Ex-Bush Aide Disrobes the Emperor
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By Jim Spencer
The Denver Post
Thursday 25 March 2004
truthout.org
It wasn't exactly John Dean and Watergate. But the 2 1/2 hours Richard Clarke spent Wednesday before a commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks could help determine the 2004 presidential race.
George W. Bush has cloaked himself in the war on terrorism to win re-election.
Clarke, a national security expert who served three Republican presidents and one Democrat, says the emperor's new clothes are an illusion.
On Wednesday, Clarke told the 9/11 commission that he warned the Bush administration in January 2001 about critical threats posed by al-Qaeda terrorists. He said he proposed actions to address those threats.
Clarke, former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, said Bush officials shunted his concerns to deputies. He said high-level discussions of al-Qaeda risks didn't take place until Sept. 4, 2001. A week later, terrorists hijacked jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Clarke prefaced his testimony Wednesday with an apology to 9/11 victims and families.
"Those entrusted with protecting you failed you," he said. "And I failed you. ... I would ask for your understanding and forgiveness."
Even Clarke isn't sure anything could have prevented an eventual al-Qaeda-driven disaster. But he insists that George W. Bush's White House didn't make terrorism enough of a priority before Sept. 11, 2001.
And once the 9/11 damage was done, Clarke said, the president and his senior advisers insisted on attacking Saddam Hussein, rather than trying to destroy al-Qaeda.
"By invading Iraq," Clarke contended, "the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
Clarke retired in frustration over the administration's approach to terrorism. His critique strikes the heart of Bush's re-election plan. The president was going to run on his success in the war on terror.
To do that now, Bush must discredit a respected White House adviser who worked not only for him, but also for his father and Ronald Reagan.
The Bush boo-birds are out in force. On Tuesday, the White House took the unusual step of releasing Clarke's resignation letter to show how Clarke praised the president when he quit his job. On Wednesday, Fox News took the even more unusual step of releasing a transcript of a supposedly confidential background briefing Clarke gave reporters in August 2002. In the briefing, Clarke emphasized the Bush administration's efforts to fight terrorism.
Clarke said the White House asked him to talk after Time magazine criticized the president's anti-terrorism efforts before 9/11.
Clarke said he put the best face he could on an "embarrassing" situation.
"You understand the freedom one has to speak while representing an administration," Clarke told commission member Fred Fielding, who was White House counsel to Reagan.
Another Republican commission member, John Lehman, secretary of the Navy under Reagan, said Clarke had a "credibility problem" because Clarke just published a book.
Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," says Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq within days of Sept. 11.
"Iraq," he writes, "was portrayed as the most dangerous thing in national security. It was ... a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail."
Lehman called Clarke's book a "devastating attack" on the latest President Bush, something that made Clarke seem partisan.
Clarke replied that the last time he had to declare a party affiliation, he asked for a Republican ballot.
Clarke admitted that he currently teaches a college class with another former Bush White House colleague, Randy Beers. Beers now supports Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Clarke acknowledged.
"I'm not going to dissociate myself from a friend," Clarke said.
But while under oath Wednesday, he swore never to accept any job with the Kerry administration, should there even be one.
This was not enough for former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, another Republican on the commission. Thompson lit into Clarke. He suggested that Clarke either lied to reporters in the August 2002 briefing or lied in his book. Thompson accused Clarke of a double standard of "candor and morality."
"It's not a question of morality at all," Clarke replied. "It's a question of politics."
Presidential politics, to be precise.
On Monday, Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, tried to dismiss the furor as "Dick Clarke's American grandstand."
It was a clever turn of phrase. But nobody should be laughing this off.
Dick Clarke's American grandstand overlooks 3,000 bodies in New York and D.C. It hovers above 560 American soldiers and 10,000 Iraqis.
Dick Clarke's American grandstand isn't about pop music.
It's about life and death.
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