hardball 911 commission

Matthews began by introducing his four guests of the 911 Commission: Fred Fielding was counsel to both President Nixon and President Reagan; Jamie Gorelick was Deputy Attorney General to President Clinton; Richard Ben-Veniste was head of the Watergate Task Force; Senator Slade Gorton was elected three times as United States Senator for the state of Washington.

Matthews: How important is bin Laden to the terrorist network and could al-Qaida function effectively without him? I sat down for an exclusive interview with four of the 911 Commissioners. Fred Fielding was counsel to both President Nixon and President Reagan; Jamie Gorelick was Deputy Attorney General to President Clinton; Richard Ben-Veniste was head of the Watergate Task Force; Senator Slade Gorton was twice elected, in fact three times elected United States Senator in the state of Washington.

Matthews: The big question to Americans have on their nerves right now is bin Laden. Fred is he still essential to running the AL-QAIDA operation as far as you know?

Fielding: As far as we know he is not as essential as one would have assumed, but he’s a symbol, so even if he’s dead or if he would be killed, he will still be a symbol and a rallying point, and that’s consistent with everything that we’ve been told and everything that has come in on our research.

Gorelick: What’s really important to understand is that we have an agile and entrepreneurial enemy. The enemy that we had in 2001 is not the enemy that we have today. He is a leader but he is in no way essential to the threat that al-Qaida poses to us.

Matthews: How do you know that?

Gorelick: Because you can see it—first of all, this is not just our conclusion I think it is the conclusion of the intelligence community at large. You can see the dispersion of capability, power, autonomy, in the actions that have taken place since 911.

Matthews: He’s the general contractor, does he still have to assign the contract if we get hit again? Will he have to be the person who says--

Gorton: No, no, not necessarily. Jamie is entirely correct. This is decentralized. The philosophy didn’t start with him of this virulent anti-Westernism. It goes well beyond him. We haven’t heard directly from him now almost for a couple of years but this is a struggle that’s going to last a long time long after bin Laden is dead whether he dies in a cave or dies naturally.

Matthews: What do you think about al-Zawahri’s claim or threat that he’s coming again, that they’re coming back at us. "Bush, reinforce your security measures, the Islamic nation which sent you the New York and Washington brigades has taken the firm decision to send you successive brigades to sow death and aspire to paradise." It sounds like he keeps going here, he’s promising us more hell.

Ben-Veniste: Well it’s interesting that it’s not bin Laden that’s making those statements. On the other hand, Chris, we have heard from recent reports that bin Laden is giving messages essentially combining the pony express with the internet. Individuals coming to see him, getting either instructions on disk or getting instructions and then communicating those instructions through their network. He’s not out of the loop. There’s no suggestion that he is.

Gorelick: One of the reasons that we were so adamant in pointing to the danger that still lies in Afghanistan and in Pakistan is that, even though we’ve toppled the Taliban, if Afghanistan is not brought further under control, it remains a place from which these kinds of actions can be taken against us. So, bin Laden is a symbol as Fred said, he is still trying to direct activity as Richard said, but as Slade and I have pointed out, this will go on without him.

Matthews: How much did 9/11 cost to carry out?

crosstalk.

Ben-Veniste: That doesn’t take into account the kind of training and everything that preceded the operation, Chris, so the $500,000 is really operational funding.

Matthews: When we studied—you know for years even through 1960 something, I remember seeing the play, The Best Man, where they denied there was a mafia. They did deny the [unclear] of families getting together. Is this like, what’s the paradigm here, what are we looking at when we say al-Qaida, when we say big time terrorism? Is it like a group of mafia families? How would you describe it to someone? Fred?

Fielding: You have to first not fall into a trap of talking about terrorism per se. Terrorism is a vehicle, it’s a weapon. But what you’re dealing with, you have to rethink everything. Your normal inhibition, the normal way to stop an enemy is to make them afraid that you’re going to kill them. These people don’t care. That’s part of their payoff.

Matthews: So you can’t have a regular war.

Fielding: So you have to have a whole rethink.

Matthews: But as a group of people, is it a political movement? Is it like the Republican parties? Is it like the Communist party used to be? Let me ask you is it like the Communist party was in the 40s?

Gorton: No, no, it is not. We Americans tend, I think, to over-politicize everything. This is a religion that is indistinguishable from politics. The politics and religion are the same thing but the promise is eternal life. You know to kill people, you get rewarded.

Matthews: But is terrorism—the use of this method of war, killing civilians by the thousands, is that essential to their belief and to their movement? Richard? Is this what they do?

