Paragraph: (Sept11-reports/oanc-chapter-6-31.txt)
Sent 1: In March 2001, Rice asked the CIA to prepare a new series of authorities for covert action in Afghanistan.
Sent 2: Rice's recollection was that the idea had come from Clarke and the NSC senior director for intelligence, Mary McCarthy, and had been linked to the proposal for aid to the Northern Alliance and the Uzbeks.
Sent 3: Rice described the draft document as providing for "consolidation plus," superseding the various Clinton administration documents.
Sent 4: In fact, the CIA drafted two documents.
Sent 5: One was a finding that did concern aid to opponents of the Taliban regime; the other was a draft Memorandum of Notification, which included more open-ended language authorizing possible lethal action in a variety of situations.
Sent 6: Tenet delivered both to Hadley on March 28.
Sent 7: The CIA's notes for Tenet advised him that "in response to the NSC request for drafts that will help the policymakers review their options, each of the documents has been crafted to provide the Agency with the broadest possible discretion permissible under the law."
Sent 8: At the meeting, Tenet argued for deciding on a policy before deciding on the legal authorities to implement it.
Sent 9: Hadley accepted this argument, and the draft MON was put on hold.
Sent 10: As the policy review moved forward, the planned covert action program for Afghanistan was included in the draft presidential directive, as part of an "Annex A" on intelligence activities to "eliminate the al Qaeda threat."
Sent 11: The main debate during the summer of 2001 concentrated on the one new mechanism for a lethal attack on Bin Laden-an armed version of the Predator drone.
Sent 12: In the first months of the new administration, questions concerning the Predator became more and more a central focus of dispute.
Sent 13: Clarke favored resuming Predator flights over Afghanistan as soon as weather permitted, hoping that they still might provide the elusive "actionable intelligence" to target Bin Laden with cruise missiles.
Sent 14: Learning that the Air Force was thinking of equipping Predators with warheads, Clarke became even more enthusiastic about redeployment.
Sent 15: The CTC chief, Cofer Black, argued against deploying the Predator for reconnaissance purposes.
Sent 16: He recalled that theTaliban had spotted a Predator in the fall of 2000 and scrambled their MiG fighters.
Sent 17: Black wanted to wait until the armed version was ready.
Sent 18: "I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN," he wrote.