Press Releases
March 29, 2004
Senator Conrad's speech on Osama bin Laden and the war in Iraq
Senator Conrad: I asked for time today to speak on the war against terror and the war in Iraq. These issues have come much more to the public attention as a result of the events of the last several weeks. As I have watched those events unfold, I have felt more strongly the need to come to this floor to speak up and to talk about where I believe we have taken a wrong path in the war on terror, where I believe we have gotten the priorities wrong.
When we were attacked on September 11, 2001, we recognized we were at war with a terrorist organization that would stop at nothing, a terrorist organization that would turn civilian airliners into flying bombs that would kill nearly 3,000 innocent Americans. The President and the American people recognized al-Qaida posed an immediate threat to this country. We agreed that defeating al-Qaida was our top national security priority, and we vowed to bring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist organization to justice. As President Bush said in convening his cabinet at Camp David after the 9/11 attacks: "There is no question that this act will not stand. We will find those who did it. We will smoke them out of their holes, we will get them running, and we will bring them to justice."
We had an outpouring of sympathy, good will, and cooperation from all over the world, as we began the war on terrorism. Today, it has now been 930 days since the attacks of 9/11. And Osama bin Laden is still at large.
We have not found him. We have not smoked him out of his holes, and we have not brought this mass murderer of innocent Americans to justice after 930 days. In fact, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization continue to mount attacks. Just three weeks ago, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the bombings in Madrid, Spain. Spanish authorities have arrested Islamic terrorists in connection with that tragic attack, and al-Qaida continues to threaten further attacks against this country.
When I saw the news footage of the bombings in Spain and when I heard al-Qaida threatening more attacks on America, it deeply angered me. I believe it raises several questions. Most fundamentally, why have we not, to use the President's words, smoked Osama bin Laden out, run him down and brought him to justice? Why is Osama bin Laden still able to threaten our country more than two years after we agreed that putting an end to his threats was our top priority? Why, if his organization has been disrupted and Osama bin Laden has been isolated, as some in the administration claim, are Islamic terrorists linked to al-Qaida able to organize and coordinate significant synchronized attacks such as the ones in Madrid? How is he still able to produce and distribute these tapes and messages exhorting others to kill more Americans?
As I asked these questions, it reminded that on April 30, 2001, less than 5 months before the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported that the Bush administration's release of the annual terrorism report contained a serious change from previous reports. Specifically, CNN reported that "there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden," as there had been in previous years. When asked why the administration had reduced the focus, "a senior Bush Department official told CNN the U.S. Government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on Bin Laden." In retrospect, that was a shocking misjudgment of the priorities in fighting terrorism. But I fear that even after 9/11, the administration has continued its failure to focus on al-Qaida.
A Newsweek article from last fall reported: "..... bin Laden appears to be not only alive, but thriving. And with America distracted in Iraq, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf leery of stirring up an Islamist backlash, there is no large-scale military force currently pursuing the chief culprit in the 9/11 attacks."
It is not just Newsweek. USA Today reported just this past weekend: In 2002, troops from the 5th special forces group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.
I want to repeat that because this to me does not add up. It does not make common sense.
In 2002, troops from the 5th special forces group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.
The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.
I find these reports deeply disturbing. We know who attacked us on 9/11. It was al-Qaida. It was not Iraq. Yet we have top Pentagon and intelligence officials saying that we shifted resources away from al-Qaida to focus on Iraq. We have 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but only 11,000 in Afghanistan. What Earthly sense does this make? Al-Qaida attacked America, not Iraq.
Those 11,000 troops are doing important work in Afghanistan--keeping the peace and recently renewing efforts to mop up Taliban strongholds that have been gathering strength. And the administration now has plans for a spring offensive to go after bin Laden. But according to our own officials, for most of the past two years, we had no large-scale military force dedicated to pursuing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
So I have to ask, why not? Why was there no large-scale military force pursuing bin Laden for most of the past two years? Why did we allow our post-9/11 focus on bin Laden to be distracted? Why have we let new al-Qaida organizations grow up all around the world to attack us and our allies?
