Debate Grows Over Bush's Handling of Terror Threat
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By CARL HULSE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 22, 2004
POLITICAL POINTS | 3.22 7:40 AM
The accusations by Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counter terrorism specialist, that the Bush administration failed to take the threat of Al Qaeda seriously prior to Sept. 11 overtook other campaign developments Sunday and promised to reverberate this week as the Sept. 11 commission conducts a public hearing.
Administration officials moved quickly to respond to the harsh criticism by Mr. Clarke and his recounting of how top White House advisers were fixated on Iraq, issuing a detailed rebuttal that said Mr. Bush "specifically recognized the threat posed by Al Qaeda."
But Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, barely let Mr. Clarke's appearance on "60 Minutes" end before he issued a scathing statement about the administration's record on terror.
"The facts are that within six months of the first bombs falling on Afghanistan, this administration was diverting military and intelligence resources to its planned war in Iraq, which allowed Al Qaeda to regenerate," said Mr. Graham, who was one of the first lawmakers to label the war with Iraq a distraction from the fight against terror. "As the people of Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and most recently Spain have learned painfully well, this president failed to execute the real war on terrorism."
Mr. Clarke's new book was also a subject on the Sunday talk shows as lawmakers and analysts tried to interpret the implications of such critical views coming from a White House insider with access to the highest levels of the administration.
"I am much more concerned about the safety of my granddaughter in school here in Washington because of Al Qaeda than I am with ten Saddam Husseins," Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC. "And we took our eye off the ball because of a preoccupation with Iraq."
But his Democratic colleague, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, said on Fox that he saw "no basis" for the allegation that the administration was too focused on Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11. "I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric and not to go about what happened in the past so totally that we divide ourselves," he said.
The focus on Mr. Clarke's account of what he described as the president's failure on terrorism could not be welcome at the Bush campaign headquarters, where strategists had been celebrating what they saw as new success with their attacks on Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.
A furor over the president's handling of terror threatened to shift attention from the Bush campaign's efforts to keep Mr. Kerry on the defensive over tax and spending policy.
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