Clinton the Anti-Terrorist: Ah, 'the permanent campaign'.

Saxby Chambliss is a little perplexed. The Republican congressman from Georgia is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security and a key player in the congressional investigation into the roots of the September 11 attacks. He knows a lot about the subject. Yet it was not until he read a recent issue of Time magazine that he learned that in late 2000 the Clinton administration came up with a new, aggressive, wide-ranging plan to topple the al-Qaeda terrorist network. In an article headlined "Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?" Time reported that top Clinton officials handed the plan to the incoming Bush administration, but, tragically, the Bush team chose not to act until it was too late. The heroes of the article were Richard Clarke, a top anti-terrorism aide who is said to have put together the plan, and Samuel Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, who is portrayed as a tough-talking hardliner on terrorism.

And that's what has Chambliss perplexed. "I've had Dick Clarke testify before our committee several times, and we've invited Samuel Berger several times," Chambliss says, "and this is the first I've ever heard of that plan." If it was such a big deal, Chambliss wonders, why didn't anyone mention it?

Sources at the White House are just as baffled. In public, they've been careful not to pick fights with the previous administration over the terrorism issue. But privately, they say the Time report was way off base. "There was no new plan to topple al-Qaeda," one source says flatly. "No new plan." When asked if there was, perhaps, an old plan to topple al-Qaeda, which might have been confused in the story, the source says simply, "No."

The Time article, which was the work of a team of 15 reporters, said that after the October 12, 2000, attack that killed 17 American sailors on board the USS Cole, Clarke began work on "an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda." Clarke reportedly wanted to break up al-Qaeda cells, cut off their funding, destroy their sanctuaries, and give major support to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. In addition, Time reported, "the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan." It was, in the words of a senior Bush administration official quoted by Time, "everything we've done since 9/11."

According to the magazine, Clarke presented the plan to Berger on December 20, 2000, but Berger decided not to act on it. "We would be handing [the Bush administration] a war when they took office," an unnamed former Clinton aide told Time. "That wasn't going to happen." Instead, Berger urged his successor, Condoleezza Rice, to take action. To the Clinton team's dismay, the Bush White House did not come up with its own finished plan against al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

On its face, the story was a sensational indictment of the Bush administration's response to terrorism. But if the president's critics hoped it would inflict political damage on the Bush White House, it has instead had the opposite effect, backfiring on Clinton's defenders and causing them to back away from the story's main conclusion.

Indeed, even a cursory look at the Clinton administration's record on terrorism raises questions about the article's premise. For example: If there was indeed such a plan, why did the Clinton team wait so long to come up with it?