MISSED OPPORTUNITIES AT THE CIA

By all accounts the CIA also received a large share of the pre-attack warnings. By some accounts the agency intentionally blocked access to critical information—or worse, may have been covertly setting up “terrorist” patsies for later service in false-flag activities.

Like the FBI, the CIA has its own electronic eavesdropping satellite and computer system, noted earlier, called “Echelon.” This system tracks international telephone calls, faxes and email messages all around the world. It was so secret that the government would neither confirm nor deny its existence until 2001. According to a study by the European Union, Echelon accumulates electronic transmissions like a vacuum cleaner using keyword search software in conjunction with massive computer data banks.

The Echelon system, headquartered in the United States with the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, has caused protests in several nations, excluding the United States whose population rarely sees any news concerning this powerful global wiretapping system.

In 2000, French prosecutor Jean-Pierre Dintilhac ordered his country's counterintelligence agency to see if Echelon was being used to steal foreign business secrets, to spy on citizens, and to see if it was “harmful to the vital interests of the nation.” The Italian Parliament also opened inquiries into Echelon, saying, “The scope is not military.” According to a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Echelon spy system provided both US and Israeli intelligence services warning of the impending terrorist attacks at least three months before the fact. The newspaper reported that Echelon, with its 120 satellites, has been used extensively by Israeli intelligence to monitor Arab terrorist groups.

Largely unreported in the American media was a story that Osama bin Laden himself was overheard telling his stepmother on September 9, 2001, “In two days you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” This telephone interception, publicly attributed to a “foreign intelligence service,” undoubtedly was the product of Echelon. Yet apparently no one in America's defense establishment was alerted to bin Laden's “big news.”

The CIA also had another high-tech weapon in their arsenal for use against terrorists. The “Predator,” an unmanned surveillance aircraft system consisting of four aircraft, a ground control station (GCS), a primary satellite link communication suite and 55 people. Predator drones had been used under the Clinton administration to track the movements of Osama bin Laden. There had even been talk of using the craft to unleash Hellfire missiles on the al Qaeda leader.

Following the attacks of 9/11, such talk turned into action. An armed Predator was used to attack a convoy of sport utility vehicles in Afghanistan thought to be carrying al Qaeda leaders on February 7, 2002. On November 3, 2002, the CIA used a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator to attack a car in Yemen, killing Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, an al Qaeda leader thought to be responsible for the USS Cole bombing. Reportedly, this was the first direct US strike in the War on Terrorism outside Afghanistan.

About a year later, an RQ-1 Predator was used to attack a remote village in the southern Ghazni Province of Afghanistan thought to be the hideout of Taliban supporters. Nine children and a 25-year-old man were killed in the strike, which failed to kill the intended target. Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai stated that he was “profoundly shocked” by the CIA attack and demanded closer coordination with Afghan authorities on all future military strikes. By 2005, the CIA’s use of unmanned Predators was becoming more effective. Haitham al-Yemeni, an al Qaeda explosives expert from Yemen, was killed in a village in northwest Pakistan by a Predator again firing a Hellfire missile. On December 3, 2005, a Predator reportedly killed ranking al Qaeda chief Abu Hamza Rabia while sleeping in Haisori, Pakistan. Four others were also killed. On January 13, 2006, several Predators rained missiles on the Pakistani village of Damadola thought to contain al Qaeda‘s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. The CIA drone planes reportedly fired 10 missiles killing 18 civilians, including five women and five children.

Because Predators, in production since at least 1995, carries an infrared camera capable of identifying the heat signature of a human body from an altitude of 10,000 feet, the the remote-controlled craft has been coveted by law enforcement. In 2005, the craft was sought to aid in Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts but was not certified by the FAA to fly within US civilian airspace. This was corrected on May 18, 2006, when the FAA granted a certificate of authorization. Some police departments, such as in Houston, Texas, were experimenting with drones in 2010.