It seems to me the administration's priorities were misplaced. We allowed our attention to be diverted by Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
Many of us did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a preemptive attack on Iraq in the first place. We believed it was not in the national security interests of the United States to attack Iraq; that instead, we ought to keep our eye on the ball and keep the pressure on al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden because it was they--al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden--who attacked America on September 11, not Iraq.
We feared attacking Iraq would leave us responsible for occupying and rebuilding a country in a profoundly dangerous and undemocratic region of the world, tying down resources we needed to meet other threats, including Iran, North Korea, and al-Qaida.
We feared that attacking and occupying Iraq would deepen and energize anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world, helping to fuel recruitment by al-Qaida and other radical Islamist terror organizations.
And we feared that a war with Iraq would inevitably slow down our efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.
In my statement on this Senate floor just minutes before the Senate voted to authorize the President to go to war in Iraq, I said: "I believe defeating the terrorists who launched the attacks on the United States on September 11 must be our first priority before we launch a new war on a new front. Yet today, the President asks us to take action against Iraq as a first priority. Mr. President, I believe that has the priority wrong."
That is what I said moments before the vote authorizing the President to go to Iraq. I believe it was right then. I believe it is even more clearly right now.
I also warned: "The backlash in the Arab nations could further energize and deepen anti-American sentiment. Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups could gain more willing suicide bombers."
I think we have seen, tragically, that this was true. Our troops in Iraq are constantly under attack. Our allies, including most recently the Spanish people, have been victimized by terrorists.
I warned that the cost of invasion and occupation of Iraq could be extremely high, diverting resources from other national priorities. And that, too, has turned out to be accurate. CBO now estimates that the cost of the war and occupation in Iraq will total more than $300 billion.
In just the last couple of days, the American people have learned that all of these concerns were shared at the very highest level of the White House. But the President ignored those warnings.
The top counter-terrorism adviser to President Bush, Richard Clarke, recently published a book detailing his experiences with the war on terrorism. In it, Clarke writes that President Bush and other top officials urged him to find a link between 9/11 and Iraq, even though he told them that there was no such link.
He writes that the shift of focus from al-Qaida to Iraq "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
As Clarke put it on 60 Minutes the weekend before last: Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, "America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country." He had been saying this as part of his propaganda.
So what did we do after 9/11? We invaded an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of it is that al-Qaida and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al-Qaida have been greatly strengthened.
These are the words of Mr. Clarke, the former Bush counter-terror official who has just published a book on the subject. I spent part of this weekend reading the book by Mr. Clarke. It is entitled Against all Enemies. I would urge my colleagues and those who might be listening or watching to get that book and read it. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, Mr. Clarke is warning and alerting us, based on a lifetime of experience in four different administrations over 30 years fighting terrorists, of where we may have gone wrong. These are lessons that are absolutely essential for us to learn.
Mr. Clarke was not only an official in this Bush White House. He was also an official, an anti-terror chief, in the Clinton administration. Before that, he was in the previous Bush administration at a high level of responsibility. Before that, he served in the Reagan administration. This is a man of credibility. This is a man of qualifications. This is a man of deep experience who is attempting to warn us of mistakes that are being made.
The charges he is making are serious charges. We know who attacked our country on 9/11. It was not Saddam Hussein or Iraq. It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. But because the administration wanted to go to war in Iraq, Clarke suggests, we not only diverted resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership, we strengthened al-Qaida and gave it time and space to develop offshoots that will continue to threaten this country even if we do eventually capture bin Laden, which I pray we do.
It is not just Mr. Clarke who is making these assertions. Read the book by Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill. I have read that book, The Price of Loyalty, as well. He makes clear the Bush administration, in its earliest weeks, were focused on attacking Iraq.
