The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, our summary of the news; then extended coverage and analysis of today's hearings of the 9/11 Commission, with the testimony of Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld, and former Secretaries Albright and Cohen; then, a look at today's grim report on the financial future of Medicare and Social Security.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The United States relied too heavily on diplomacy to get Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. A bipartisan commission reported that and other initial findings today. It said the Clinton administration tried in vain to have bin laden expelled from Afghanistan. It said officials did not think their intelligence, or the public, would support major military action. The Bush administration came up with a new diplomatic strategy on Sept. 10. The commission heard today from the secretaries of state and defense in both administrations. And we'll have extended excerpts of their testimony right after this News Summary. President Bush today denied his administration was late to recognize the al-Qaida threat. It was his first direct response to charges by his former counter-terror chief. In a new book, Richard Clarke claims the president focused on Iraq instead of al-Qaida before 9/11 and even after. The president was asked about that today at a cabinet meeting at the White House.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The facts are these. George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threats to the United States of America. And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted.

JIM LEHRER: Officials from Vice President Cheney on down have denied Clarke's claims and questioned his motives. But Senate Majority Leader Daschle said today he believes Clarke, and he called for a thorough investigation.

SEN. TOM DASCHLE: No one challenged his credibility before now. Now that he's speaking out and telling the American people something the Bush administration doesn't want them to hear, his reputation and credibility is being undermined. There are many, many examples of that very thing happening, both to members of Congress as well as to members of the administration. I think it's wrong.

JIM LEHRER: Clarke is scheduled to testify before the 9/11 Commission tomorrow. Israeli leaders have decided to go after all of the senior leaders of Hamas. Wire services reported that today. They said the decision came hours after Israeli forces killed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas. The Israelis also tightened security against possible reprisals today. We have a report from Jonathan Miller of Independent Television News.

JONATHAN MILLER: On the West Bank the Intifada continued. Both sides now plunge deeper into mutual demonization. No turning back now, Israel says. All Palestinian militants are now in our sights. Some speculate whether this could mean Yasser Arafat is next.

ARIEL SHARON (Translated:) Israel is a very strong country. We will continue to take any necessary measures to defend ourselves.

JONATHAN MILLER: In Gaza, the Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed on a pilgrimage today to Yassin's house, this in itself a rare show of solidarity -- the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are bitter rivals.

AHMED QUREIA (Translated) These are Israeli crimes. It is Israel that wants to keep this cycle of violence going. They don't want any peace efforts to succeed.

JONATHAN MILLER: In Israel, they're bracing themselves. Security stepped up at the Knesset -- streets, buses, restaurants empty. A tiny nation on high alert - Hamas has promised to strike with unprecedented ferocity. Sharon's high-risk strategy thought reckless by some and bold by others.

JIM LEHRER: Also today, U.S. embassies in the Middle East urged Americans to be on alert. Hamas said yesterday the U.S. Made the killing of Sheik Yassin possible by supporting Israel. Protests over the Israeli action broke out in Iraq today. In Ramadi, west of Baghdad, police fired into the air to break up crowds throwing stones. At least two people were wounded, and two police cars were set on fire. To the South, gunmen killed nine police recruits in a van on the road near Hillah. And in Kirkuk, two officers who were twin brothers were shot dead. Taiwan's President Chen agreed today to count the votes again in his disputed reelection last Saturday. But thousands of demonstrators continued their protests. We have a report narrated by Richard Vaughan of Associated Press Television News.

RICHARD VAUGHAN: Reporter: With demonstrators gearing up outside the presidential office again on Tuesday, Chen called for a recount, saying he would accept the results as final. The president offered no time frame for the ballot recounts. It was Chen's first public appearance since Friday, when he was shot in mysterious circumstances one day before the election. Chen won with only 50.1 percent of the ballot, leading to massive political protests. The opposition leader says the fighting is out of his hands.

LIEN CHEN: I don't think I can end the protest myself.

RICHARD VAUGHAN: You mean it's out of your control.

LIEN CHEN: It is out of my control, yes.

RICHARD VAUGHAN: Crowds have camped outside Chen's office since Saturday's tight votes. Chen urged protesters to go home and let the courts deal with the dispute.

JIM LEHRER: The opposition has accused Chen of election fraud, and of staging the attempt on his life. Today he denied both charges. Medicare trustees reported today the program will go broke by 2019 without major changes. That's seven years earlier than last year's estimate. Medicare will also begin dipping into its trust fund this year, nine years ahead of the last estimate. The main factors are rising health care costs and the new drug benefit. The report also said that Social Security would remain solvent until 2042, unchanged from last year's estimate. We'll have more on this story later in the program. The cable TV industry made a new move today to address concerns about indecent programming. The ten largest cable companies announced they will give subscribers free equipment to block unwanted channels. About 35 million customers lack cable boxes that can be programmed to block selected channels and programs. NASA confirmed today there's evidence mars once had saltwater on its surface. Scientists said one of the Mars rovers has found rocky outcrops with ripple patterns and concentrations of salt. That indicates the rover is on the edge of what was once a salty pool. The scientists said if any organisms lived in the water, there could be fossils in the rocks. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost one point, to close at 10,063. The NASDAQ fell eight points to close under 1902. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to today's extraordinary hearings of the 9/11 Commission, and the bleak future of Medicare.