There is enticing evidence that ties Osama bin Laden directly to the CIA back at the time the agency was funding and training fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan. While it has been widely acknowledged that the CIA helped found and fund the al Qaeda network during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the agency steadfastly denied any direct dealings with bin Laden. Despite these denials, there is considerable evidence of prior CIA and Bush family involvement with the bin Laden family going back several decades as will be described later. Many researchers believe the CIA groomed Osama bin Laden for years in preparation for some future need.

For example, one Internet source claimed that bin Laden, under the name Tim Osman, actually was brought to the United States in the late spring of 1986 for a meeting with government agents at the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California. Former FBI senior special agent Ted L. Gunderson confirmed this meeting and said he was one of the attendees.

Gunderson said he was contacted by a “top figure” in the Reagan administration and asked to meet with Afghan insurgents to “see what we might do to help them.” The four men at the hotel meeting, according to Gunderson, were himself, a quiet Tim Osman (bin Laden), computer expert Michael Riconosciuto, a CIA scientific “asset” with connections in the arms business, and a man identified as Ralph Olberg, who was purchasing weapons on behalf of the Afghan Mujahideen.

Gunderson said conversation during the hour-and-a-half meeting was mostly between Olberg and Riconosciuto while Osman/bin Laden “sat silent in a corner of the room.” He added that he was unaware of what, if any, deal was sealed during the meeting but that he is “certain in my own mind” that arrangements were made to provide arms for bin Laden and the Arab fighters. Gunderson's guess has been proven true as it is a historic fact that the CIA supplied both arms and training for bin Laden's fighters in Afghanistan. It should be noted, however, that Gunderson's credibility has been questioned.

According to a former staffer of Republican senator David Durenberger, Olberg was a man often seen in the senator's office during the Reagan years talking about the plight of the Afghan people.

Riconosciuto, also tight with Republican bigwigs, had been involved in the development of the PROMIS software initially planned for use against criminals and terrorists. But this promising software soon turned into a scandal when its creator charged that US government officials, including then-Attorney General Bill Casey, had stolen the software and used it to create a “back door” into computers in both foreign governments and domestic corporations. It was also alleged that the stolen software was used for insider trading including that which preceded the 9/11 attacks as described in the next section. Osama bin Laden is suspected of using the PROMIS software to elude captors and to spy on his enemies.

But by the mid-1990s, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, the Saudis were our oil friends and, with the exception of certain counterterrorism units, little notice was taken of Osama bin Laden. The CIA, like their brethren in the FBI, apparently became somewhat complacent at the lower levels thanks to the near constant stream of tips, warnings, and information. Workers not actively involved in counterterrorism took a cue from their superiors and never got too serious about terrorism.

And it wasn't as if prior warnings had all proven false. Almost a year before the deadly 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, an al Qaeda member had warned CIA officials of the coming attacks. The informant's information was dismissed as unreliable and nothing was done.

Though admittedly vague, there was even a warning in a September 1999 National Intelligence Council (NIC) report, which foresaw events similar to the 9/11 attacks. This NIC report, entitled “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” was prepared by about a dozen senior intelligence officers. The NIC was attached to the CIA. “Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the White House,” stated the report, which was issued exactly two years before 9/11.

“This information was out there,” noted Robert L. Worden, chief of the Federal Research Division, which prepared the report from open sources, “certainly to those who study the in-depth subject of terrorism and al Qaeda.”

In January 2000, Malaysian security agents conducted surveillance of al Qaeda operatives meeting in Kuala Lumpur at the behest of the CIA. One of the operatives was Khalid al-Midhar, named by the FBI as one of the 9/11 hijackers. It was determined that al-Midhar had a multiple-entry visa to the United States. CIA agents also found that al-Midhar was traveling with a Saudi, Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had previously entered the United States. Neither man was placed on the State Department “watch list” until August 23, 2001, far too late to prevent their participation in the 9/11 attacks.

