Ex-general defends fuel stops in Yemen

By Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 20, 2000

WASHINGTON -- The former Marine general who arranged for U.S. warships to refuel in Yemen defended his decision Thursday before a Senate panel, saying all ports in the region are "rats' nests ... for terrorists."

In the first hearing on last week's terrorist attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Yemeni coast is a "sieve" for terrorists and that its port at Aden is the best of many undesirable locations to refuel.

Zinni headed the U.S. Central Command, headquartered in Tampa, in 1998, when the contract to refuel Navy ships at Aden was negotiated. He said some previously scheduled refueling stops there had been canceled because of terrorist threats.

But he said a U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf must be maintained to protect the economy in a region that produces more than half the world's oil. And he personally took responsibility for the decision to refuel at Aden, although he said it had been made in consultation with security and intelligence officials.

"I pass that buck on to nobody," Zinni said. "The threat conditions in Aden were better than elsewhere. ... Sudan? Obviously not. Saudi Arabia? Back in 1997, when we were making this decision, we had just had two bombings in Saudi Arabia. We lost 24 people."

On Oct. 12, a small boat carrying powerful explosives blew a hole in the USS Cole as it refueled in Aden harbor, killing 17 sailors and injuring three dozen others.

Although the State Department recently reported that Yemen remains a haven for terrorists, Zinni said he is convinced the Yemeni government wants to work with the United States to combat terrorism. He said he had not compromised security considerations in a bid to improve relations with Yemen and argued that it's important to cooperate with Yemen so it doesn't become a problem for the United States like Afghanistan, where Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, a prime suspect in the attack, is sheltered.

But Sen. John Warner, R.-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: "The one question I keep hearing from the families of the crew of the USS Cole is "Why Yemen? Why Yemen, when there are continuing State Department travel warnings in effect for that country? Why Yemen, when the annual State Department report on global terrorism, issued in April 2000, stated that the (Yemeni) government's inability to exercise authority over remote areas of the country continued to make the country a safe haven for terrorist groups?' "

In response, Zinni said that reductions in the size of the Navy's fleet had led to a major decrease in the number of oil tankers that could be used to refuel at sea. "Ten years ago, we did all refueling at sea," he said. But he also noted it is impossible for Navy ships in the region not to head into port occasionally to refuel, make repairs and replenish supplies.

Zinni met with skepticism from some members of the Senate panel, who asked why better security arrangements weren't made for the Cole and sought suggestions for improvements in protection of military personnel abroad.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said intelligence information showed that refueling in Yemen posed enormous risk, data that wasn't used properly in the decision to refuel at Aden.

"I have a chart here that's unclassified," Roberts said. "This is a summary of the threat level. ... If you look at orange, you see Yemen, and it is very high. And you look at Djibouti, and it is green; it is very low. That threat assessment is about two inches thick, with a lot of red flags in it, for over a year. Those are the questions that ... we have to answer as to why this information was not provided in the proper way to the proper people in regard to the USS Cole."

But Zinni said the threat assessment Roberts displayed was simply a measure of risk at a given moment.

"That's a snapshot in time," Zinni said. "Those threat levels go up and down. ... Aden never had a specific terrorist threat."

Even if all Navy warships were refueled by oil tankers at sea, determined terrorists would find other ways to attack, Zinni said.

And he warned that the U.S. military is woefully unprepared to deal with weapons of mass destruction that are far more lethal than the explosives used on the Cole.

"We will eventually see a weapon of mass destruction used in a terrorist act," Zinni said. "And I would just say that we had better start thinking about how we're going to be prepared for that."

Also Thursday:

Knight-Ridder Newspapers, citing a U.S. official monitoring the case, reported that a radical group that operates from Afghanistan and has close ties to bin Laden is the leading suspect in the Cole attack.

The group, al-Jihad, was once based in Egypt and its leader, Ayman Zawahri, is considered the top lieutenant of bin Laden, the Saudi dissident accused of waging a global anti-American terrorism campaign from exile in Afghanistan.

Zawahri, who is under death sentence in Egypt for terrorism and is thought to be with bin Laden in Afghanistan, has repeatedly threatened to retaliate against the United States for jailing Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in the 1994 bombing of New York's World Trade Center. The sheikh is the spiritual leader of al-Jihad.

A 12-year-old Yemeni boy has told investigators that a man paid him to watch his car, then took to sea in a small boat and never returned, providing a key early lead in their search for clues about what happened to the Cole.

The Navy announced Thursday that it recovered the last four bodies of sailors killed in the blast. Thirteen bodies already had been flown to the United States.

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