The focus of the hearings has been the argument, promoted especially by Democrats, that because of “intelligence failures” the Bush administration was unable to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The most recent attack on political rights carried out in the name of fighting “terrorism” was the extension on April 2 of the requirement that visitors from other countries be photographed and fingerprinted before entering the United States. Since January, visitors from most countries in the world have been subjected to this requirement; citizens of another 27 countries—mostly imperialist nations—have now been added to the list. The move represents one more probe to impose such requirements on U.S. residents.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, as it is called, was set up by Congress in late 2002. The 10-member bipartisan commission is chaired by Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, with former congressman Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, as vice chair. It was set up to “prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks” and make recommendations for strengthening the government’s “war on terrorism.” Several current and former top officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations have testified before it.

One of the aspects of the hearings that has drawn the most attention is the testimony of Richard Clarke, former counterintelligence chief for the Bush administration. Clarke served in a similar capacity in the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush senior, and William Clinton.

In his testimony and in his new book Against All Enemies, published just days before the commission hearings opened, Clarke asserted that the Bush administration did not do enough in Washington’s “war on terrorism” because of its focus on attacking Iraq.

In his book Clarke says that the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush pulled Clarke and a small group of aides into a room and instructed them to “go back over everything. See if Saddam did this.”

“The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein,” Clarke wrote, “launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.”

That argument echoes the main criticism of the administration’s conduct of the war on Iraq made by Democratic Party politicians, all of whom support the current U.S.-led occupation of Iraq but who have offered tactical criticisms about how the war should have been conducted most effectively from the standpoint of U.S. imperialist interests.

The debate around the hearings has often taken a sharply partisan tone, with Democrats trying to score points against the Bush administration. The big-business media devoted many pages, for example, to the controversy over whether National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was going to appear publicly before the commission. Bush finally announced that Rice would answer questions before the commission under oath. Until then he had refused to do so claiming that it would be a violation of the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Above all, however, what the commission hearings have underscored is the bipartisan character of the U.S. government’s “war on terror,” under the banner of which it has carried out military assaults abroad and attacks on constitutional rights at home.  
 
Support for Patriot Act
Members of the commission have been unanimous in supporting “homeland security” measures that give more leeway to the FBI, CIA, and other political police agencies to conduct spying and disruption operations, as well as other actions that violate constitutional guarantees.

The commission heads, for example, expressed their support for the USA Patriot Act, which Congress over the coming year will be discussing whether to renew. The Bush administration and politicians in both parties are pressing Congress to reauthorize the law over the coming year. The Patriot Act allows police to carry out arbitrary searches and seizures in private homes and businesses, expands police powers to wiretap phones and personal e-mail, allows domestic CIA spying, and authorizes police to jail immigrants without charges as “terrorist suspects,” among other provisions. This law builds on the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and other laws signed by William Clinton that have expanded police powers, beefed up the immigration police, and undermined constitutional rights.

When asked by a reporter whether Congress should reauthorize the Patriot Act, Hamilton said the provisions in the act that allow a freer use and exchange of information between cop agencies like the FBI and CIA would be “beneficial.”

Kean added, “we had witness after witness tell us that the Patriot Act has been very, very helpful, and if the Patriot Act, or portions of it, had been in place before 9/11, that would have been very helpful.”

At the hearings, Clarke advocated creating a “domestic intelligence” agency within the FBI.

In response to Clarke’s testimony, Senate majority leader William Frist called his criticisms of the Bush administration “outrageous.” Frist read into the Congressional Record excerpts of an interview the counterintelligence chief gave in August 2002 in which Clarke said the Bush administration had built on and augmented the “antiterrorism” plans of the Clinton administration and substantially increased resources and funding for the CIA and other covert activities.  
 
‘Clinton initiated homeland security’
Much of the commission’s deliberations have concentrated on U.S. military assaults abroad carried out in the name of combating al Qaeda, under both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

According to a transcript of the hearings, Clarke told the commission that fighting “terrorism” in general and al Qaeda in particular was an “extraordinarily high priority of the Clinton administration.” He said that, as counterterrorism chief, almost everything he asked for by way of support from the Clinton administration he received. “We did enormously increase the counterterrorism budget of the federal government,” Clarke said, and that the administration initiated many programs, including one that is now called homeland security.”

Clarke noted that many of the provisions implemented by the Bush administration had been carried over from measures developed under the Clinton administration. “All of the things recommended back in January [2002] were those things on the table in September” 2001, Clarke said.

Clarke rejected the notion that the Clinton administration was reluctant to use military force to fight “terrorism.” He said that Clinton began to use military force in the first months of his administration.

In its first days in office, in fact, the Clinton administration launched missile attacks on Iraq. In 1998, using as a pretext the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the U.S. government launched missile strikes on Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and on what it called “terrorist facilities” in Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. The Clinton administration also carried out an occupation of Somalia in 1993-94, invaded Haiti in 1994, and waged a devastating bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. Throughout those years, Washington carried out repeated air attacks on Iraq while maintaining a brutal economic embargo against the country.

In August 1998, Clarke said, “I recom mended a series of rolling attacks against the infrastructure in Afghanistan. Every time they would rebuild it, I would propose that we blow it up again, much like, in fact, we were doing in Iraq, where we had a rolling series of attacks on their air defense system.”

The former secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, confirmed Clarke’s testimony on these points. “I fully embraced an aggressive policy before and especially after August 7, 1998,” she said, referring to the embassy bombings, for which Washington held al Qaeda responsible. Albright said that after those bombings, “the president specifically authorized the use of force, and there should have been no confusion that our personnel were authorized to kill bin Laden.”

Albright added that “to use force effectively, we placed warships equipped with cruise missiles on call in the Arabian Sea.” Plans were also drawn up to deploy Special Forces into Afghanistan.

In testimony before the commission, officials from both the Bush and the former Clinton administrations discussed the tactical advantages of backing opponents of the regimes of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq in order to overthrow them, on one hand, versus the use of U.S. Special Forces, on the other. In response to a question on that subject from a reporter, Hamilton said, “I think you always want to have the capability of special forces available…. And I think we’ve been moving in that direction now for some time, and I think it’s been accelerated under Secretary Rumsfeld.”

As the debate unfolded in Washington, Homeland Security officials instituted an extension of the requirement that millions of visitors from other countries be photographed and fingerprinted digitally. The restriction was first applied to residents of most Third World and Eastern European countries who come with a visa, except for diplomats. It now extends to those from European countries, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei—that is, all nations except Canada and Mexico.

The measure “will add security by allowing us to check [visitors] against our terrorist criminal watchlist,” said Homeland Security Department Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson.

Testifying before the Congressional commission, Albright argued for using such lists to establish “a common data base that is comprehensive” and accessible to all cop agencies “including visa and customs officers, border guards, and law enforcement personnel at all levels.”
 
 
Related articles:
Europe-wide dragnets target the foreign-born
From London to Rome, ‘antiterror’ raids trample on workers’ rights  
 
 
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