Bush Administration's First Memo on al-Qaeda Declassified

Bush Administration's First Memo on al-Qaeda Declassified: "In a series of recent public statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again denied that the Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of President George W. Bush with a 'comprehensive strategy' against al-Qaeda. Rice's denials were prompted by a September 22 Fox News interview with Bill Clinton in which the former president asserted that he had 'left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy' with the incoming Bush administration in January 2001. In a September 25 interview, Rice told the New York Post, 'We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida,' adding that, 'Nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11.'

The crux of the issue is a January 25, 2001, memo on al-Qaeda from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to the debate over pre-9/11 Bush administration policy on terrorism and figured prominently in the 9/11 hearings held in 2004. A declassified copy of the Clarke memo was first posted on the Web by the National Security Archive in February 2005.

Clarke's memo, described below, 'urgently' requested a high-level National Security Council review on al-Qaeda and included two attachments: a declassified December 2000 'Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects' and the September 1998 'Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida,' the so-called Delenda Plan, which remains classified."

(Via The National Security Archives.)