So I think we need to ask why we allowed ourselves to be distracted by Saddam Hussein. We need to ask why we took the focus off of finding Osama bin Laden and bringing him to justice? And we need to ask why the President decided that going after Iraq not al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden--was the priority, and see how that judgment has stood the test of time.
The President and his top officials made two main arguments for going to war in Iraq: Iraq was allied with al-Qaida, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it could use to attack this country. That is what he told the American people when he was persuading the Congress and the American people that we should launch a war against Iraq.
In recent days and weeks, the evidence shows we have been pursuing the wrong priorities. Let us look at what we know now.
On the question of a link to al-Qaida, the polling shows that 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind September 11. Over half believe that Iraqis were the hijackers of the planes. Let me repeat that. The polling shows 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind September 11. Fifty percent believe it was Iraqis on the planes that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The fact is, of course, not a single Iraqi was among the hijackers of the airliners that were turned into flying bombs. The vast majority of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabians, as, of course, is Osama bin Laden. Fifteen of the 19 were Saudis. Two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and the other from Lebanon.
Not a single Iraqi was involved in the attack. That is the fact.
However, the American people believe there is a link because again and again the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and other top administration officials have done everything they could to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in the minds of the American people.
They offered up two specific assertions to support this allegation: One, the Vice President and others in the administration said repeatedly that there was a link because one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. But what does the most recent evidence show?
The fact is, the CIA and the FBI have concluded this report was simply not true. It was not true because Mohammed Atta was not in Prague; he was in the United States, in Virginia Beach, VA, preparing for the 9/11 attacks.
As The Washington Post reported on September 29: In making the case for war against Iraq, Vice President Cheney has continued to suggest that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a September 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks, even as the story was falling apart under scrutiny by the FBI, CIA and the foreign government that first made the allegation.
Second, the President and other top officials said al-Qaida maintained a training camp in Iraq, but what they did not tell the American people was that the training camp was in a part of Iraq controlled by the Kurds, not by Saddam Hussein. The Kurds, by the way, are our allies. Once again, this is a disturbing bit of information used in a way that I believe fundamentally misled people.
Yet Vice President Cheney, as recently as last fall, said that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
President Bush himself was forced to correct the record just a few days later, when a reporter asked him about the Vice President's statement. The President was very clear. He said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on this country. Here it is in the New York Times, September 18, 2003, "Bush Reports No Evidence of Hussein Tie to 9/11."
But that did not stop the administration from making statements over and over again linking Iraq with al-Qaida, and with terrorists more generally, to create the impression the war in Iraq was part of our response to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism. As Richard Clarke, the top counter-terrorism official in the White House during 2001 and 2002, puts it: The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it.
They did know better. We told them. The CIA told them. The FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging September 11, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. I think for a commander in chief and vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.
These, again, are the remarks of the top counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration.
In fact, it is unlikely there would be any strong linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida because Saddam Hussein was secular, Osama bin Laden is a fundamentalist. In many ways, they are mortal enemies.
I graduated from an American Air Force base high school in Tripoli, Libya--in North Africa--in 1966. Anybody who has lived in that culture understands very well the deep divisions between those who are secular and those who are fundamentalists. It is a deep division.
But it is as though our administration in Washington is unaware of it because, repeatedly, they have suggested the two were tightly linked. In fact, they were sworn enemies. Who do you think it is we are digging up in those graves in Iraq? They are, by and large, fundamentalists whom Saddam Hussein found profoundly threatening to his secular regime.
I think it is time for America to think very carefully about the path we are going down and to think very carefully about whether the strategy this administration has adopted is a strategy to secure our future, or whether there is a better strategy to be pursued.
What we do know is Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida organized the attack on the United States. That is who is responsible. That is who we should be going after. Instead, what we are hearing is that military and intelligence resources were shifted to Iraq, taking resources away from the search for Osama bin Laden. I have to ask again, Why? Why are we spending time and energy trying to prove a link with Saddam instead of spending the same time and energy trying to find Osama bin Laden and defeating al-Qaida?
