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EDITOR'S NOTE:
This article originally appeared in The
Hill on May 26, 2004 and is reprinted with permission.
CLARK CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY
Ex-counterterrorism czar approved
post-9-11 flights for bin Laden family
By Alexander Bolton
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 Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush's chief of counterterrorism, has
claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens,
including members of Osama bin Laden's family, from the United States
immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, "I take
responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it
again."
Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United
States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence
officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened.
Clarke's claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing
political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial
flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was
preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim
backgrounds as material witnesses to the attacks.
Several Democrats say that at a closed-door meeting May 6, they pressed
members of the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 to find out
who approved the flights.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who attended the meeting, said she asked former
Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a
Republican, "Who authorized the flight[s] and why?"
"They said it's been a part of their inquiry and they haven't received
satisfactory answers yet and they were pushing," Boxer added.
Another Democrat who attended the meeting confirmed Boxer's account and
reported that Hamilton said: "We don't know who authorized it. We've
asked that question 50 times."
Referring to questions about who authorized the flights, former Rep. Tim
Roemer (D-Ind.), one of the 10 members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission,
said in an interview Monday: "In my mind, this isn't resolved right now.
We need more clarity and information from the relevant political sources and
FBI sources."
But Clarke yesterday appeared to put an end to the mystery.
"It didn't get any higher than me," he said. "On 9-11, 9-12 and
9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation
with the FBI."
Clarke's explanation fit with a new stance Hamilton has taken on the issue of
the Saudi flights.
Hamilton said in an interview Friday that when he told Democratic senators
that the commission did not know who authorized the Saudi flights, he was not
fully informed.
"They asked the question 'Who authorized the flight?' and I said I did
not know and I'd try to find out," Hamilton said. "I learned
subsequently from talking to the staff that we thought Clarke authorized the
flight and it did not go higher."
"I did not at any point say the White House was stalling," Hamilton
added. "They asked me who authorized it, and I said we didn't know."
Hamilton said, however, that "we asked the question of who authorized the
flight many times to many people."
"The FBI cleared the names [of the passengers on the flights] and
Clarke's CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] team cleared the
departure," Hamilton said.
He cautioned that this is "a story that could shift, and we still have
this under review."
This new account of the events seemed to contradict Clarke's sworn testimony
before the Sept. 11 commission at the end of March about who approved the
flights.
"The request came to me, and I refused to approve it," Clarke
testified. "I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI
look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger
manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the - at the time - No.
2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The
FBI then approved . the flight."
"That's a little different than saying, 'I claim sole responsibility for
it now,'" Roemer said yesterday.
However, the FBI has denied approving the flight.
FBI spokeswoman Donna Spiser said, "We haven't had anything to do with
arranging and clearing the flights."
"We did know who was on the flights and interviewed anyone we thought we
needed to," she said. "We didn't interview 100 percent of the
[passengers on the] flight. We didn't think anyone on the flight was of
investigative interest."
When Roemer asked Clarke during the commission's March hearing, "Who gave
the final approval, then, to say, 'Yes, you're clear to go, it's all right
with the United States government,'" Clarke seemed to suggest it came
from the White House.
"I believe after the FBI came back and said it was all right with them,
we ran it through the decision process for all these decisions that we were
making in those hours, which was the interagency Crisis Management Group on
the video conference," Clarke testified. "I was making or
coordinating a lot of the decisions on 9-11 in the days immediately after. And
I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to
me, but I don't know. The two - since you press me, the two possibilities that
are most likely are either the Department of State or the White House chief of
staff's office."
Instead of putting the issue to rest, Clarke's testimony fueled speculation
among Democrats that someone higher up in the administration, perhaps White
House Chief of Staff Andy Card, approved the flights.
"It couldn't have come from Clarke. It should have come from someone
further up the chain," said a Democratic Senate aide who watched Clarke's
testimony.
Clarke's testimony did not settle the issue for Roemer, either.
"It doesn't seem that Richard Clarke had enough information to clear
it," Roemer said Monday.
"I just don't think that the questions are resolved, and we need to dig
deeper," Roemer added. "Clarke sure didn't seem to say that he was
the final decisionmaker. I believe we need to continue to look for some more
answers."
Roemer said there are important policy issues to address, such as the need to
develop a flight-departure control system.
Several Democrats on and off the Hill say that bin Laden's family should have
been detained as material witnesses to the attacks. They note that after the
attacks, the Bush administration lowered the threshold for detaining potential
witnesses. The Department of Justice is estimated to have detained more than
50 material witnesses since Sept. 11.
Clarke said yesterday that the furor over the flights of Saudi citizens is
much ado about nothing.
"This is a tempest in a teapot," he said, adding that, since the
attacks, the FBI has never said that any of the passengers aboard the flight
shouldn't have been allowed to leave or were wanted for further investigation.
He said that many members of the bin Laden family had been subjects of FBI
surveillance for years before the attacks and were well-known to
law-enforcement officials.
"It's very funny that people on the Hill are now trying to second-guess
the FBI investigation."
The Sept. 11 commission released a statement last month declaring that six
chartered flights that evacuated close to 140 Saudi citizens were handled
properly by the Bush administration.
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