FOCUS - WHAT WENT WRONG?

JIM LEHRER: The 9/11 Commission hearings were divided into two sections today. Diplomacy was the focus in the morning. Kwame Holman reports.

KWAME HOLMAN: The bipartisan 9/11 Commission spent months interviewing top officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations about U.S. efforts to combat terrorism prior to the 9/11 attacks. This week, the commission invited many of those same officials to testify in public. At the beginning of today's session, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, the commission chairman, recognized that only current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice had declined the invitation.

FORMER GOV. TOM KEAN: We're disappointed that she's not going to appear to answer our questions about national policy coordination. We have had extended private meetings with Dr. Rice. We have received a lot of information from her and she's been a very cooperative witness in that circumstance.

KWAME HOLMAN: But former Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer urged Rice to testify in public. He cited the criticisms of the Bush administration and its attention to the terrorism threat made this week by former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke.

FORMER REP. TIM ROEMER: We have Dr. Rice on the airwaves saying that she strongly condemns and disagrees with Mr. Clarke's assessments and analysis. I would hope that this discussion would not be for the airwaves and would not be a partisan type of discussion that we have, but belongs in this hearing room tomorrow in a substantive way so that the ten commissioners can ask factually based questions, and so the American people have the access to those answers to try to make this country safer.

KWAME HOLMAN: This morning, the commission's staff first issued its preliminary report on the failure of diplomatic steps taken to neutralize al-Qaida and chase Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan prior to the 9/11 attacks.

PHILIP ZELIKOW: From the spring of 1997 to September 2001, the U.S. Government tried to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden to a country where he could face justice and stop being a sanctuary for his organization. The efforts employed included inducements, warnings and sanctions. All these efforts failed.

KWAME HOLMAN: As secretary of state during the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright oversaw the diplomatic initiatives.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: In our discussions with Pakistani leaders we were blunt. We told them that bin Laden is a murderer who plans to kill again; we need your help in bringing him to justice. In return, we received promises but no decisive action. We couldn't offer enough to persuade Pakistani leaders such as General Musharraf to run the risks that would have been necessary. It was not until September 11 that Musharraf had the motivation in his own mind to provide real cooperation, and even that has not yet resulted in bin Laden's capture, though it apparently has led to several attempts on Musharraf's life. The other two countries we went to were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and both agreed to deliver the right message. The Saudis sent one of their princes to confront the Taliban directly, and he came back and told us the Taliban were idiots and liars. The Saudis then downgraded diplomatic ties with the Taliban, cut off official assistance, and denied visas to Afghans traveling for non- religious reasons.

KWAME HOLMAN: But under questioning, Albright admitted the success of Saudi Arabia's diplomatic efforts was difficult to assess.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: They always did say that they would press and push on the bin Laden/al-Qaida front, but frankly, it's hard to say how effective it was at what time.

SPOKESMAN: Were you convinced they were pushing?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I was convinced when they told me they were pushing. But the bottom line is that in effect, as you look at the record, there were questions about some of the financial aspects. And I do think that there is a mixed record. One of the things about the Saudis is that they often do more things in private than is evident publicly. But I would say the record was a mixed one. I would say we pushed as hard as we could.

KWAME HOLMAN: Albright said president Clinton finally authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida following the 1998 attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: We also studied the possibility of sending a U.S. Special Forces team into Afghanistan to try and snatch bin Laden -- but success in either case depended on whether we know where bin Laden would be at a particular time. Although we consumed all the intelligence we had, we did not get this information; and instead, we occasionally learned where bin Laden had been or where he might be going or where someone who appeared to resemble him might be. It was truly maddening. I compared it to one of those arcade games where you manipulate a lever hooked to a claw-like hand that you think, once you put your quarter in, will actually scoop up a prize. But every time you try to pull the basket out, the prize falls away.

KWAME HOLMAN: But former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, was critical of the Clinton administration for not having a military option in the works much sooner.

FORMER SEN. ROBERT KERREY: I keep hearing the excuse, "We didn't have actionable intelligence." Well, what the hell does that say to al-Qaida? Basically, they knew, at the beginning of 1993, it seems to me, that there was going to be limited, if any, use of military, and that they were also free to do whatever they wanted.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: The executive orders that President Clinton put out about using lethal force against Osama bin Laden, everything that we did in terms of the structure that we put together to freeze various assets and to go after them with every conceivable tool that we had-- you, Senator, I know, were the only person that I know of who suggested declaring war. You were-- you know, in retrospect-- you were probably right, but we used every single tool we had in terms of trying to figure out what the right targets would be and how to go about dealing with what we knew to be a major threat, and I reviewed it, and I am satisfied that we did what we could, given the intelligence that we had and pre-9/11, if I might say. I think that we have to keep being reminded of that, because there were whole questions, as Secretary Lehman said, that we'd overreacted, not the other way around.

