Richard Clarke has been making the rounds quite a bit since Sunday’s 60 Minutes, but since I’m partial to print interviews, I found his discussion with Salon’s Joe Conason particularly helpful.
The interview touches on all the major areas of controversy, as you’d expect. But the one thing that jumped out at me was just how offended Clarke seems to be by all the Bush White House attacks on him.
Clarke certainly expected the smear machine to target him; he acknowledged as much on Sunday. But from reading his remarks to Conason, one gets the impression that he didn’t expect Bush and his lackeys to be so terribly dishonest. Clarke, in a word, sounds outraged.
Conason: Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that you were not “in the loop,” and that you’re angry because you were passed over by Condi Rice for greater authority. And in fact you were dropped from Cabinet-level position to something less than that. How do you respond to what the Vice President said?
Clarke: The vice president is becoming an attack dog, on a personal level, which should be beneath him but evidently is not.
I was in the same meetings that Dick Cheney was in, during the days after 9/11. Condi Rice and Dick Cheney appointed me as co-chairman of the interagency committee called the “Campaign Committee” — the “campaign” being the war on terrorism. So I was co-chairing the interagency process to fight the war on terrorism after 9/11. I don’t think I was “out of the loop.”
Conason: The vice president commented that there was “no great success in dealing with terrorists” during the 1990s, when you were serving under President Clinton. He asked, “What were they doing?”
Clarke: It’s possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn’t know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn’t notice.
If the White House was hoping to use overwhelming rhetorical force to intimidate Clarke and push him into submission, their hopes were clearly misguided. Clarke isn’t demoralized; he’s angry.
Clarke also had a terrific response to the “Beers question.”
Conason: Were you concerned about your friendship with Rand Beers being used, as it is now, to suggest that you did this in order to help John Kerry in his presidential campaign?
Clarke: This is the most interesting charge against me — that I am a friend of Rand Beers, as if that’s some terrible thing. Who is Rand Beers? Until a year ago, he was someone who was working for George Bush in the White House. He worked for George Bush’s father in the White House. He worked for Ronald Reagan in the White House. But now it’s a terrible thing to be a friend of Rand Beers? He and I have been friends for 25 years. I’m not going to disown him because he’s working for John Kerry. He’s my friend, he’s going to stay my friend, we teach a course together [at Harvard]. He works for John Kerry. I don’t.
Over to you, Mr. Rove.