both administrations were at fault in my opinion. Communication breakdowns everywhere, I think 9-11 was inevitable.
By Dana Milbank and Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writers
For all the sniping over efforts by the Bush and Clinton administrations to thwart terrorism, information from this week's hearings into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks suggests that the two administrations pursued roughly the same policies before the terrorist strikes occurred.
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Witness testimony and the findings of the commission investigating the attacks indicate that even the new policy to combat Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and his Taliban hosts, developed just before Sept. 11, was in most respects similar to the old strategy pursued first by Clinton and then by Bush.
The commission's determination that the two policies were roughly the same calls into question claims made by Bush officials that they were developing a superior terrorism policy. The findings also put into perspective the criticism of President Bush (news - web sites)'s approach to terrorism by Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief: For all his harsh complaints about Bush administration's lack of urgency in regard to terrorism, he had no serious quarrel with the actual policy Bush was pursuing before the 2001 attacks.
Clarke did not respond to efforts to reach him for comment yesterday.
Bush officials have claimed that their al Qaeda strategy took eight months to develop because it was significantly more aggressive and sweeping than the tactics employed by the previous administration. "Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) wrote in an op-ed article published in The Post earlier this week.
In fact, according to the details that emerged this week, most of the strategies approved by high-level Bush officials on Sept. 4 and Sept. 10, 2001, were nearly identical in thrust to the policies pursued by the Clinton team. The plans grew out of long-standing proposals made by Clarke in 1998 and 2000 -- ideas derided this week by Rice as a "laundry list" of ideas that were previously "tried or rejected."