KWAME HOLMAN: Albright also said President Clinton considered a ground invasion into Afghanistan to flush out the ruling Taliban and al-Qaida, but decided against it.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I do think-- this is my personal opinion-- that it would be very hard, pre-9/11, to have persuaded anybody that an invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate. I think it, it did take the mega-shock, unfortunately, of 9/11 to make people understand the considerable threat. Plus, there was not a staging area in Pakistan, and the variety of problems that we faced, I do think that this administration faced also.

KWAME HOLMAN: Current Secretary of State Colin Powell followed Albright. His testimony covered those eight months between the time President Bush took office, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

COLIN POWELL: The outgoing administration provided me and others in the incoming administration with transition papers, as well as briefings, based on their eight years of experience, that reinforced our awareness of the worldwide threat from terrorism. All of us on the Bush national security team, beginning with President Bush, knew we needed continuity in counter-terrorism policy. We did not want terrorists to see the early months of a new administration as a time of opportunity.

KWAME HOLMAN: Powell said President Bush wanted to build upon the previous administration's strategies.

COLIN POWELL: The basic elements of our new strategy, which came together during these early months of the administration: First and foremost, eliminate al-Qaida. It was no longer to roll it back or reduce its effectiveness. Our goal was to destroy it. The strategy would call for ending allsanctuaries given to al-Qaida. We would try to do this first through diplomacy, but if diplomacy failed and there was a call for additional measures, including military operations, we would be prepared to do it, and military action would be more than just launching Cruise missiles at already warned targets. In fact, the strategy called for attacking al-Qaida and the Taliban's leadership, their command and control, their ground forces and other targets.

KWAME HOLMAN: Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration official, asked if the Bush administration wanted to build on the Clinton strategies, why National Security Adviser Rice has been criticizing those Clinton policies in recent days.

JAMIE GORELICK: She has given speeches, she has been on the airwaves essentially saying that the policies she inherited, and that you inherited, were bankrupt, that they were feckless, that there was no response. And yet you have made, I think, a singular point here this morning of saying that up until Sept. 11, most of them were continued.

COLIN POWELL: We took advantage of the expertise that existed with the individuals I listed, to include Dick Clarke. But in fact, the policy of the previous administration had not eliminated al-Qaida. It's a tough, tough target, as Dr. Albright said earlier.

JIM LEHRER: And to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: We get reaction from two former counter-terrorism and intelligence officials. Daniel Benjamin was director for transnational threats on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. He recently co-authored "The Age of Sacred Terror," which traces the rise of al-Qaida. Reuel Gerecht was in the CIA's clandestine service focusing on the Middle East and terrorism from 1985 to 1994. He is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Daniel Benjamin, from the preliminary reports from the commission, from a full day of testimony detailing either government understand what they were dealing with al-Qaida?

DANIEL BENJAMIN: I think both administrations understood in part what it was dealing with in terms of al-Qaida. I think that by the latter years of the Clinton administration, certainly the White House understood, I think, parts of the CIA understood quite well, parts of DOD, the Defense Department, understood quite well. There were some of the farther reaches of the bureaucracy did not understand quite well and the FBI In this period was really sort of an independent actor, so you had a lot of concentrated effort to keep - keep the effort up and to try to find bin Laden and to try to destroy the command-and-control structure of al-Qaida but of course it was a very difficult time. There wasn't the basis for an invasion and we had a hard time finding the necessary intelligence so it's a very frustrating period. As for the new team, I think that Secretary Powell, for example, who I know listened to several briefings and was very concerned about this problem did take it seriously but I think overall we had a real problem. That is that the period of the transition was so acrimonious and so contentious and there was so much....

RAY SUAREZ: Not to mention short.

DANIEL BENJAMIN: Not to mention short -- so much disdain for the outgoing administration on the part of the new team that there was a reluctance to believe that the threat was as big as it was made up to be -- as big as the Clinton administration personnel and also the permanent civil servants claimed. There was I think a period in which there just was a lot of disbelief.

RAY SUAREZ: Reuel, same question. Did either administration understand the nature of what they were dealing with, with al-Qaida?

REUEL GERECHT: Well I would agree with Daniel. I think there was a growing awareness about al-Qaida's capacity, about its lethality. Certainly after the attack on the embassies in Africa in '98 and the attack on the Cole in 2000, I think everyone understood that al-Qaida was a serious threat. I would disagree with Daniel a little bit. I think it probably is fair to say that with the transition you may have had a loss of energy. That is certainly true but I think what's striking about the Clinton administration, the Bush administration is actually its continuity that its attitude and approaches toward bin Laden, I would also add Iraq, before 9/11 are essentially the same. There's not much difference between them. Neither party really wanted to contemplate the ultimate sanction, what was required. That was an invasion of Afghanistan to destroy both the Taliban and the base of operations for al-Qaida.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Madeleine Albright testified at length and was questioned closely by members of the commission. Her basic statement was we did the best we could. Is that true?

