SECTION I -- CURRENT INTELLIGENCE

CLARKE VS. BUSH ET AL -- The dust stirred up by former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke continues to swirl. But such is the nature of WINs readers that they may be expected to have immersed themselves in the ocean of reports and commentary that has followed on Clarke's launch of his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror -- and his declaration of war on the Bush administration. What follows are a few points that WINs readers may have missed.

          The subscription e-mail journal of analysis, Stratfor Weekly, commented on March 26, "There is no question but that the intelligence system failed to predict the event [9/11] and that it was supposed to," dryly noting that, "Officials and former officials hurling charges against each other in a public display of disunity does not seem to serve the national interest." 

          The Washington Post made the point on March 27 that both the Bush and Clinton administrations pursued roughly the same policies before 9/11.  

          Stratfor, developed the same point. Up to 9/11 President Bush's policy towards Iraq was a continuation of that begun by his father in 1991 and continued by Bill Clinton during the latter's two terms in office, the Texas based analysts said. This policy was comprised of economic sanctions and U.S. and British air patrols of no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq. Under Clinton, covert attempts to overthrow Saddam Hussein were mounted.

          In Stratfor's view, it was not Iraq the administration was obsessed with prior to 9/11, as Dick Clarke alleges. It was China. The newly appointed Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, announced that the focus of U.S. defense policy was Asia. It was a crisis in relations with China over its downing of an EP-3 spy plane that caused the Bush administration the most concern, not Iraq.

          Stratfor sees a persistent failure in both the Clinton and Bush administrations to take al-Qaeda seriously. That view was countered by DCI Tenet in his testimony before the 9/11 commission, known formally as the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States." The intelligence community had its eye on Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaeda from the early 1990s, Tenet said.

          The most serious charge that can be made against Bush, in Stratfor's view, is that he did not drastically reshape his administration for war after 9/11 and failed to hold the intelligence community responsible for its failure. He failed to find for the CIA an equivalent of Adm. Chester Nimitz with whom FDR replaced Adm. Husband Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) at the time of Pearl Harbor.

          In his testimony, Tenet defended himself, the intelligence community, and the presidents he has served. The Clinton administration had "lived through the terrorist phenomenon and wrestled with difficult issues thoughtfully and diligently," Tenet said.  The Bush administration "was working hard before September 11th to devise a comprehensive framework to deal with al-Qaeda, based on the best knowledge that we in the Intelligence Community could provide…."And, during this time, the Intelligence Community did not stand still. You, as the Commission, must evaluate all of this. I, as Director of Central Intelligence, must tell you clearly that there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced."

          Tenet admitted that gaps in security were not closed rapidly or fully enough before 9/11. But, he went on, "We have learned-and are doing better, in an integrated environment that allows us to respond faster and more comprehensively than three years ago. And much more work needs to be done."

          There are those who believe that Bush, Vice-President Cheney and the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon refused to accept intelligence they did not like, David Kahn, writing on 'How Good Intelligence Falls on Deaf Ears' in the NY Times <www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/opinion/27KAHN.html> pointed out there is nothing new in leaders behaving this way.  His historical examples range across history from the Athenians in 427 B.C. refusing to believe their vassal state of Mytilene had revolted; the Kaiser's rejection in 1914 of evidence that Britain would not remain neutral if Germany invaded Belgium; Stalin's disregard of reports that Hitler was about to attack Russia in 1941; Hitler in 1944 angrily sweeping off his desk a Luftwaffe photomosaic showing that the Soviet Union had assembled the greatest artillery concentration of all time; Israeli intelligence believing in 1973 that Egypt would not attack, which it did on Yom Kippur; and President Nixon rejecting intelligence reports that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.

EU TAKES ANTI-TERROR MEASURES BUT WILL THEY BE EFFECTIVE? -- On March 25, the European Union named a Dutch political figure to be its first antiterrorism coordinator. The appointment was made and other measures adopted at the EU's two-day Spring summit meeting in Brussels. Among those familiar with the EU's ways, the measures were met with doubts as to how effective they would be.

          Adoption of the counterterrorist measures arose directly from the shock felt throughout Europe by the attacks on Madrid train stations on March 11 that killed at least 190 people. The atrocity is believed to have been the work of al-Qaeda.

          The top EU top official for security and foreign policy, Javier Solana, indirectly admitted that action within the EU has not been up to snuff. There has to be somebody, he said, who always follows up to make sure that everybody complies with agreements they have given. He called on member governments and parliaments to meet their obligations promptly.

          Sergio Carrera, an expert at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, took a skeptical view of Solana's words. The EU lacks competence to check on implementation of the adopted measures. The post of the EU's 'Mr Terrorism' would be of symbolic value rather than of substance, Carrera said.

          The man expected nevertheless to keep and eye on member governments is Gijs de Vries. Born in New York, he has dual Dutch and American nationality. He was a member of the European Parliament for 14 years before becoming deputy interior minister of The Netherlands from 1998 to 2002. De Vries was to begin his new job on March 29. He will report to Solana.

          One measure adopted at Brussels calls on all EU member states to use all instruments at their disposal, including military force, to prevent terrorist attacks on other member states or help them cope with the effects of an attack.