Endnote 44 to Chapter 6 of The 9/11 Commission Report described a CIA cable entitled “Activities of Bin Ladin Associate Khalid [al-Midhar] Revealed.” This cable stated that on January 4, 2000, the passport containing a visa for travel to the United States belonging to Khalid, named as one of the hijackers of Flight 77, was photocopied and sent to CIA headquarters. However, this evidence of a known al Qaeda terrorist in the US was not shared with the FBI until August 2001, after a CIA desk officer instructed the FBI agent detailed to the bin Laden unit at the CIA not to send along this information. A few hours later, this same desk officer distributed a cable within the agency that this information had been shared with the bureau, though she later admitted that she did not personally share the information nor could identify who told her it had been shared.

Another example of CIA incompetence, if that's what it was, can be found in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who, since the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in the spring of 2002, was considered the highest-ranking member of the al Qaeda network still at large, as well as a primary planner of the 9/11 attacks.

Mohammed was so highly placed in bin Laden's organization that the joint congressional committee looking into intelligence failures in the fall of 2002 took special notice of him. But they were so stymied by restrictions on classified material that they could only refer to Mohammed as a “key al Qaeda leader,” even though the man was identified as a terrorist chief as far back as 1995.

The joint committee criticized the CIA’s handling of Mohammed's case, stating, “there was little analytic focus given to him and coordination amongst intelligence agencies was irregular at best.” One US intelligence official disputed this charge but admitted to a New York Times reporter, “We had identified him as a major al Qaeda operative before September 11.”

Such mishandling continued after 9/11 when it was reported that Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003, following a nighttime shootout in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. US officials expressed jubilation over the arrest but their celebration faded swiftly as questions arose. Witnesses did not agree with the official account and foreign media speculated that Mohammed may have been misidentified, killed at an earlier date, or might even still be on the loose. Oddly, despite these doubts, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—supposedly now in US custody and a key informant to the US government—is cited more frequently than any other insider as a crucial source for the narrative of The 9/11 Commission Report. In fact, by author Griffin's count, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is cited 272 times in the report, despite the fact that no corroborating evidence has ever been provided as to the fact of his capture, or even the veracity of his testimony to the government. Such reliance on an unvetted source was reminiscent of the 2010 film Green Zone, starring Matt Damon as a Army warrant officer who comes to realize that the bogus intelligence he was given about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction came solely from a US official, who had actually been told by a ranking Iraqi general that there were no WMDs as far back as the Gulf War.

Author Mike Ruppert even went so far as to name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as one of the top-level al Qaeda chieftains who may have actually been double agents—trained, funded and continuing to work for the CIA. “[Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others] worked to further an agenda originating out of Washington, strongly influenced by Tel Aviv, rather than out of some ill-defined Muslim hatred of the US,” Ruppert wrote.

Mohamed Atta, the accused chief hijacker, was also named by Ruppert as a double agent secretly working for US intelligence. Atta reportedly was under surveillance by US military intelligence agents who had identified him as an al Qaeda ringleader more than a year prior to his visit to the United States for flying lessons.

This astounding fact, only made public in mid-2005, came from a highly classified anti-terrorism program named “Able Danger” formed under the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in October 1999. The Able Danger team specifically targeted al Qaeda for investigation. In 2000, a year before to the 9/11 attacks, the Able Danger team identified Mohamed Atta and three other named 9/11 hijackers as possible members of an al Qaeda cell.

This revelation appeared to contradict government claims that no one in US intelligence had identified Atta as a terrorist before 9/11, although it is unclear if senior government officials were given information regarding Atta in either the Clinton or early Bush administrations.

What is clear is that this case of forewarning was presented to the 9/11 Commission who chose not to mention it in their report. It is also noteworthy that in an unprecedented action, General Pete Schoomaker, one of the officers in charge of Able Danger, was brought out of retirement and made Army chief of staff in 2003. In 2006, a report from the Pentagon's Inspector General's Office claimed there had been no pre-9/11 identification of Atta by Able Danger and that those who claimed otherwise were simply mistaken. There was no mention of Able Danger in The 9/11 Commission Report.

