Clarke's credibility is shot. Clarke admitted that he accentuated the positive and negated the negative in 2002 because he was working for the President of the United States. The fair inference, of course, is that he is now willing to negate the positive and accentuate the negative in 2004 because he is working for himself and selling a book.
The crux of the matter is that the Bush administration preferred an aggressive elimination strategy aimed squarely at both religious terrorism in Afghanistan and secular terrorism in Iraq instead of Clarke's tentative rollback strategy against religious terrorism in Afghanistan only. Is it any surprise that Clarke was kept out of the loop and eventually demoted?
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Early August 2002
CLARKE: Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, </font><font color=red>there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.</font><font color=gray>
CLARKE: No, it came up in April and it was approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.
foxnews.com
September 19, 2002
BERGER: Now, the second question you asked -- which comes off of the "Time" magazine story, I think -- was there a plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition? I could address that.
The transition, as you will recall, was condensed by virtue of the election in November. I was very focused on using the time that we had -- I had been on the other side of a transition with General Scowcroft in 1992. But we used that time very efficiently to convey to my successor the most important information -- what was going on and what situations they faced.
Number one among those was terrorism and Al Qaida. And I told that to my successor. She has acknowledged that publicly, so I'm not violating any private conversation. We briefed them fully on what we were doing -- on what else was under consideration and what the threat was. I personally attended part of that briefing to emphasize how important that was.
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But there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect.</font><font color=gray>
cooperativeresearch.net
March 22, 2004
RICE: ...During the transition, President-elect Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda. The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals. In response to my request for a presidential initiative, the counterterrorism team, which we had held over from the Clinton administration, suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted. </font><font color=red>No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration. </font>
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