Framework of Clarke's Book Is Bolstered
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By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 4, 2004
When Condoleezza Rice appears Thursday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush's national security adviser will have the administration's best opportunity to rebut her former aide's stinging critique of Bush's terrorism policy.
Since former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke charged March 24 that the Bush White House reacted slowly to warnings of a terrorist attack, his former colleagues have poked holes in parts of his narration of the early months of 2001 and have found what they say is evidence that Clarke elevated his own importance in those events.
The most sweeping challenge to Clarke's account has come from two Bush allies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Fred F. Fielding, a member of the investigative panel. They have suggested that sworn testimony Clarke gave in 2002 to a joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures was at odds with his sworn testimony last month. Frist said Clarke may have "lied under oath to the United States Congress."
But the broad outline of Clarke's criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book "Bush at War" that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.
In addition, a review of dozens of declassified citations from Clarke's 2002 testimony provides no evidence of contradiction, and White House officials familiar with the testimony agree that any differences are matters of emphasis, not fact. Indeed, the declassified 838-page report of the 2002 congressional inquiry includes many passages that appear to bolster the arguments Clarke has made.
For example, Rice and others in the administration have said that they implemented much more aggressive policies than those of Clarke and President Bill Clinton. Rice said the Bush team developed "a comprehensive strategy that would not just roll back al Qaeda -- which had been the policy of the Clinton administration -- but we needed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda."
But in 2002, Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, wrote to the joint committee that the new policy was exactly what Rice described as the old one. "The goal was to move beyond the policy of containment, criminal prosecution, and limited retaliation for specific attacks, toward attempting to 'roll back' al Qaeda."
The joint committee's declassified report, released last July, contains dozens of quotations and references to Clarke's testimony, and none appears to contradict the former White House counterterrorism chief's testimony last month. In its July 2003 report, the congressional panel cited Clark's "uncertain mandate to coordinate Bush administration policy on terrorism and specifically on bin Laden." It also said that because Bush officials did not begin their major counterterrorism policy review until April 2001, "significant slippage in counterterrorism policy may have taken place in late 2000 and early 2001."
Eleanor Hill, staff director of the House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry, said last week that she heard some of Clarke's March 24 presentation before the 9/11 commission and remembered his six-hour, closed-door appearance.
"I was there," she said of Clarke's 2002 testimony, "and without a transcript I can't have a final conclusion, but nothing jumped out at me, no contradiction" between what he said last month and his testimony almost two years ago. She also noted that Rice refused to be interviewed by the joint intelligence panel, citing executive privilege.
Repeated efforts to reach Clarke for comment last week were unsuccessful.
Administration officials have been preparing a number of points -- already known to the 9/11 commission but not to the public -- that Rice will make on Thursday; the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging Rice, said these arguments will go more directly to the heart of Clarke's criticism that the Bush administration did not take terrorism as seriously as the Clinton administration did.
In the meantime, officials have pointed to a number of what they consider misrepresentations and inconsistencies in Clarke's book and testimony. Perhaps the most important is Clarke's complaint that the Bush administration did not arm the unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft more quickly in 2001, to give it the capability to attack bin Laden.
In testimony before the 9/11 commission, Clarke said a decision to arm the predator should have been made "right away," at the start of the Bush administration. He complained about the "refusal of the administration to spin out for earlier decision things like the armed Predator." And on page 27 of his book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," Clarke quotes his deputy as complaining that the administration had not deployed "an armed Predator when it was ready."
While the commission staff has found that Clarke did agitate for the armed Predator, several Bush administration officials, reading from a memo prepared by Clarke's staff for a Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of national security principals, said the recommendation about the Predator was this: "We believe concerns about the warhead's effectiveness argue against flying armed missions this fall."
On page 237 of his book, Clarke writes about the Sept. 4 meeting. He said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, "who looked distracted throughout the session, took the [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.] Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq." Officials said Rumsfeld was not even at the meeting.
Similarly, those in the White House Situation Room with Clarke on Sept. 11, 2001, dispute some elements of his description. They say there was no audible countdown of how many minutes a "hostile aircraft" was from the White House. They say Clarke was never told by his colleague, Franklin Miller, "I'll stay here with you, if you're staying." And Miller disputes Clarke's statement, on page 7, that Miller urged Rumsfeld to take a helicopter to an alternate site. "I never spoke with Secretary Rumsfeld that day, either about him taking a helicopter or anything else," Miller said.
