By now, surely everyone who cares about such things has seen, read, or heard all about Richard Clarke’s new book and interview on last night’s 60 Minutes.
From where I sat, Clarke’s perspective was devastating. Here we have President Bush’s top anti-terrorism advisor at the NSC coming forward to explain that all of our worst fears about the Bush White House’s so-called “war on terror” are true. The administration didn’t take the terrorist threat seriously, it was set on “regime change” in Iraq from the beginning, and al Queda was always an afterthought.
For me, it was effectively the part of the courtroom thriller when the unimpeachable surprise witness comes forward to rebuke the defendant and blow the defense’s case away. The accused slumps in his chair, the jury looks on with indignation, and murmurs of shock and disappointment echo through the spectators.
Point by point, Clarke demonstrated that he has the goods on the White House.
On the administration’s interest in counter-terrorism before 9/11:
Clarke … criticized President Bush for promoting the administration’s efforts against terrorism, accusing top Bush advisers of turning a blind eye to terrorism during the first months of Bush’s presidency.
The Associated Press first reported in June 2002 that Bush’s national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions.
“We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.”
“I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.”
By June 2001, there still hadn’t been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.
On the president’s disinterest in al Queda immediately after 9/11:
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism advisor to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn’t seem to be one.
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”
Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.'”
On Rumsfeld:
After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
On Rice:
[Clarke] said he wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Jan. 24, 2001, asking “urgently” for a Cabinet-level meeting “to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack.” Months later, in April, Clarke met with departmental deputy secretaries, and the conversation turned to Iraq.
On Wolfowitz:
Clarke relates, “I began saying, ‘We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.’ Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, ‘No, no, no. We don’t have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.’
“And I said, ‘Paul, there hasn’t been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!’ And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, ‘Isn’t that right?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.”
Clarke went on to add, “There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever.”
On Bush’s campaign rhetoric:
“Frankly,” he said, “I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We’ll never know.”
Clarke went on to say, “I think he’s done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.”
On administration claims tying Hussein to al Queda:
“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection” between Iraq and the al-Qaeda attacks in the United States, Clarke said in an interview segment that CBS broadcast Friday evening. “There’s just no connection. There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda.”
I can appreciate that all of these facts have been reported, one way or another, over the last year. The significance of Clarke’s charges, of course, is his unique position within the administration, which lends his charges enormous credibility.
When Michael Moore says Bush ignored the terrorist threat and has had a dispassionate disinterest in al Queda, we can all nod in agreement, knowing that Moore is probably the wrong messenger for the right message.
But when the top counter-terrorism official at the National Security Council — a man who has worked for every president since Reagan — comes forward with a sweeping condemnation of the Bush White House and its approach to fighting terrorists, it warrants attention.
Get ready for the ferocious GOP smear machine to target Clarke in a very big way.