Upset over claims by 9/11 Commission members that they had not been given critical information concerning Able Danger and its capabilities, Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon in the summer of 2005 wrote to the former chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission reminding them that commission staffers had received two briefings on Able Danger, once in October 2003, and another in July 2004. “The impetus for this letter is my extreme disappointment in the recent, and false, claim of the 9/11 commission staff that the commission was never given access to any information on Able Danger,” wrote Weldon. “The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter.”

Commission Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton said staff workers indicated that they could not recall being briefed on Able Danger and that no mention of the program was included in their report because the commission had no “information that the United States government had under surveillance or had any knowledge of Mohamed Atta prior to the attacks.”

“[Able Danger] Team members believed that the Atta cell in Brooklyn should be subjected to closer scrutiny, but somewhere along the food chain of administration bureaucrats and lawyers, a decision was made in late 2000 against passing the information to the FBI,” Weldon stated in his letter to the commission. If the Able Danger intelligence on Atta and his al Qaeda ties was available in 2000, it would be critical to determine who then blocked this information from going to the FBI. But, as usual, there was no investigative follow-up to this information, so damning to official denials of foreknowledge, and which seemed to point to the possibility that Atta was being protected by US intelligence.

In 2010, one of the Able Danger team members, Lt. Col. Anthony A. Shaffer, the winner of a Bronze Star medal for his leadership against the Taliban, published a book entitled Operation Dark Heart. In his book, Shaffer, who had retired from the DIA, provided further details on Able Danger as well as his experiences in Afghanistan. He said while serving undercover in Afghanistan, he met with Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and personally alerted Zelikow to the activities of Able Danger and the fact that they had identified Atta a year prior to the 9/11 attacks. He added that this information was met with “stunned silence,” but that nothing of this was mentioned in the commission's report.

In an action reminiscent of Nazi book burnings, Defense Department officials bought and then destroyed nearly 10,000 copies of Shaffer's book, effectively censoring the first printing. This book destruction cost the taxpayers $47,000, according to Fox News. Lt. Col. April Cunningham told CNN the book contained intelligence secrets and might harm national security. It also might have called public attention to the fact that Mohamed Atta and his gang were known to the government a year before the 9/11 attacks.

David Wise, author of The Invisible Government and other books on US intelligence, recalled that the CIA attempted to pull this same ploy on him back in 1964 but were confounded by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf who said he would be happy to sell the first printing to the CIA but would then just print more. “Their clumsy efforts to suppress the book only made it a bestseller,” quipped Wise.

“The whole premise smacks of retaliation,” said Shaffer, whose loss of his security clearance prompted an irate letter from Rep. Christopher Shays, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, who said this action was misuse of the security system. Shaffer quipped, “Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous.” Later in 2010, Shaffer along with five other witnesses to the Able Danger program, told Fox News that investigators for the Inspector General's office looking into Able Danger distorted their statements and attempted to guide their comments and even intimidate them. The whole controversy only served to add support to those who alleged that Atta and his team were known to the US military and that 9/11 was indeed an inside job.

US surveillance of Atta was even reported in European publications long before the Able Danger issue arose. As early as 2001, the German magazine Focus reported that US agents, referred to as FBI in some accounts and CIA in others, monitored Atta from January to May 2000 after he was seen buying large quantities of chemicals thought to be used for making bombs. According to the article, the US agents never informed German authorities of Atta's presence or of any suspicions about him.