Ben-Veniste: It’s essential to the core of what they’re after now. This is what they are about is killing and destroying those that they believe are firmly the other, that are dehumanized in their view. Now, how do you look at them, though, as a group? They are not a religion certainly, per se, they are a faction, an off-shoot of a great religion, but their beliefs are so contrary to the basic tenets of any of the great religions that its hard to call them that. They are a political movement and if you look at them, they are much more like an organized crime family carrying out their operations in that way. We are using lethal force to get them because they have used lethal force against us.

Gorelick: But it is very dispersed and I think that’s very important. If you look at even the plot of 911, the plot was not hatched in the first instance by bin Laden, it was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and brought to bin Laden for his blessing and his help. The cell that originally formed and that became so key to the plot was formed in Hamburg. Now were there lots of interconnections? Was this a bin Laden operation? YES. But as much evidence as we have about what happened in 911, that pattern has played out all over the world and that is why it is very important to not, as we say, blur the strategy. This is NOT a war on terrorism. It is a war against Islamist fundamentalist terrorists. These are Jihadists who want to achieve certain goals. They want to get us out of Afghanistan. They want to get us out of Saudi Arabia. They want to get us out of Iraq. They want to do our country harm by using the techniques of terrorists.

Matthews: Let me ask you this, it’s a terrible example but I’ve been working on it. In your kitchen sink, if you see a lot of ants on the kitchen sink when you go to bed one night. You kill them all, right? And then you wake up the next morning and there’s a lot of them at the table because there’s a lot of them you can’t see. Is that what it’s like? That if you kill every one you see, like the President’s policy seems to kill all the terrorists as if there’s a finite number of them. Is there an infinite number of them, do they constantly get re-recruited by anger about Iraq for example? Do they continually grow organically in a way that you can’t kill them individually, you can’t say here’s my top 50 I’m gonna kill or my top 10,000 because after that 10,000 there will be more growing up.

Ben-Veniste: Well the one thing we did learn at one of our hearings from a CIA counter terrorism expert was that following the invasion of Iraq there was a marked increase in recruitment for al-Qaida, that’s what we know, and there have been comments that the recruitment effort is growing far faster than we are killing.

crosstalk

Matthews: ...was for many years our trusted ally in that region, whatever is going on now, he’s been a strong ally of the first President Bush, he said by going to Iraq we’ve created a hundred or a thousand bin Ladens. Is this the case?

Fielding: But to get to your overall question, putting aside that issue. You’ve got a problem here that you have people committed, right now. There probably is no redemption, to no way to change their [crosstalk] the ones in league right now, and the solution has got to be a long term solution. I mean, you know, it took 50 years to knock communism out of the box. It’s gonna take a long time.

crosstalk

Matthews: Do you know you’re in al-Qaida if you’re in it? I mean is it something you have to join and say you have to make your bones like the mob or something?

Gorton: Yes, you do, but that doesn’t mean there are not a very significant number of people who aren’t in al! and who share their beliefs and who will engage in the same activities. Just look at what happened in Russia last week. Those people had the same attitude toward human life and toward children.

Matthews cuts in: The Chechens

Gortons: Well if they were all Chechens, we don’t get straight answers on who they were.

Matthews: But that’s where it gets tricky we can’t fight the Chechens can we? Americans cant’ take that responsibility can we?

Gorton: No we cannot, but there was much—

crosstalk

Gorton: We can certainly do so, some of them have religious motivations as well as political motivations but the same mindset, the same mindset governed them even though they may have very well not have been members of al-Qaida.

break

Matthews: What is the motivating force behind people, maybe it’s like it always seems to be—when Poland was under Soviet rule everyone became very Catholic; when Ireland was under British rule everybody became very Catholic; it’s always seemed religion is what you resort to when you’re repressed. Is it culture that drives them against us, is it religion that drives them against us or is it US policy that gets their people in different parts of the Mideast in the Islamic world. You suggest it was policy.

Gorelick: I think if you read our report its an amalgam and this is a subject that we debated quite a bit.

cross talk

Gorton: You are separating three things and saying is it this, is it that or is it the third? The three are not indistinguishable among these people.

crosstalk

Matthews: Suppose we didn’t keep the troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia for all those ten years, we yanked them out after the first Iraq war, suppose we were seen as more even-handed in the middle east in negotiations in Israel and the Arab world, suppose we had never done anything politically against them, would they still have this rage against our culture, against women being equal, against the fact that there’s a different sexual moray in this country, all the things that are usually associated with our culture?

Gorton: Just ask bin Laden himself. What did he say? He said three things, "get out of the Middle East, convert to Islam and end all of the corruption of your society.

Gorelick: But I think its really important here, Slade is absolutely right, but it’s really important here to distinguish between the hard core and the recruits and that’s why you have Don Rumsfeld asking the question, "Are we breeding more than we can kill."

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