Ex-counterterrorism chief says Bush politicized response to 9/11
Judith Miller, New York Times
Monday, March 22, 2004
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Richard Clarke, who was counterterrorism coordinator for President Bill Clinton and President Bush, asserts in a new book that while neither president did enough to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has undermined U.S. national security by using the attacks for political advantage and ignoring the threat of al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq.
Clarke, who has spent more than 30 years as a career 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 today.
Clarke resigned from government in March 2003.
In an interview Sunday evening, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, dismissed 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?" Bartlett said. He said the book's timing showed that it was "more about politics than policy."
In his book, 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 Sept. 11, Clarke writes, Bush "harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks."
Clarke alleges in his book that Bush and others in his small inner circle tried to intimidate Clarke and other officials into finding a link between Iraq and al Qaeda despite intelligence community determinations that no significant connections existed.
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 Clarke into finding a link between Sept. 11 and Iraq.
In an opinion article published opposite the Washington Post editorial page today, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, writes: "It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his national security council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."
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