White House at war with ex-terrorism chief
msnbc.msn.com
<<...Harsh words for Rice
Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel investigating the attacks, recounted his early meeting with Rice as support for his contention the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al-Qaida.
He said that within one week of Bush’s inauguration he “urgently” sought a meeting of senior Cabinet leaders to discuss “the imminent al-Qaida threat.”
Three months later, in April 2001, Clarke met with deputy secretaries. During that meeting, he wrote, the Defense Department’s Paul Wolfowitz told Clarke, “You give bin Laden too much credit,” and he said Wolfowitz sought to steer the discussion to Iraq.
A spokesman for Wolfowitz said in a statement that the allegation that Wolfowitz dismissed the threat from al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden is false.
“He regarded al-Qaida 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, for nearly a decade,” the statement said.
Bush communications director Dan Bartlett said Clarke’s memo to Rice in January 2001 discussed recommendations to improve security at U.S. sites overseas, not inside the United States. “Each one of these, while important, wouldn’t have impacted 9/11,” he said.
Criticism about Iraq
Clarke harshly criticizes Bush personally in his book, saying his decision to invade Iraq generated broad anti-American sentiment among Arabs. He recounts that the president asked him directly almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.
“Nothing America could have done would have provided al-Qaida and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country,” Clarke wrote.
He added: “One shudders to think what additional errors (Bush) will make in the next four years to strengthen the al-Qaida follow-ons: attacking Syria or Iran, undermining the Saudi regime without a plan for a successor state?”...>> |
