Former Terrorism Official Criticizes White House on 9/11
March 22, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
In a new book, Richard A. Clarke, who was counterterrorism
coordinator for President Bill Clinton and President Bush,
asserts that while neither president did enough to prevent
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has
undermined American national security by using the 9/11
attacks for political advantage and ignoring the threat of
Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq.
Mr. Clarke, who has spent more than 30 years as a civil
servant in Republican and Democratic administrations,
issues a highly critical assessment of the Bush White House
in "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,"
which is being released on Monday.
Mr. Clarke resigned from government in March 2003.
In an
interview Sunday evening, Dan Bartlett, the White House
communications director, dismissed Mr. Clarke's charges as
"politically motivated," "reckless" and "baseless."
"If Dick Clarke had such grave concerns about the direction
of the war on terror, why did he stay on the team as long
as he did, and why did he wait till the beginning of a
presidential campaign to speak out?" Mr. Bartlett said. He
said the book's timing showed that it was "more about
politics than policy."
In his book, Mr. Clarke accuses the administration not only
of failing to take Al Qaeda seriously before the attacks,
despite "repeated warnings," but also of mounting a
lackluster, bureaucratic and politicized response to the
attacks. Having failed to act against Al Qaeda before 9/11,
Mr. Clarke writes, Mr. Bush "harvested a political windfall
for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the
attacks." Mr. Clarke also accused the administration of
starting "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that
strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist
movement worldwide."
Mr. Clarke alleges in his book that Mr. Bush and others in
his small inner circle tried to intimidate him and other
officials into finding a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda
despite the intelligence community's repeated
determinations that no significant connections existed. He
also refers to Vice President Dick Cheney as a "right-wing
ideologue," who rejected facts inconsistent with the
administration's political outlook and goals.
In an interview broadcast Sunday night on the CBS News
program "60 Minutes," Stephen Hadley, the president's
deputy national security adviser, denied that anyone at the
White House had tried to intimidate Mr. Clarke into finding
a link between 9/11 and Iraq.
Mr. Clarke denied that his book was politically motivated,
saying in an interview that he had spoken up because he was
"outraged" by the "terrible job" that President Bush had
done fighting terrorism.
The book, whose manuscript was screened for classified
information by White House lawyers before its publication,
contains new allegations about steps the Bush
administration took, or failed to take, before and after
the attacks. Specifically, it asserts the following:
¶Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
gave Mr. Clarke "the impression she had never heard the
term" Al Qaeda "when she first took office." She also
downgraded the position of counterterrorism adviser soon
after taking office.
¶Less than a day after the attacks, Donald H. Rumsfeld, the
secretary of defense, said at a cabinet-level meeting that
"there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan
and that we should consider bombing Iraq" instead because
it had "better targets." A spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld said
the secretary would not comment on a book no one in the
administration had been able to read.
¶Paul D. Wolfowitz, Secretary Rumsfeld's deputy, repeatedly
"belittled" the Qaeda threat and argued after the 9/11
attacks that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 attack on
the World Trade Center and must have helped Al Qaeda carry
out 9/11 because the attack was "too sophisticated and
complicated" for a "terrorist group to have pulled off by
itself." In an interview, Charlie Cooper, Mr. Wolfowitz's
spokesman, said that Mr. Wolfowitz regarded Al Qaeda "as a
major threat to U.S. security, the more so because of the
state support it received from the Taliban and because of
its possible links to Iraq, including Iraq's harboring of
one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Abdul Rahman
Yasin."
¶As counterterrorism adviser, Mr. Clarke said he had only
three meetings with Mr. Bush before the attacks in which he
set the agenda, and was never given the "chance to talk
with him about terrorism" until after the attacks.
Mr. Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first
domestic security adviser and head of the Department of
Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own
department on grounds, accurate ones in Mr. Clarke's view,
that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with
other agencies. Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Ridge had to clear
major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the
president's chief of staff.
In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman
for the department, denied that.
Mr. Clarke's book also accuses the Clinton administration
of having done too little to fight the threat of Al Qaeda.
But he attributes this to the fact that Mr. Clinton had
been "weakened by continuing political attack" stemming
from his involvement with a White House intern and by other
scandals. |
