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By Root 678 0

and other national security principals on December 20, 2000. The plan was an ambitious one: break up al Qaeda cells and arrest their personnel; systematically attack financial support for its terrorist activities; freeze its assets; stop its funding through fake charities; give aid to governments having trouble with al Qaeda (Uzbekistan, the Phillipines, and Yemen); and, most significantly, scale up covert action in Afghanistan to eliminate the training camps and reach bin Laden himself. Clarke proposed bulking up support for the Northern Alliance and putting Special Forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan. As a senior Bush administration official told Time, Clarke’s plan amounted to “everything we’ve done since 9/11.”

Remember how I mentioned that the National Review’s Byron York wrote that Clinton’s “record is a richly detailed manual on how not to combat terrorism”? Well, if you take out the word “not,” you get a pretty good description of the plan: “a richly detailed manual on how to combat terrorism.” So Byron was just one word away from understanding the Clinton antiterror legacy.

But the plan was never carried out. In its place Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, and his national security team would conceive and execute a different plan entirely. A plan called Operation Ignore.

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Operation Ignore

Bill Clinton’s far-reaching plan to eliminate al Qaeda root and branch was completed only a few weeks before the inauguration of George W. Bush. If it had been implemented then, a former senior Clinton aide told Time, “we would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office.” Instead, Clinton and company decided to turn over the plan to the Bush administration to carry out. Clinton trusted Bush to protect America. This proved, nine months later, to be a disastrous mistake—perhaps the biggest one Clinton ever made.

Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger remembered how little help the previous Bush administration had provided to his team. Believing that the nation’s security should transcend political bitterness, Berger arranged ten briefings for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. Berger made a special point of attending the briefing on terrorism. He told Dr. Rice, “I believe that the Bush administration will spend more time on terrorism in general, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”

Which brings me to a lie. When Time asked about the conversation, “Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.” Perhaps so, Dr. Rice. But might I direct our mutual friends, my readers, to a certain December 30, 2001, New York Times article? Perhaps you know the one, Condi? Shall I quote it?

“As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning. According to both of them, he said that terrorism—and particularly Mr. bin Laden’s brand of it—would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined.” (Italics mine.)

When I read this, my instinct was to shout for joy and dance around the room, naked, celebrating the finding of a lie. And I did. “Badda Bing!” I cried, as I ran around the house, my genitals flopping wildly, embarrassing my wife and her bridge group.

After the dressing down from my wife, who really read me the riot act, it occurred to me that all I had really found was a contradiction between Time and the Times. Maybe The New York Times had it wrong. Maybe Dr. Rice, considered a paragon of integrity, had told Time magazine the truth—that her predecessor had never warned her about the impending threat from al Qaeda and its evil mastermind.

It was time for the Franken investigative juggernaut to assert itself. I called Dr. Rice’s office, prepared to pierce the infamous White House veil of secrecy with a lance of white-hot journalistic enterprise. I left a message, and they called me right back with the answer. A White House official told me that Dr. Rice had met with Berger at a briefing, and he had told