One of the most outrageous accounts of CIA pre-9/11 activity actually involved Osama bin Laden. One month after the attacks, the French daily Le Figaro reported that bin Laden had been treated at an American hospital in the Arab emirate of Dubai in July 2001, and while there was visited by a local CIA agent. According to this report, bin Laden was flown from the Quetta airport in Pakistan to Dubai, where he was admitted to the American hospital located between the Al-Garhoud and Al-Maktoum bridges. He was taken to the urology department for treatment of a kidney infection. The article stated that bin Laden had had mobile kidney dialysis equipment shipped to his hideaway in Pakistan as far back as early 2000.

Furthermore, it went on to say that during his stay at the hospital, between July 4 and 14, bin Laden received visits from family members and prominent Saudis and Emiratis. “During the hospital stay, the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator of the hospital to go to bin Laden's hospital room,” stated the Le Figaro article, adding, “A few days later, the CIA man bragged to a few friends about having visited bin Laden. Authorized sources say that on July 15th, the day after bin Laden returned to Quetta, the CIA agent was called back to headquarters.” Bin Laden, with both a price on his head and eligible for execution under a last-minute order from outgoing president Bill Clinton, nevertheless was allowed to fly without hindrance from Dubai by private jet on July 14.

The article also reported that in late August, customs agents in Dubai notified both American and French authorities of the arrest of Djamel Beghal. Under interrogation, Beghal said he had been ordered to bomb the US embassy in Paris by al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in Afghanistan. “According to Arab diplomatic sources as well as French intelligence, very specific information was transmitted to the CIA with respect to terrorist attacks against American interests around the world, including US soil,” stated the French piece. While this story made the rounds in the European media, nothing but a few scattered Internet reports circulated in the United States. In Europe, CIA officials denied the story.

The Dubai story is either true or false. If it is false, the American public needs to know this, so that such untruths can be stopped and not distract from anti-terrorism efforts. If it is true, then the American people need to know that their own CIA let the world's most wanted man walk away unmolested two months prior to the deadly 9/11 attacks. Yet no major American media organization apparently could spare one good reporter to travel to Dubai to check with the hospital staff and others to confirm the story.

The story of the CIA and bin Laden in Dubai is reinforced by a story in the December 23, 2001, edition of the Washington Post, which reported that the CIA had recruited a team of Afghan agents to track bin Laden's movements in their country beginning in early 1998. This effort continued right up until September 11, 2001. According to the paper, these agents sent the CIA daily reports on bin Laden's whereabouts but agency officials often dismissed the information because it sometimes conflicted with other intelligence information.

CIA foreknowledge was also obliquely admitted in April 2002 by its own deputy director, James L. Pavitt. In a speech to the Duke University Law School Conference, Pavitt was simultaneously trying to excuse his agency's failure to prevent 9/11 while touting its efficiency. “We had very, very good intelligence of the general structure and strategies of the al Qaeda terrorist organization. We knew and we warned that al Qaeda was planning a major strike. There is no question about that,” Pavitt told his audience. His speech later was posted on the CIA’s website.

Yet Pavitt tried to echo the administration's claim that there was not enough specific intelligence to prevent the 9/11 attacks. He added that within days of the attacks CIA operatives were “on the ground” operating in Afghanistan. “None of this came easy,” he explained. “You cannot learn Pashtun overnight and you can't truly understand the complexities of tribalism, regionalism and personalism in Afghanistan by reading the newspaper or a learned book. My people learned about this by years of study and years of practice often in difficult, hostile and, yes indeed, on the ground in Afghanistan itself.

“If you hear somebody say, and I have, the CIA abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets left and that we never paid any attention to that place until September 11th, I would implore you to ask those people how we were able to accomplish all we did since the Soviets departed. How we knew who to approach on the ground, which operations, which warlord to support, what information to collect. Quite simply, we were there well before the 11th of September.”

In early 2005, the results of an internal CIA investigation were made public. In a report by CIA Inspector General (IG) John Helgerson, former Agency officials, particularly former intelligence chief George Tenet and former deputy director of operations James L. Pavitt, were criticized for the failure to foresee the 9/11 attacks. Both Tenet and Pavitt had resigned from the CIA in the summer of 2004. The IG’s report was requested by Congress in December 2002, when it asked “whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable” for failure to prevent or stop the attacks. Oddly, Tenet had recently been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in a special ceremony at the White House on December 14, 2004.

