Weighing in on the ABC mini-series "The Path to 9/11," the former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bodine8sep08,0,7413678.story?c... target=_blank>writes ("9/11 Miniseries is Bunk") in today's Los Angeles Times:
One of the myths perpetuated by ABC played out in the steamy port city of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, using an FBI agent out of New York, John O'Neill, and the U.S. ambassador to that country. According to the mythmakers, a battle ensued between a cop obsessed with tracking down Osama bin Laden and a bureaucrat more concerned with the feelings of the host government than the fate of Americans and the realities of terrorism. I know this is false. I was there. I was the ambassador.
I am not here to either defend or attack O'Neill. He was a complex man. But what happened after Al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole was a complex story. Within hours, our embassy in Sana, Yemen, received support from Washington, U.S. military commands in the region and neighboring U.S. embassies. Within days, our presence in Aden went from zero to more than 300 people from the Navy, Marines, the intelligence community, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the FBI, the State Department and my embassy. We had a clear and common goal: honor those killed by finding those guilty.
As ambassador, I had four missions: recover the Cole and her crew; provide security for the burgeoning U.S. presence in Aden; establish a joint Yemeni-American criminal investigation, as agreed between the president of Yemen and FBI Director Louis Freeh; and maintain the Yemeni-American relationship.
These tasks were not sequential but deeply interdependent. The recovery of the ship and its crew was the most urgent. The Cole was also a crime scene, and crew members were witnesses. Recovery efforts had to be coordinated with naval investigators and the FBI. With an unsettled threat, I could not allow either to go forward without rigorous security at the harbor and at our base of operations. The least quantifiable of the four mandates was our relationship with the Yemeni authorities. Diplomatic relations are not an end in themselves but rather provide a context within which we are able to operate - or not. Our cooperative relationship enabled the recovery, the security and the investigation to move forward, to work through the tensions, disagreements and conflicts that naturally arose. The attack on the Cole was a hostile act, but this was not a hostile government or a hostile people. It was my job to make sure everyone involved understood that our actions must not subvert our goals.
The realities of a U.S. investigative style inevitably collided headlong with the limited capabilities of Yemen. The Yemenis knew Aden and its people but lacked technical and professional competence; the FBI had the forensic and technical capability but could not operate "on the street" in Aden. The friction, the suspicion, the miscommunication between the two could not, however, be allowed to derail a successful criminal investigation of the attack, its roots in Yemen and its links to other attacks against Americans around the world. Yemen's subsequent willingness to cooperate with us in the war on terrorism confirms the value of working with it - not seeing it as the enemy.
John O'Neill was no ordinary FBI agent tasked to Yemen to investigate the Cole bombing. Long before September 11, O'Neill had warned about the threat al Qaeda posed to the U.S. In late August 2001 he took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. He was killed there on September 11. PBS' Frontline aired an excellent program on O'Neill called "The Man Who Knew" in October 2003. The program focused on O'Neill's uphill battle against the U.S. government bureaucracy and also on what happened in Yemen following the USS Cole bombing. O'Neill can't defend his actions today, so here's the Yemen-related section from the Frontline http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/etc/script.html target=_blank>transcript:
