Seeing Red
A top counterterrorism veteran puts the Bush White House on the defensive over 9/11 and the decision to invade Iraq
The ferocity of the White House attack prompted comedian Jon Stewart's Daily Show to cover the controversy under the logo "Belittle Richard." But the man the White House had relied on to run the Situation Room immediately after the 9/11 attacks blithely ignored his administration critics. And the attacks on him angered not only Clarke's former colleagues, who leapt to his defense, but also many officials who work on counterterrorism throughout the government. "The personal attacks are inappropriate and uncalled for and way off the mark," fumed a White House aide. Clarke emerged from the tumultuous week as confident as ever. "I don't think they touched me," he told U.S. News. "They still haven't responded to the substance of what I've said."
The White House was most worried about Clarke's assertions that the Bush administration was not urgently addressing the al Qaeda threat during its first eight months in office, focusing instead on other priorities, like missile defense. Clarke had urged stepped-up actions against al Qaeda from the first days Bush was in office, he testified. But the first meeting on terrorism of the Principals Committee, which includes Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, didn't occur until just a week before the terrorist attacks. The White House retorted that it was working on a complete overhaul of the policy, a necessarily lengthy process. Reports by the 9/11 commission staff track closely with Clarke's account of the period and point out that the plan eventually adopted closely resembled Clarke's January proposals. The commission also notes that two veteran officers of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center were so frustrated by the slow pace of policymaking in the summer of 2001 that they considered resigning and going public, which would have been a shocking breach of protocol.
"Battle stations." The summer of 2001 was a frustrating time for Clarke because the CIA was more worried about potentially catastrophic al Qaeda attacks than it had ever been. Clarke compares that period to the run-up to the millennium, when the Clinton administration went on high alert. At the time, Clinton personally became involved and ordered the CIA and FBI directors to come to the White House almost daily and share all kinds of intelligence information. "That did not happen obviously in the summer of 2001, even though the warnings should have justified it," Clarke said, adding that the CIA had identified two future 9/11 hijackers already in the United States as being al Qaeda members but failed to pass the information on to the FBI. "If we had used millennium-era procedures with cabinet-level involvement, that information could have been shaken loose, and it could have included information on those two hijackers." Bush aides retort that they were at "battle stations" and that Clarke had not complained at the time.
Even though Iraq was slightly beyond the scope of the commission, much of Clarke's anger was prompted by Bush's decision to go to war there, despite little evidence of a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "Dick is speaking for a silent majority in the government: the counterterrorism professionals, the nonpartisans, who are absolutely appalled at how the administration went after Iraq at the expense of destroying al Qaeda," says Roger Cressey, his former deputy in the White House counterterrorism office and now his business partner. Clarke says the Iraq war pulled scarce intelligence assets like translators, special operations forces, and Predator drones away from the effort to crush al Qaeda in Afghanistan. "After 10 years of working at it, he thought we were finally going after al Qaeda--that we would be relentless and pound every last one of them," says a senior administration official. "And he's so frustrated now that our power has been diffused, rather than focused on what's the real threat."
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