In this connection it is worth remembering that senior government officials had received this report on Osama bin Laden in July 2001, also quoted earlier: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

Even President Bush was fully briefed during this time frame. On July 5, 2001, President Bush received a briefing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch that mentioned the possibility of an airline hijacking as a domestic threat. This information was not made public until nearly nine months after the attacks.

But the most startling revelation of Bush's foreknowledge regarding the attacks did not come until 2004. For nearly two years the Bush administration had attempted to block public access to some of President Bush's President's Daily Brief reports (PDB). Prior to 2005, the PDB was prepared by the CIA. After much legal wrangling, the 9/11 Commission finally obtained these reports in 2004. One in particular, the PDB for August 6, 2001, makes it clear why someone did not want this report made public. The threat, as detailed in this briefing report, was both clear and imminent.

The PDB headline read “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US”. Items detailed in the report, which will be examined later, included the desire of bin Laden to strike Washington; that al Qaeda had support members including US citizens training for attacks; and that bin Laden had wanted to hijack US aircraft in 1998.

The PDB report added that “FBI information since that time [1998] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

Yet, despite these warnings, when four jetliners went off course on the morning of September 11, there was little or no immediate reaction.

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, admitted to the possibility that the attacks could have been prevented but saw no design in the voluminous evidence of foreknowledge. “My feeling is a whole number of circumstances, had they been different, might have prevented 9/11,” Kean said during a TV network interview. “They involve everything from how people got into the country to failures in the intelligence system.”

This picture of missed opportunities to stop the 9/11 attacks was darkened further in early 2005 when the Bush administration released a declassified 120-page report to the National Archives detailing how the FAA had received 52 intelligence reports between April and September 2001, warning of impending attacks. This report, blocked by the Bush administration until more than five months after the release of The 9/11 Commission Report, mentioned both bin Laden and al Qaeda by name and the possibility of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons.

Major airports were warned in the spring of 2001 of the possibility that “the intent of the hijacker [may not be] to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion…”

The report, only declassified in late January 2005, still contained “heavy redactions” in some areas. It provided more heat in the struggle between the administration and the FAA. The FAA came under attack in the 9/11 Commission's final report for reported failures on September 11, 2001. The 2005 report stated that FAA officials were “lulled into a false sense of security,” although it did note that then-FAA Administrator Jane F. Garvey told 9/11 commissioners “that she was aware of the heightened threat during the summer of 2001” but that other senior aviation officials, airline officials and veteran pilots were not.

The 2005 report quoted extensively from FAA circulars distributed to some airports although many of these references were blacked out.

Despite the FAA circulars and a barrage of information on the Internet and in the foreign press, the corporate mass media failed to respond until mid-2002, when complaints from CIA and FBI agents and certain members of Congress became too loud to ignore. Even then, they danced around the subject of all the missed clues and cues.

“Because Bush has long insisted he had no inkling of the attacks, the disclosures [in 2002] touched off a media stampede in a capital long deprived of scandal. The fact that the nation's popular war president might have been warned a little over a month before September 11—and that the supposedly straight-talking Bushies hadn't told anyone about it—opened up a serious credibility gap for the first time in the War on Terror,” wrote Newsweek writers Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff.

Inflated budgets, further centralization of intelligence functions, and adding more intelligence and law enforcement manpower will add nothing to the search for true national security until the American people demand an honest accounting concerning how our government behaved before and during the 9/11 attacks. The record clearly shows that there was a great deal of foreknowledge of what was to come and even covert contact with the alleged hijackers, yet very little commitment at the highest level to stopping the attacks—in fact, considering the hindrance of investigations in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, there appeared to be a willingness to allow them to happen.