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American Morning

Chairman Discusses Commission That Warned of 9/11 Years Ago

Aired May 21, 2002 - 08:19   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Now, the big question this morning, can the U.S. stop suicide bombers? The head of the FBI saying yesterday that such attacks were inevitable. This is part of the government's grim assessment of the future fight against terrorism. And we have a bit of hindsight on the matter, too.

Nearly two years ago, in June of the year 2000, the National Commission On Terrorism issued a report predicting a Pearl Harbor-type attack on the United States.

Paul Bremer was the Commission's chairman and the former ambassador-at-large joins us now from Austin, Texas. He is currently chairman and CEO of March Crisis Consulting.

Good morning. Good to have you with us, sir.

L. PAUL BREMER III, FORMER AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE FOR COUNTER- TERRORISM: Good morning. Nice to be with you.

ZAHN: What exactly did this report lay out in June of 2000?

BREMER: We laid out a number of points. First, that terrorists were escalating to mass casualty terrorism, the kind of thing we saw in September 11. Secondly, that our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement agencies had become too risk adverse in seeking good intelligence on the terrorists. And we said terrorists were receiving funding and that had to be stopped.

ZAHN: Did it indicate the style of attacks that potential terrorists might use? Did it say anything about using commercial airliners as jet bombs?

BREMER: No, it did not, although with great irony we had the World Trade Center towers on the cover of that report, as you may have seen. We did not predict the exact tactics. But if you think back now, this group has declared war on us a decade ago. They are ruthless killers and they have used suicide attacks against us before in East Africa when they attacked our embassies and on the Cole in Yemen.

So the suicide part of their method of operation, if you will, is not new.

ZAHN: What did the Clinton administration do with this information once you compiled it?

BREMER: Well, one of the lasting heartbreaks of the Bremer Commission report was we had about three dozen recommendations in there covering many of the areas I already talked about. And not one of those recommendations had been acted on by September 11.

ZAHN: And why do you think that was? Did it never make it to the hands of President Clinton? Do you think it got buried in committee? What do you think happened?

BREMER: Oh, I don't know, Paula. I think democracies are not, on the whole, very good at planning ahead. If you think about American, the American experience in the 20th century, it took a torpedo to bring us into the First World War, which was by then already three years old. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring us into the Second World War, which was by then already two years old. We seem to come lately to these kinds of threats.

Now it's clear we have the threat before us. I think we laid it out pretty well two years ago. And now the question is what are we going to do about it?

ZAHN: Well, let me ask you this. If the Clinton administration had acted on some of the recommendations you talked about or if the information had been handed over to the Bush administration, could the attacks of September 11 been prevented?

BREMER: There's no way to know that at this point and I would like to remind you that this was a bipartisan commission and that the Clinton administration was, after all, in its last six months and there was quite a lot of delay and confusion in the new administration coming into office because of the election results.

So it's very hard to know if our recommendations had been carried out if it would have had an impact. I think the American people have a legitimate need to find out what went wrong, not so much because we want to hang somebody from the yardarm, but because we don't want it to happen again. And the proper forum for that is this bicameral look by the intelligence committees and the Congress, which has been under way now for a couple of months. And I hope that they will come up with some serious recommendations on how to avoid this happening in the future.

ZAHN: And meanwhile as they are drawing up some of those recommendations, you have the head of the FBI coming out and warning Americans about the prospect of suicide bombers, "I think we will see that in the future. I think it's inevitable. There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it. It's something we all have to live w."

What do you think his comments are based on?

BREMER: Well, I think his comments are based on an analysis of obviously information he has, but also one could reach that conclusion by just looking at the historical record. Bin Laden has been at war with us for a decade. His cadence has been to try and attack roughly every year. He's very patient. It takes a long time. The attacks on September 11 were probably four to five years in the making.

We have to continue to expect that we did not wrap up all of the al Qaeda operatives in the United States. They have used suicide bombing before. They've seen it, of course, most recently in Israel.

What we have to do is keep our eye on our strategic objective, which is to decisively defeat extremist Islam. And it's going to be a long, difficult twilight struggle, as the president has said. It's going to take a lot of patience. More Americans will die in this long war. But we can win it. But it's going to take a long time.

ZAHN: And talk about the challenge of that, in closing, at a time when apparently there was a terror summit held in Beirut with members of Hamas and Hezbollah, one news organization saying that members of al Qaeda were there. David Ensor just shooting that down earlier this morning. His sources say al Qaeda representatives were not there. But nevertheless, you had these terrorists sitting down and apparently talking about how you further damage American interests.

How concerned are you about that?

BREMER: Well, it will -- I think we need to be concerned. It's not the first time. Tehran has hosted several of these terrorist summits at which we know both Hezbollah and al Qaeda has been present. I would like to remind you that until September 11, Hezbollah was the terrorist group that had killed more Americans than all other terrorist groups combined. So Hezbollah is an extremely dangerous terrorist group that has a history of attacking Americans.

Hamas, so far as we know, has not targeted Americans. But there is a nexus between Hezbollah, which is the creature of the regime in Iran, and al Qaeda, that is well established, going back several years now.

So it would not surprise me if they were talking about coordinating attacks.

ZAHN: Well, we very much appreciate your insights this morning, L. Paul Bremer III. Boy, we learned a lot and we'd love to have you come back.

BREMER: Nice to be with you.

ZAHN: Thank you.

We've been asking the question all morning long, "Can the U.S. stop pedestrian suicide bombings?" You can vote on our Web page at cnn.com. So far more than 13,000 of you have voted, and as you can see, most of you believe that we cannot stop suicide bombers, those who have explosives strapped to their bodies, from attacking here in the U.S. Ten percent believe we can stop the bombers, 90 percent not. We'll keep you updated throughout the morning on those results.

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