Administration officials also protest Clarke's assertion that, before Sept. 11, others in the Bush administration resisted his proposal that a national security directive include a call to "eliminate" al Qaeda.
With the exception of the Predator issue, Clarke's alleged misrepresentations are largely peripheral to his central argument about Bush's lack of attention to terrorism before Sept. 11. The White House believes this nevertheless suggests flaws in Clarke's overall credibility.
"The public continues to get different stories on different days depending on which Mr. Clarke they ask or read," said James R. Wilkinson, the deputy national security director for communications. "These contradictions directly undermine his overall case against the administration."
Beyond that, Bush aides and defenders have argued that Clarke's book, recent interviews and testimony are lopsided in their criticism of Bush and praise of Clinton. They say his still-classified 2002 testimony was much friendlier to Bush. Frist said Clarke was "effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush administration."
Robert G. Stevenson, spokesman for Frist, said yesterday that because the material is classified he could not discuss details of Clarke's praise for the Bush administration. But he said that on March 24, while Clarke was testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the panel is formally known, a number of staff members of the Senate intelligence committee familiar with Clarke's 2002 joint intelligence committee testimony contacted the senator's staff and said "the tone" was "quite different from 2002."
Hill, the intelligence inquiry's staff director, said she could not recall Clarke saying much about Bush or the National Security Council, because the purpose of the joint committee was to examine the intelligence community's activities before Sept. 11. "We were looking at intelligence and Clarke was quite vocal about his views of intelligence."
Clarke himself pointed out that he provided the 2002 testimony as a representative of the Bush administration. Whatever the reason, he devoted proportionately more criticism to events during the Clinton administration in his 2002 testimony. From the declassified portions, it appears that Clarke's 2002 criticism was directed at the military, the FBI and the CIA rather than at Clinton or Bush policymakers.
Clarke told the 2002 hearing exactly what he said on March 24 about the hesitancy of the CIA's Directorate of Operations to launch covert actions against terrorist groups. He said this about individuals who directed CIA covert operations in the 1970s and 1980s: "One after another of them was either fired or indicted or condemned by a Senate committee."
The result, he said, was "they institutionalized a sense [that] covert action is risky and is likely to blow up in your face." Clarke added: "I think it is changed because of 9/11. I think it is changed because [CIA Director] George Tenet has been pushing them to change it."
In his 2002 testimony, Clarke criticized both administrations for not setting clear priorities for the intelligence community. The White House, Clarke told the joint panel, "never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the intelligence community about what priorities were at the national level."
When the Clinton administration first took office, he told the panel, "the furthest thing from [its] mind in terms of the policy agenda was terrorism." That changed, he said, after the murder of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters in 1993.
Clarke criticized the CIA for failing to have adequate human sources to penetrate the terrorist networks, particularly al Qaeda. One result was that when it came to military action against bin Laden, "we never knew where he was going to be in advance, and usually we were only informed about where he was after the fact."
Clarke repeatedly cited the FBI's failure to have a domestic intelligence analysis capability before the 2001 attacks. "Their job was to do law enforcement, and they didn't have the rules that permitted them to do domestic intelligence collection," he said then.
He also was outspoken about the FBI's failure, after the thwarting of the 1999-2000 millennium attacks, to involve field offices in looking at al Qaeda and potential sleeper cells in the United States. "I got sort of blank looks of, 'What is al Qaeda?' " he said then.
In the Clinton and Bush White Houses, Clarke found that the military was hesitant to take action against bin Laden before 9/11. He said that before Sept. 11, "the military repeatedly came back with recommendations that their capability not be utilized for commando operations in Afghanistan." Clarke also criticized the pre-attack hesitancy to go after bin Laden's finances.
Clarke faulted the CIA for devoting only a small portion of its counterterrorism budget to al Qaeda, telling the joint panel that the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget asked the CIA in vain to sacrifice lower-priority programs to beef up the terrorism budget.
Even as of June 2002, according to Clarke's testimony to the congressional panel, there were still unanswered questions. The CIA, he said, was "unable to tell us what it cost to be bin Laden, what it cost to be al Qaeda, how much was their annual operating budget within some parameters, where did the money come from, where did it stay when it wasn't being used, how it was transmitted. . . . They were unable to find answers to those questions."
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