REUEL GERECHT: Well, I think within the conventional framework, yes. I don't think at any time the Clinton administration, particularly President Clinton-- because this is really, if there's going to be a significant movement in American foreign policy, if we're going to do something radical and certainly attacking Afghanistan would have been radical, it would require the President of the United States to push the bureaucracies which naturally in Washington to be cautious and conservative. President Clinton didn't do that even though I think it is absolutely true that he became more aware, more concerned about the dangers of al-Qaida but in the end he refused to act.

RAY SUAREZ: Is it a mistake? Madeleine Albright suggested toward the end of her testimony that you have to remember before 9/11 how different the world looked and how different various options looked that we can't look at the period of the late '90s through the lenses of 2004.

DANIEL BENJAMIN: Well it's absolutely correct. And the questioning at some points made me a little concerned that the commissioners are going to commit the fallacy of reading history backwards. That's a very dangerous thing to do. You have to remember what kind of threat terrorism was. What the entire government as a corporate body really thought of terrorism and what the country thought of terrorism and it thought that it was a lot of theater but really not a strategic threat. Now there were, of course, people who were starting to dissent from this perspective but it's very hard to move the entire bureaucracy. Remember, the number of people who had been killed by terrorism in the decade of the '90s was fewer than the number of people killed by bee stings or lightning and so there was a very different perspective on the nature of the threat. It was believed to be good theater -- very important for nationalist groups that were trying to get recognition but not a central threat to the United States. Catastrophic terror as a phenomenon had not yet occurred.

RAY SUAREZ: Reuel Gerecht, Secretary Powell came on after his predecessor and said President Bush and his entire national security team understood the terrorism had to be among our highest priorities and it was. This goes right to the controversy also brought up by Richard Clarke in the last couple of days. Was it?

REUEL GERECHT: Well, again, I think I would take Secretary Powell at his word. I think that before 9/11 in theory it probably was but I would agree with Daniel I don't think people before 9/11 in the Bush administration really were thinking that al-Qaida was a threat that we had to kill -- that we had to... it was worth the risk to go and invade Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban. I think that dynamic only occurred --that conversation only occurred after 9/11.

RAY SUAREZ: But they said not only Secretary Powell but other members of the administration who testified today that they had moved the ball -- that the goal was no longer to limit the effectiveness of or roll back the activities of al-Qaida but in fact to eliminate it. Was there any sign of that before September 11?

REUEL GERECHT: Well I think in a Washington context, yes. I mean, they started having new meetings, new contingency planning and all the rest. But I think when it comes to the actual efforts out in the field, that is getting much rougher with the Pakistanis, understanding that you need to do something with the Northern Alliance which was opposing the Taliban and opposing bin Laden, I don't think you really saw that much action. There's a certain thought out there now and certain stories that there was this build-up, more or less this undeclared war that started in the Clinton administration and continued in the Bush administration by the CIA to fight bin Laden. I don't really think it's true. I think that for the most part the operational activity in the field wasn't all that serious and it was only 9/11 that made it something we had to deal with immediately.

RAY SUAREZ: Right up until Sept. 10 Daniel Benjamin was the Bush administration still using the diplomatic front to address this?

DANIEL BENJAMIN: Actually at the time the diplomatic front was fairly inactive. The administration undertook some very large policy reviews that really took most of the period, up until Sept. 11, and on the basis of the reporting that I did for our book, I was surprised to hear but General Hugh Shelton, for example, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said that he thought that terrorism had really moved back to the back burner. This same viewpoint was echoed by then three star General Don Kerrick who was serving uniformed military and had been the deputy national security advisors in the previous administration. I heard this from quite a number of people both in the State Department and at DOD, so I think there's a real issue that needs to be resolved there.

RAY SUAREZ: Daniel Benjamin, Reuel Gerecht, stay with us.

JIM LEHRER: Now to the afternoon session of the hearings. Defense was its focus and again to Kwame Holman.

KWAME HOLMAN: The afternoon session like this morning's began with a commission staff report: This one detailing the U.S. military response to terrorism beginning with the Clinton administration.

PHILIP ZELIKOW: After the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam care attacked on August 7, 1998, President Clinton directed his advisors to consider military options. He and his advisors agreed on a set of targets in Afghanistan. More difficult was the question of whether to strike other al-Qaida targets in Sudan. Two possible targets were identified in Sudan including a pharmaceutical plant at which the president was told by his aides they believed VX nerve gas was manufactured with Osama bin Laden's financial support.

KWAME HOLMAN: But following that attack on the pharmaceutical plant for which President Clinton was criticized widely, the administration passed on three other strike opportunities.

PHILIP ZELKOW: National security advisor and others told us that more strikes, if they failed to kill bin Laden, could actually be counterproductive, increasing bin Laden's stature. The paramount limitations cited by senior officials on every proposed use of military force was the lack of actionable intelligence -- by this, they meant precise intelligence on where bin Laden would be and how long he would be there.

KWAME HOLMAN: But the report also focused on the Bush administration and its decision not to retaliate against al-Qaida for the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen.

PHILIP ZELIKOW: The new team at the Pentagon did not push for response for the Cole. According to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld then Paul Wolfowitz his deputy -- Wolfowitz told us that by the time the new administration was in place the Cole incident was stale. The 1998 Cruise missile strike showed UBL and al-Qaida that they had nothing to fear from a U.S. response Wolfowitz said. For his part, Rumsfeld also thought too much time had passed.