          Ireland currently holds the rotating EU presidency and its prime minister, Bertie Ahern, declared that when the anti-terrorism mechanism is invoked each EU government would choose the most appropriate means to comply with the commitment to EU solidarity. On the basis of past performance, skeptics said, some EU members are likely to display a solidarity deficiency.

          Solana indicated the EU will develop analytical and operational bodies to assess intelligence coming from member states and possibly act on it. But Ahern rejected any idea of setting up a European counterpart to the CIA.

          Prior to the new measures, the EU had already agreed to joint arrest warrants, joint investigation teams, and common action against money laundering. However, implementing them has been slow going. Now the EU leaders have committed their countries to putting all measures into practice by this coming June.

          Other measures the EU has in mind are tightening control of its borders with non-EU states and creating databases on non-EU travelers that would include visa details, photos, and, possibly fingerprints, iris scans, and perhaps even DNA samples.

          The EU also decreed that countries outside the bloc that aspire to close ties with it must make counterterrorist cooperation a priority. In Ahern's bold words:  "The whole principle is that the message has to go out: if you want good relationships from the regions of the world with the European Union, then you must build up -- and the European Union will help you -- your counterterrorism capacity, so that we're all clear that there is not any kind of toleration of anything that is not tough action against terrorism."

          Ahern said that human rights and the rule of law would be respected when carrying out counter-terrorist moves and that the EU would not discriminate against immigrants or minorities in its efforts to eradicate Islamic terrorists in Europe.

          Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation dismissed the EU measures. "The European answer in their 'no-war' on terrorism is more bureaucracy," he told the Washington Times. (RFE/RL, BBC, Washington Times)

SECTION II -- CONTEXT AND PRECEDENCE

IRAQI DEFECTOR'S TALES BOLSTERED U.S. CASE FOR WAR -- In a lengthy article in the Los Angeles Times of March 28, reporters Bob Drogin and Greg Miller relate how the Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball."

          U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by the German Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, which repeatedly rejected CIA requests to meet Curveball, saying it needed to protect its source. However, Curveball's file was so detailed that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections.

          Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.

          U.N. weapons inspectors asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory. Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.

          Based largely on his account, the shadowy germ trucks, dubbed "Winnebagos of Death" or "Hell on Wheels" in news accounts, became a crucial part of the White House case for war -- including Secretary of State Colin Powell's dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.

          Citing "eyewitness accounts," he showed what he called highly detailed and extremely accurate diagrams of how the trucks were configured, and warned that they could spew enough anthrax or botulinus toxin "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

          It was only after Powell's speech that the CIA learned the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and began to suspect he might have been coached to provide false information these mobile biological facilities," the official said.

          David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling. "This is the one that's damning," he said. "This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward." Kay said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator."

          DCI Tenet gave the first hint of the underlying problem in a speech at Georgetown University on Feb. 5. "I must tell you we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" about mobile biological weapons production, he said. "Because we lack direct access to the most important sources on this question, we have as yet been unable to resolve the differences."

          The story of Curveball is now under close review by an internal panel at the CIA, as well as House and Senate oversight committees. All are seeking to determine why so much of the prewar intelligence now appears seriously flawed. (LA Times, DKR)

DEATHS OF BIN LADIN, ZAWAHIRI WILL NOT MEAN WAR HAS BEEN WON -- What impact would the capture of Ayman al-Zawahiri have on America's campaign against Al Qaeda? Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran and AFIO member has asked in the New York Times Magazine.  Since Sept. 11, 2001, much of Al Qaeda's original leadership has already been captured, killed or dispersed, he writes in a commentary titled, "You Cut the Head, but the Body Still Moves." The two most prominent survivors -- Usama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his No. 2 -- will eventually be killed or captured, Bearden believes, if not during the operation now under way in Afghanistan and Pakistan, then in one that will surely follow.

          America's preoccupation with al-Qaeda and UBL has spawned the hope-driven conviction that when he and Zawahiri are finally neutralized, the war on terror will somehow have been won. That, says Bearden, is, sadly, not the case.  In real terms, he warns, their elimination will mean little to the Qaeda network. The jihadi movement should not be thought of as a hierarchical structure akin to the Comintern, the former international communist organization controlled from Moscow. Nor does it resemble an organization chart for the Gambino crime family. The reality is that the jihadis today have nothing like a central command.  "This is an ideological and spiritual movement rather than a cohesive, quantifiable foe," says Bearden, who served as a senior manager for clandestine operations in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Thus UBL's death will have little effect beyond establishing his immortality and spurring jihadis to go to even greater heights to harm the United States or its friends. Zawahiri's end will have even less meaning, Bearden believes.

          Bearden cites the case of Che Guevara who was tracked down and killed in Bolivia in 1967. But his communist dream didn't die there. His myth continued to inspire revolutionary movements in Latin America and beyond. His death was considered a romantic, almost glamorous denouement.  It may be that in death both UBL and Zawahiri can achieve more real power than they ever wielded while alive, Bearden concludes. (NYTimes, cjlaclair, DKR) <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/weekinreview/21bear.html>