Sept. 11, Lies and 'Mistakes'
washingtonpost.com
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A23
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It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.
The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned.
For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and
in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke
admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the
terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor
belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out
around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now
we have to hunt [them] down country by country."
What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke
answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary.
Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their
infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in
retrospect I wish had happened."
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It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was
the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism
official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his
advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue
was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why
didn't he resign in protest?
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Clinton had one justification after another for going on the offensive: American blood spilled in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the embassy bombings of 1998, the undeniable act of war in the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Response: A single, transparently useless, cruise missile attack on empty Afghan tents, plus a (mistaken!) attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
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As Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen testified,
three times the CIA was ready with plans to assassinate
Osama bin Laden. Every time, Clinton stood them down,
because "we're not quite sure."
We're not quite sure -- a fitting epitaph for the Clinton
anti-terrorism policy. They were also not quite sure about
taking bin Laden when Sudan offered him up on a silver
platter in 1996. The Clinton people turned Sudan down,
citing legal reasons.
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The "Frontline" interviewer asked Clarke whether failing to blow up the camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a "pretty basic mistake."
Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."
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This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke
of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this
week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under
oath that "fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al
Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high
priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there
was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.
Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan
perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his
top national security priority, but he refuses even to
call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in
putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al
Qaeda.
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Clarke gives Clinton a pass and instead concentrates his
ire on Bush. For what? For not having preemptively
attacked Afghanistan? On what grounds -- increased
terrorist chatter in June and July 2001?
Look. George W. Bush did not distinguish himself on terrorism in the first eight months of his presidency. Whatever his failings, however, they pale in comparison to those of his predecessor.
Clinton was in office eight years, not eight months. As
Clarke himself said in a 2002 National Security Council
briefing, the Clinton administration never made a plan for
dealing with al Qaeda and never left one behind for the
Bush administration.
Clarke says he pushed very hard for such critical anti-al-
Qaeda measures as aid to and cooperation with Pakistan,
Uzbekistan and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. By his own
testimony, the Clinton administration then spent more than
two years -- October 1998 to December 2000, the very time
the Sept. 11 plot was hatched -- fruitlessly debating this
and doing absolutely nothing.
Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself.
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