KWAME HOLMAN: Former Defense Secretary William Cohen was first to testify this afternoon. Like Secretary of State Albright this morning, Cohen was questioned sharply by former Senator Kerrey about why President Clinton didn't take earlier military action against al-Qaida.

FORMER SEN. BOB KERREY: Every single time I heard the administration come up before the Intelligence Committee that I wan, just try to keep doing what you had done for years before, it was we're going to send the FBI To investigate this stuff. I would say my God I don't understand this. They killed airmen in Khobar Towers. They have attacked our facilities in East Africa. They attacked our sailors on the Cole. I don't understand and still today don't understand why the military wasn't given a dominant role.

WILLIAM COHEN: We had lethal authority. We were not... Sandy Berger said we weren't trying to send simply a summons to bin Laden in Afghanistan. We were trying to kill him, him or anyone else who was there at the time. That was, you know, what they call a warning shot to the temple. We were trying to kill bin Laden and anyone there that went to that camp. Did we have the kind of information that would have allowed us to get him later? We didn't see it. It was never recommended. I can't account for everything that you've heard but there was never a recommendation that came to the nationality team that said we've got a good shot at getting him, let's take military action and do it. I leave it to you, Senator Kerrey and to others who have served in Congress. Do you think it's reasonable that under the circumstances that any president, including President Clinton, could have gone to Congress in October of 2000 and said, these people are trying to kill us and now therefore we're going to invade Afghanistan and take them out? I don't think so.

KWAME HOLMAN: Commission member John Lehman, a former navy secretary, challenged Cohen on why the Clinton administration didn't come up with a wider range of military options.

FORMER NAVY SECRETARY JOHN LEHMAN: The question I have is, in the testimony of a number of the witnesses we've had and, of course, in Mr. Clarke's book, your Pentagon comes in for a lot of criticism for basically along two lines, the most import of which is that whenever there was an opportunity and a quest for options when the president requested options and so forth, the only thing the Joint Chiefs could come up with, the Pentagon could come up with was either lob a few Cruise missiles or the Normandy invasion. And clearly, as Senator Kerrey was suggesting, there are lots of potential discreet options in between -- like putting specialized Special Operations Forces on the ground. Now this is before - yes, it takes 13,000 today and they can't find him. But before the war in Afghanistan there was a lot of -- he was much more accessible.

WILLIAM COHEN: Was Richard Clarke in a better position to say this has a greater chance of success or General Shelton? I indicated that I relied upon the senior military advisor to me, the president to the national security team. I have no reason to in any way ever doubt that he was very straight with me and was not trying to rig the system so you only had one of two options. But rather I think he always felt we are prepared to take action, to put Special Forces on the ground if there is a reasonable opportunity to achieve the mission -- to do anything less than that, to put those people at risk with the enormity of the task of that country, that size with that many caves with by the way, the support of the Taliban and not the support of Pakistan, I'd have to question whether or not that was reasonable to do so.

KWAME HOLMAN: Current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified next and immediately faced questions from former Senator Kerry about why the new Bush administration did not take action against al-Qaida right away.

FORMER SEN. BOB KERREY: I don't understand this. We're waiting for a plan thing at all. I really don't. I mean, we're dealing with an individual who has led a military effort against the United States for ten years and has serially killed a significant number of Americans over that period of time. Why in God's name do I have to wait eight months to get a plan?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Afghanistan was harboring the al-Qaida. Afghanistan was something like 8,000 miles from the United States. It was surrounded by countries that were not particularly friendly to the United States of America. Afghanistan, as I said publicly on one occasion, didn't have a lot of targets. I mean, you can go from an overhead and attack Afghanistan and in a very short order you run out of targets that are lucrative. You can pound the rubble in al-Qaida training camp 15 times and not do much damage. They can put tents right up back. The country has suffered for decades in drought, in civil war, in occupation by the Soviet Union. And trying to deal with them from the air, in my view, and that is essentially what the courses of action were that I saw.

KWAME HOLMAN: Former Washington State Senator Slade Gorton, a Republican, continued the line of questioning.

FORMER SEN. SLADE GORTON: My question is given World Trade Center 1, given the embassy bombing, given the millennium plot, given the Cole, given the declaration of war by Osama bin Laden, what made you think that we had the luxury of that much time?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Reflecting on what happened on Sept. 11, the question is obviously the Good Lord willing things would have happened prior to that that could have stopped it but something to have stopped that would have had to happen months and months and months beforehand -- not five minutes or not one month or two months or three months. The counter argument -- it seems to me - is do you have the luxury of doing what was done before and simply just heaving some Cruise missiles into the thing and not doing it right? I don't know. We thought not. It's a judgment.

JIM LEHRER: Once more to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Joining me are Daniel Benjamin and former CIA Official Reuel. And today the written response from the 9/11 commission -- and the questions to those who came to testify -- hit once again and again and again on the lack of military response to which the people who came to testify said, well, it wasn't really clear what you attack.

