Part 1
Richard Clarke terrorizes the White House
In a provocative Salon interview, the former terrorism czar fires back at the Bush administration, blasting its "big lie" strategy and "attack dog" Dick Cheney.
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By Joe Conason
salon.com
March 24, 2004 | NEW YORK -- After more than 30 years of dedicated service, including stints as the National Security Council's counterterrorism chief under Presidents Clinton and Bush, Richard A. Clarke has delivered a scathing assessment of Bush administration policy and personnel in his new memoir, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror." Clarke portrays the president and his top aides as arrogant, insular and uninformed about the changed world they faced when they entered the White House in January 2001. They did little about the growing peril from al-Qaida, despite urgent briefings from the outgoing Clinton national security team, and remained willfully ignorant despite repeated, even obsessive warnings from Clarke and CIA director George Tenet.
For almost nine months, according to Clarke, he sought approval from top Bush officials for an aggressive strategy against Osama bin Laden. Clarke writes that he could not convince National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to schedule meetings to advance an action plan against al-Qaida. Instead, George W. Bush and his most powerful officials -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- pursued an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. When the Sept. 11 attacks took place, their first instinct was to bomb Iraq -- even though Clarke and other experts had long assured them that there was no intelligence connecting Iraq to any recent acts of terrorism against the United States. On Sept. 12, Bush pulled Clarke aside to demand that he search for evidence of Saddam's involvement, which never existed.
Since Clarke's debut on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, administration officials have been bombarding him with personal calumny and abuse. They have called him an embittered job-seeker, a publicity-seeking author, a fabricator, a Democratic partisan and, perhaps worst of all, a friend of a friend of John Kerry. On Tuesday Bush himself responded to Clarke's charges, insisting "had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on 9/11, we would have acted."
Clarke, an expert on surprise attacks, is not shocked by the ferocity of the White House response. During an interview with Salon on Tuesday, on the eve of his scheduled public testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission), Clarke blasted Cheney as an "attack dog" and described the administration's attacks on his credibility as another example of the "big lie" strategy it has pursued since winning the White House. While he is critical of all four of the presidents he served, Clarke draws sharp contrasts between the records of the Clinton and Bush administrations. He compares Clinton's understanding of terrorism as the most significant threat to U.S. and international security and his efforts to combat it to the neglect and illusions of Bush.
You said on "60 Minutes" that you expected "their dogs" to be set on you when your book was published, but did you think that the attacks would be so personal?
Oh yeah, absolutely, for two reasons. For one, the Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset. That's the first reason. But the second reason is that I think they're trying to bait me -- and people who agree with me -- into talking about all the trivial little things that they are raising, rather than talking about the big issues in the book.
Why did you write the book now? That's a question they raise. Did it occur to you that this would be an election year and it would be especially controversial because of that, and that these commission hearings were coming up?
I wanted the book to come out much earlier, but the White House has a policy of reviewing the text of all books written by former White House personnel -- to review them for security reasons. And they actually took a very long time to do that. This book could have come out much earlier. It's the White House that decided when it would be published, not me. I turned it in toward the end of last year, and even though there was nothing in it that was not already obviously unclassified, they took a very, very long time.
Were you seeking to make a political impact, in the way that the White House spokesmen have accused you of trying to do?
I was seeking to create a debate about how we should have, in the past, and how we should, in the future, deal with the war on terrorism. When they say it's an election year, and therefore you're creating not just a debate but a political debate, what are they suggesting? That I should have waited until November to publish it, waited until after the election? I don't see why we have to delay that debate, just because there's an election.
Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that you were not "in the loop," and that you're angry because you were passed over by Condi Rice for greater authority. And in fact you were dropped from Cabinet-level position to something less than that. How do you respond to what the Vice President said?
The vice president is becoming an attack dog, on a personal level, which should be beneath him but evidently is not.
I was in the same meetings that Dick Cheney was in, during the days after 9/11. Condi Rice and Dick Cheney appointed me as co-chairman of the interagency committee called the "Campaign Committee" -- the "campaign" being the war on terrorism. So I was co-chairing the interagency process to fight the war on terrorism after 9/11. I don't think I was "out of the loop." |