The other thing that was asserted repeatedly in making the case that Iraq should be the priority, rather than al-Qaida, was that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons. The President and top officials repeatedly warned of Saddam's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and nuclear weapons in particular.
We had rhetoric about nuclear holy wars and mushroom clouds, and the statements were assertions. The administration did not say that Iraq might--or might not--have weapons of mass destruction. It asserted affirmatively that, without a doubt, Iraq had these weapons and that they posed an immediate threat to this country.
This chart lists a few of the many administration statements on Iraq's nuclear weapons. The first one is a quote of the Vice President in a speech to the VFW National Convention. He said: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
We have quote after quote from this administration. The President said: "The Iraqi regime is seeking nuclear weapons. The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
Ari Fleischer, the President's press spokesman said: "We know for a fact there are weapons there."
It goes on and on. Secretary Powell said: "He has so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed."
And, again, Vice President Cheney: "We know he is out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons. We believe Saddam has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons."
These were the statements made over and over by this administration. On chemical and biological weapons, the story was the same. The administration repeatedly asserted that Saddam had revived his chemical and biological weapons program and had stockpiles of weapons that posed a grave, immediate danger to the United States.
We all knew that Iraq had possessed and used chemical weapons in the 1980s. And we all knew that intelligence had not conclusively demonstrated that all these weapons had been destroyed. But the administration went well beyond that consensus, suggesting that there was new evidence of renewed chemical and biological weapon production.
This next chart I have lists a few of the many administration statements on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Again, the President's chief spokesman said: "The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it." That was Ari Fleischer.
Again, later the next year: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
Secretary Powell: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
President Bush: "The Iraqi regime has actively and secretly attempted to obtain equipment needed to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons."
Again, President Bush: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
The President's chief spokesman Ari Fleischer: "Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly ..... all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
Mr. President, assertion after assertion. These statements, and dozens more like them, painted a frightening picture of the threat posed to this country by Iraq. They created a mood in this country that built support for attacking a country that had not first attacked us or our allies, and to do so for the first time in our history.
Again, these statements did not suggest that "maybe" Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They did not suggest that "probably" Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They stated clearly and unequivocally that he had them. There was one only problem with these statements. All the evidence that has emerged since the war suggests that they were wrong. All the evidence we have now shows the administration knew at the time the statements were made that its own intelligence undercut the statements it was making.
What we know now is that we have occupied Iraq for 10 months. We have full, unrestricted access to the whole country, more than 1,000 investigators searching for illegal weapons, and they have found none. Saddam did not have nuclear weapons or any serious effort to acquire them in the near term. I think this quote from the January 28 Washington Post sums up the most recent finding: "U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday."
The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information ..... demonstrating that Saddam Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war .....
"If weapons programs existed on the scale we anticipated," Kay said, "we would have found something that leads to that conclusion. Instead, we found other evidence that points to something else."
I think the attached graphic from the Washington Post sums up the gap between the statements and what we now know.
On biological weapons, evidence since March of 2003? No. No weaponized agents found.
On chemical weapons? No. No weapons found. Appears none were produced after 1991.
On nuclear weapons? No. No evidence of any active program.
I do not fault the administration for thinking that there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I myself thought it probable that Saddam possessed these weapons. But for me the real question was whether these weapons posed such a serious, imminent threat that they justified a preemptive attack on Iraq. Did we have solid evidence of an immediate danger? For me, at the time, the answer was no. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, with the Bush administration's own top weapons inspector acknowledging that the pre-war statements were wrong and that Saddam, in fact, was disarming before the war, the answer is even clearer: No.
I am not the only one who has reached that conclusion. For example, former President Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, James Webb, recently wrote: "Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence."
There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our Nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.