REUEL GERECHT: Yeah. I would say that if you exclude from the very beginning that you're not going to invade the country which I would argue was the only serious way to deal with al-Qaida and the Taliban, as Secretary Rumsfeld quite correctly noted that there aren't many targets that you can hit. I mean, surgical strikes against the Taliban or al-Qaida I don't think really make enough sense because would have to have perfect intelligence and you'll never have perfect intelligence. You need to get in there to remove the camps permanently. So once you move away from that, then you're sort of stuck in a certain discussion that can't bring up pre-emptive war that makes you actually respond to events defensively. And I think that's what happened with the Clinton administration and I think the same process happened with the Bush administration. They started thinking about different ways to deal with it without actually tackling the major issue. That is we have to go out and bring down the entire regime.

RAY SUAREZ: Daniel Benjamin again and again the commission members were saying you had this, you had this, you had this, ticking off the events, and the defense specialists testifying answered that you really shouldn't make this sound like it's easier than it was. Why was it so hard to do something militarily against the Taliban and al-Qaida?

DANIEL BENJAMIN: Well, it certainly was challenging in the sense that to use what would be called a large package, to really get a large military force on the ground would be very difficult. It was unclear where we would stage from. Pakistan was not going to give us an opportunity to do that from there. We certainly weren't going to do it from Iran, a hostile country. It would be difficult to come in from the north. It was a practical matter highly problematic. Now there was discussion certainly during the Clinton administration about trying to do something with a smaller force of Special Operations experts to go in and try to find bin Laden and the senior al-Qaida leadership but the military was very hesitant about doing this without absolutely superb intelligence as to where they were and with the certainty that we had the assets to go in and get these troops if there needed... if they needed to be rescued. There was real resistance within the military -- at the joint staff level the people who served the chairman, there actually was an eagerness to do this because they understood the threat. The one stars really did want to carry out an operation but when the higher brass looked at these issues they said there are just too many dangers, the package needs to be too big. They backed away from it.

RAY SUAREZ: What about support in the Congress and in the country at large?

DANIEL BENJAMIN: Well, it's absolutely true as both administrations have said that this would have been inconceivable from a political perspective. It would have taken an enormous leap of leadership and really was in many ways inconceivable. Remember at the end of the Clinton administration Congress nearly cut off support for U.S. forces in Kosovo. There we had a case were genocidal acts were being committed in front of the entire world. I don't think anyone was going to believe that we had vital interests in Afghanistan. And then the same thing was true after the transition as Paul Wolfowitz has said. I think it would have beena very, very difficult sell.

RAY SUAREZ: Reuel Gerecht, one point that came up again and again during both the diplomatic and military portions of today's testimony was how hard it was to get information out of that part of the world -- what they kept referring to as actionable intelligence. Well if it was hard, could you put more assets in there until you could get what you needed to get or was there something like a barrier built around the place?

REUEL GERECHT: Well, I think the primary problem is that the CIA actually didn't treat Afghanistan as an area of operations until very late in the game. They were very reluctant to even send people in country to talk to Massoud. They considered those missions to be dangerous. They didn't have any people. Up in the North debriefing prisoners of war, according to Ahmed Massoud the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated just before 9/11 he had upwards of 700 members of al-Qaida on the front lines against him. We just simply didn't want to take the risk. Now I would backtrack just a little bit. I would disagree with Daniel on the issue of the politics at that time. I tend to perhaps have a 19th century view on this but I do believe that if you attack two American embassies and you sink or nearly sink an American destroyer that those are acts of war and I think that President Clinton could have used the bully pulpit on this one and he chose not to. I think he could have made a do-or-die argument to Musharraf who had been really integral in using and developing those camps that bin Laden was in for his operations in Kashmir that we could have gone to the Pakistanis and said, listen, either you are with us or against us on this one. The Clinton administration didn't do that. I think they can be faulted for that.

RAY SUAREZ: Didn't it take 9/11 to bring the Pakistanis around?

DANIEL BENJAMIN: It did take 9/11. What Reuel is overlooking here I think is that, first of all we were dealing with Nawaz Sharif until the fall of 1999 and we were facing a potentially catastrophic situation in which Pakistan and India were going to go to nuclear war. On July 4, 1999 President Clinton hosted Sharif of Pakistan in Washington and had to essentially tell him to back down in the Cargill confrontation. I think that's really instructive because we had woefully overloaded diplomatic circuits. We had too many issues to deal with with the Pakistanis. That was a huge problem. Musharraf came in in the fall and we really lost ground. We had a very difficult time dealing with him because he thought this was a problem that he didn't need to worry about. Pakistan wanted to maintain Afghanistan as its strategic depth. And once again we were also very concerned about nuclear issues. Now we did push the terrorism issue very forcefully and President Clinton met with Musharraf in Islamabad and pushed this issue. But again we had a real problem. We had no carrots to give the Pakistanis. We had a series of overlaying sanctions that had accrued over years. The executive branch had its hands largely tied by Congress. It was a really difficult diplomatic problem.

RAY SUAREZ: Time for a quick response. Reuel.

