Bush team strategy to destroy al Qaeda predated 9/11

President George W. Bush’s national security team devised "a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda" well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – contrary to claims of an ex-NSC official, whom Bush had demoted and passed over for a subsequent important post.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice rebuts allegations of former NSC counterterrorism director Dick Clarke that the administration was disinterested in al Qaeda in the months leading to 9/11, writing that the new Bush White House drew up a years-long plan in the spring and summer of 2001 designed to "marshal . . . all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures" as Clarke had urged the Clinton Administration to do.

That plan, according to Rice, "became the first major foreign-policy document of the Bush administration – not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda."

The Pentagon could not give due attention to the plan until after 9/11, and through no fault of the White House.

As Mohammed Atta and the other terrorists were plotting to hijack the four jetliners, Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and others worked feverishly on Capitol Hill to prevent President Bush’s defense policy team – the team that would design the war against the terrorists – from taking office.

Those team members, led by current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith – who had been the longtime chairman of the Center for Security Policy – couldn’t even take office in the Pentagon until just weeks before the terrorists struck.

Although Clarke and other Clinton holdovers strongly warned the new Bush administration about al Qaeda, Rice says that they never presented her with a plan for what to do about it.