In my view, it was a clear alternative to a preemptive attack that had worked for us for more than half a century--aggressive containment and isolation. The Soviet Union had biological and chemical weapons. We never attacked them. China had biological and chemical weapons. We didn't attack them. Cuba had missiles. We didn't attack them. In every one of those cases we used containment, and it worked. But we did not use containment in Iraq. We broke with our history and launched a preemptive attack on a country that had not first attacked us or our allies.
Now we have the responsibility for trying to occupy and rebuild Iraq. Now we have moved resources out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to deal with the dangers of the occupation of Iraq, and we have not yet succeeded in capturing bin Laden or shutting down al-Qaida.
I again must ask why have we not brought Osama bin Laden to justice? Why do we allow ourselves to be distracted by a war with Iraq when we have other, better options that allow us to keep the focus on al-Qaida?
It has been more than 30 months. It has been 930 days since the 9/11 attacks on this country, but Osama bin Laden is still at large. We all hope he will soon be caught, but every day our attention is diverted is another day America is at risk. That makes me question our policy.
It makes me question why for most of the last two years we have had no large-scale force hunting for bin Laden. It makes me question why our military and intelligence assets that could be hunting down al-Qaida have instead been diverted to Iraq. It makes me concerned when intelligence experts tell us al-Qaida has used that breathing space to decentralize its operations so it will be harder to disrupt and destroy al-Qaida in the future, even if we do capture bin Laden.
In the past few weeks, the administration has announced it has stepped up the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Sending a few thousand troops now is certainly a positive step. But I must ask with all due respect, could we have captured Osama bin Laden months ago had we kept the focus on al-Qaida? Could we have prevented the Madrid attack had we kept the focus on dismantling al-Qaida rather than going to war in Iraq?
Where was the effort to find Osama bin Laden for the past two years? And why do we not have tens of thousands of troops rather than just a few thousand to hunt him down so he does not remain free to plot against this country and our allies?
As Flynt Leverett, former CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer for President Bush, observed in a Washington Post article this past Sunday: "We took the people out [of Afghanistan] who could have caught them. But even if we got bin Laden or [his top aide Ayman] Zawahiri now, it is two years too late. Al-Qaeda is a very different organization now. It has had time to adapt. The administration should have finished this job."
I can only reach one conclusion. We have been distracted. We have been diverted. We have taken our eye off the ball. We have lost focus on the real war on terrorism--the war on al-Qaida and the terrorists who viciously attacked our country.
To put it bluntly, we have lost time and momentum and initiative in the war on the terrorists who actually attacked us while we went after a dictator--vicious and nasty as he was--who posed little immediate threat to this country.
If we look across the evidence, I believe in many ways the United States simply made a mistake of judgment on what was most important. The President and his advisers believed--and I believe they sincerely believed--the priority was to go after Iraq. But the evidence we now have suggests they were chasing red herrings rather than real evidence of a national security threat.
Don't get me wrong. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. But going to war with Iraq at the expense of our credibility and at the expense of our readiness to deal with other threats, at the expense of vigorously hunting down al-Qaida and bin Laden, has been the wrong priority.
That is exactly what concerned this Senator, that a preemptive war against Iraq--a country that had a low-level threat against this country, according to our own intelligence agencies--has distracted us from going after the man and the organization that attacked this country. It was not Iraqis who attacked this country. It was al-Qaida that attacked this country. Saddam Hussein was not the heart of that operation. Osama bin Laden was the leader of that operation.
It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida that engineered the vicious attacks on America on September 11. It is unacceptable that Osama bin Laden is still at large and broadcasting threats against this country 930 days after the attacks of September 11.
So I ask a final time: Why? Why has bin Laden eluded capture for 930 days? Why are we not focusing our efforts on bringing him to justice and defeating his network of terror?
I think the American people deserve an answer to that question. I think Members of this Chamber deserve an answer to that question. Holding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to account for this attack should be our top priority. It is time to refocus our priorities and to win the war against al-Qaida. Stopping bin Laden and al-Qaida before they can launch another attack that kills innocent Americans should be our highest national security priority.