REUEL GERECHT: I would agree with everything Daniel said. It's one of perception. If you believe that bin Laden and al-Qaida was a serious threat and certainly there were many individuals in the Clinton administration who say now they did, then I think that they should have come forward and said listen we have to eliminate this man. We have to do it now. They did not do that.

RAY SUAREZ: Gentlemen, thanks for joining us.

FOCUS - SEEING RED

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, new projections and concerns on the long-term future of Medicare and Social Security, and to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: Today's annual report on the long-term outlook for Medicare and Social Security painted a bleak picture. The report by the program's trustees says that Medicare faces the more immediate problem: Insolvency by the year 2019. That's seven years sooner than was projected just last year. Earlier today, Treasury Secretary John Snow laid out some of his concerns.

JOHN SNOW: Serious as the issues are facing Social Security, the Medicare trustees report reveals that the problems confronting the Medicare system are even greater -- the challenges there much more significant in terms of their impact on general revenues and the deficit and the economy as a whole. While Medicare faces the same shifting demographics as Social Security, it's additionally burdened by the sharp and continuing increase in health care costs. From 1998 to 2002 health care costs rose by 35 percent; health care spending has grown continuously as a percentage of GDP. Its share of GDP is now some 15 percent as of 2002, the last time we had good numbers on it. But it's surely higher than that today.

GWEN IFILL: Social Security is projected to become insolvent in 2042-- no change from last year. But in looking beyond the traditional timeframe of 75 years, the trustees discovered even more disturbing news. Combined, Medicare and Social Security will have a shortfall of $72 trillion. But how much of this is cause for immediate alarm? For that, we turn to Dan Crippen, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office; and Marilyn Moon, a former Medicare and Social Security trustee, now a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. Help to put some of these numbers in context for us, Dan Crippen. $73 trillion sounds like a lot of money. Is it?

DAN CRIPPEN: It can be but in this case I would say it's probably out of context. The number's that large over an infinite time horizon. What's most important and most immediate is that when my generations retires which will start occurring very soon and will be accomplished by 2030, we will more than double the number of retirees and disabled on these federal programs. That's much more important and much more immediate than some longer-term prospects here.

GWEN IFILL: Put the numbers in context from your point of view, Marilyn Moon.

MARILYN MOON: Well, I think it's very difficult to think into infinitely unless you're a real theorist. As a consequence I think the 75- year projections are reasonable ones to look at. Even by that time, what these projections say is that health care will be so expensive in the United States that as much as half of GDP Would be going to health care, if you put that in the context of the share that would go to Medicare. So something is going to happen before we get to that point obviously.

GWEN IFILL: Is what's going to happen going to be a gradual lack of strength, a draining of strength, or is it going to be a train wreck?

DAN CRIPPEN: Well, it's going to be neither, probably. I say that because we think of a train wreck as an immediate happening. That's not going to be the case. As I said over the next 25 years when my generation retires, we'll not only double the number of recipients but we'll go - in the context of the economy and the federal budget - about 7 percent of GDP today - to a 14 plus the drug benefit -- to 17 percent of GDP That's what we spend on the entire federal budget today. That's going to happen over a 25-year time frame so there's no precipitating event that's going to happen to us tomorrow but it's going to happen obviously within my lifetime.

GWEN IFILL: Without guessing your age, I guess it's fair to say that anybody who is around the area of 50 years old should be thinking about this.

DAN CRIPPEN: Absolutely.

GWEN IFILL: And trying to figure out what it means.

DAN CRIPPEN: As well as what it means for our kids, because they're going to be paying the bills.

GWEN IFILL: Do you think a train wreck or a gradual weakening?

MARILYN MOON: I think a gradual issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. One of the things that's important to also remember is that baby boomers are headed towards retirement but are in their earnings years right now. If we're going to ask for greater contributions, for example, now is the time to begin thinking about that as well.

GWEN IFILL: We've been hearing for years about this. We've been hearing these kinds of predictions of sooner or later, shortfall, sooner or later weakness in both Social Security and Medicare. What's fueling these shortfalls?

MARILYN MOON: Well, this time around there are a number of things that have changed. We've been close to insolvency in the Part A trust fund a number of times. In fact, we're within four years of it just in 1996.

GWEN IFILL: Remind people what Part A is.

MARILYN MOON: I should do that. Part "A" is the hospital insurance portion that's funded by payroll taxes. That insolvency date four years was put off substantially to 28 years by the changes that were enacted in 1997. So it has always been possible to kind of pull us back from the brink with changes. But this year, two things have happened. One is we're a little closer to the baby boomers retiring, which causes a problem. And secondly, the new changes that were made at the end of last year in the Medicare prescription drug bill not only changed and added prescription drugs but increased spending in a number of other areas as well.

GWEN IFILL: There's been a lot of political discussion especially in the past week about the amount that the prescription drug benefit will cost. How big a factor do you think, Dan Crippen, it is in what we're seeing in this Medicare report today?

DAN CRIPPEN: Well, the drug benefit itself is not much of a factor. As Marilyn said, what does count is some of the other pieces of the bill which added to hospital spending, not drug spending.

GWEN IFILL: What do you think is fueling the report today, all the shortfalls?

