Michael Saba, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 3 March 2004 — After last week’s Sept. 11 Commission hearings, highlighted by the controversial remarks of former anti-terrorist czar Richard Clarke, many questions remain unanswered. Former Clinton administration officials have accused the Bush administration of being “asleep at the wheel” and the Bushies have accused the Clinton administration of the same. And Clarke seems to have accused everybody (except himself) of everything. But still no answers, only more questions.

A few days ago, US Sen. Lincoln Chaffee was asked to comment on the commission in a local Rhode Island newspaper. Chafee said, “We missed a lot of opportunities. In July 2001, there was the Phoenix memo from an FBI agent saying known terrorists were learning to fly airplanes. He sent it to a special (FBI) Osama Bin Laden Unit and a Radical Fundamentalist Unit. These warnings went to these entities. What went wrong? Who dropped the ball?”

The Radical Fundamentalist Unit! Where did they come from and who are they? According to various reports, the RFU was created at the FBI in March of 1994 during the Clinton administration. It was allegedly formed to “handle responsibilities related to international radical fundamentalist terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden.” The unit was also charged with handling other counterintelligence matters, and was responsible for the coordination of extraterritorial intelligence operations and criminal investigations targeted at radical fundamentalist terrorists. In 1999, the FBI reported recognized the increased threat to the United States posed by Bin Laden and created the “Osama Bin Laden Unit” to handle Al-Qaeda related counter-terrorism matters. Keep in mind that the FBI is responsible for American domestic crimes.

In May 2002, the New York Times was retracing the steps leading up the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy. Times reporters made reference to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and speculated after interviewing more than a dozen senior policy makers and law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, that “in the summer of 2001, the government’s counterterrorism apparatus was too lumbering, too compartmentalized and too inattentive to grasp the emerging pattern.” The New York Times continued that the FBI had been reluctant to pursue certain leads because one of their agents, Michael Resnick, was reprimanded by Attorney General Janet Reno for “filing misleading affidavits’ to the courts to try to obtain search warrants to eavesdrop on people “suspected of being foreign agents of international terrorists.” Resnick, who was working under the radical Fundamentalist Unit of the FBI, is described by the New York Times as the FBI supervisor in charge of coordinating the surveillance operations related to Hamas.

So the FBI was “gun-shy” at this point because of Resnick’s activities which hadn’t focused on Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden at all, but Hamas, which was an enemy of Israel not the United States. The Phoenix memo mentioned by Sen. Chafee that went to the RFU in July of 2001 which, reportedly said that Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden had sent individuals to the US for flight training, got buried at the RFU. And that happened not because the FBI wasn’t “minding the store”, but because they were probably minding someone else’s store — Israel’s.

From the beginning of the Clinton administration, there was considerable pressure for the US to assist the Israelis in its fight against terrorism inside Israel. The RFU was established in 1994 and clearly took a strong role in searching for Israel’s enemies from its beginnings, for example, with its special unit to deal with Hamas.

In 1995 with increased terrorist bombings in Israel, President Clinton proposed upgrading his administration’s efforts in counterterrorism. And in the Middle East “Summit of the Peacemakers” on March 13, 1996, held in Sharm Al-Sheikh, the emphasis shifted from an overall peace to focusing the conferees and attendees from 29 countries exclusively on measures to help Israel combat terrorism. That led to Clinton directing that new legislation be provided to increase the US involvement in helping “friendly governments (read-Israel)” fight terrorism. and a request for one hundred million dollars to be provided by the US to Israel for counterterrorism. Secretary of State Warren Christopher later announced that the US would be sending teams to Israel to help them with their terrorism problems.

In 1998 when Israel announced a “bold initiative to reduce its dependence on American aid”, it was essentially shifting its over one billion dollar annual economic aid package from economic aid to defense aid. And that put more pressure on the US to help Israel with its security.

When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, more pressure was applied on the US to assist Israel with its own security.

The pressure and emphasis on Israel’s security continued into the Bush 2 administration. Even after 9/11, funding was increased from the US to Israel to assist Israel’s counterterrorism efforts. In July of 2002, the US Senate by a 92-7 vote and the US House by a vote of 397-32 passed an emergency anti-terrorism bill for Israel allocating an additional $200 million.

Pat Lang headed the Middle East and South Asia intelligence in the Defense Intelligence Agency for seven years. The Washington Post quoted him after the last Sept. 11 Commission meeting as saying, “When you commit as much time and attention and resources as we did to Iraq, which I do not believe is connected to the worldwide war against the jihadis, then you subtract what you could commit to the war on terrorism.” And Richard Clarke in the same article was asked why, in his earlier, private testimony to the commission, he did not include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book. He replied “In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president’s invasion of Iraq.”

Maybe if Lang and Clarke and others were asked questions about the situation created with our concern for Israel rather than for the counterterrorism needs of the United States, we might start finding more answers to what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001.

— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.