DAN CRIPPEN: The report today was fueled about half of it was due to the economy. The economy is weaker than expected. There's less employment and therefore less payroll taxes -- as Marilyn said, more expenditures due to the bill plus more expenditures over their projections.

GWEN IFILL: Tax cuts?

DAN CRIPPEN: Well, the tax cuts don't have a direct impact because they're not... they don't really affect the money that comes in to the Medicare program. But the tax cuts are important in the context of in a world of scarce resources we're going to have to decide do we want to spend money on these kinds of programs? Do we want to give dollars back to taxpayers? There's going to be a real conflict over time over this issue.

GWEN IFILL: What are the solutions that public policy experts and hopefully elected officials should be trying to wrestle with in a realistic way given that it's an election year but given this is a problem that's not going away - Dan Crippen --

DAN CRIPPEN: One I think that is very promising, Gwen, is just as in lots of other cases it's a relative handful of the sickest elderly that expend most of the resources. For example, in this case 25 percent of the elderly use about 90 percent of the Medicare dollars every year. Those folks have several conditions, multiple conditions. They get hospitalized frequently. They have many doctors and many prescriptions. If we did a much better job of managing their care not only would they have better health and health care but we would save a lot of money.

GWEN IFILL: Marilyn -

MARILYN MOON: I agree largely with what Dan is saying. In the past we've put our emphasis on saying formal managed care programs might solve the problem. But they've not been very innovative in Medicare. They haven't saved costs in Medicare. What we need to do is take a much more active look, I think, at finding ways to coordinate care for these people, to have good information on what works and what doesn't work and emphasize what works for people.

GWEN IFILL: In Medicare, should raising the eligibility age be on the table?

MARILYN MOON: It doesn't really save you very much money because those are the healthiest people. The people that are 65 and 66, for example, if you took them off the rolls, except for the folks who are disabled, you'd save about 2 percent of all of Medicare spending, so it really doesn't do very much for you and it puts those people into a broken health care system if they had to go out and buy individual health insurance. We're not really prepared to do that very well. I think there are a lot of other things we should look at before we do that.

GWEN IFILL: Social Security. The news was not as dire today as Medicare. What is your sense of where Social Security trust fund stands?

DAN CRIPPEN: The trust fund itself is, as they said, solvent to 2042. But trust funds are being accounting mechanisms. Again, you need to look at the real consequences from my point of view on the economy and the budget. In that case, the year 2013 is the important one for Social Security, which is the year that payroll taxes aren't enough to pay Social Security benefits as which point the rest of the government will have to start funding those benefits with increased taxes or more borrowing or cuts in other spending.

GWEN IFILL: Or cuts in benefits?

DAN CRIPPEN: Or cuts in benefits.

GWEN IFILL: Marilyn.

MARILYN MOON: Social Security is a much easier problem because you can make modest changes in both the benefits and perhaps on the tax side as well without really disrupting people's planning for retirement, solve that problem. It's not the case with Medicare. It's in much more serious issue.

GWEN IFILL: What about raising the retirement age?

MARILYN MOON: We are moving to raise the retirement age in Social Security. There I think it makes good sense. It works out well. It gives people incentives to stay in the labor force longer which is going to be important in the future. That could be speed up a little bit. The age of retirement is going to rise and then it takes a hiatus and then it starts to rise again. You could eliminate that hiatus period, for example, and achieve a substantial amount of savings for the program.

GWEN IFILL: You both understand the way things work in Washington, especially in very complicated, very expensive programs like this. The choices in the end boil down to cutting retirement, I mean cutting benefits or raising taxes or revenue in some way. If it were a perfect world, in your opinion, what is it that they should be doing first?

DAN CRIPPEN: I thinkas always-- and this is the Washington answer often-- but it's going to be some of both. My children can't afford the programs the way they're structured now assuming we keep government as we know it intact. At the same time there are going to be more revenues that are going to be dedicated to these programs ultimately.

GWEN IFILL: What do you think is most politically palatable or do you not want to go there?

DAN CRIPPEN: I think both will be palatable when the time comes if not before. When my generation begins retiring in earnest we're talking about 40 million more people and very few more workers. My kids are going to rebel at some point if we don't take the problem now.

MARILYN MOON: I would say one of the things we could do now is use more resources to prepare our children for being more productive in the future, improve the infrastructure that we have, highways, bridges, all of those kinds of things are investments that we could take off their plate later on. That's one thing we could do now that would help people in the future. The other is, I think we have to have a more realistic debate. People have always been seeking the magic bullet. What will save Medicare from having to face these terrible choices? The issue is, we're going to have to face those choices and we're going to have to find a fair way to share.

GWEN IFILL: Marilyn moon and Dan Crippen, thank you both very much.

MARILYN MOON: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the other major developments of the day. The 9/11 Commission reported the U.S. relied too heavily on diplomacy to get Osama bin Laden before the attacks. President Bush denied his administration was late to recognize the al-Qaida threat. And gunmen in Iraq killed 11 Iraqi police officers and recruits. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening with coverage of day two of the 9/11 hearings. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.