Clarke Urges Terrorism Testimony to Be Made Public

[IJ Reilly]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke on Sunday called on the White House to make public his own testimony to Congress as well as other statements, e-mails and documents about how the Bush administration handled the threat of terror.

Clarke, center of a firestorm over the level of engagement of President Bush (news - web sites) in the issue before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was responding to Republican allegations that his earlier testimony to Congress contradicted statements he made last week that criticized Bush.

"I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, slamming Clarke on Friday, called for declassifying Clarke's July 2002 testimony to a joint hearing by the Senate and House of Representatives Intelligence committees.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said Clarke's words then, when, as a member of Bush administration he defended its policies, conflicted with last week's sworn public testimony before the bipartisan commission investigating the attacks, known popularly as the 9/11 Commission.

Clarke said he supported having that testimony declassified and also wanted testimony given in private to the commission by Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) made public.

He said he wanted everything out in the open. "The White House is selectively now finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed were covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press.

"Let's take all of my e-mails and all of the memos that I sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20th to September 11th, and let's declassify all of it," he said.

"The (9-11) victims' families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said," Clarke said. Rice has been criticized for appearing extensively on television but not in public before the panel.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=1&u=/nm/20040328/pl_nm/security_rice_clarke_dc

[zimv20]

i'm in the middle of reading this August 2002 Times article (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,333835,00.html) that details Clarke's struggle in 2001 to get the bush administration to take his plans seriously.


For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so meant delay.

Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.

[Sayhey]

It is amazing how the attack dogs of this administration are frothing at the mouth about Clarke. However, in the final analysis it doesn't matter if Richard Clarke said one thing at one moment and another latter on. Personally, I can't give much credibility to the various White House and GOP Congressional critics who are on overdrive in their contradictory statements, but none of it deals with the substance of Clarke's criticism. In his interview on Meet The Press (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4608698/), he has this to say,

MR. RUSSERT:* Why do you think the Iraq war has undermined the war on terrorism?

MR. CLARKE:* Well, I think it's obvious, but there are three major reasons. Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism?* We're fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us.* Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, "Wait a minute.* Maybe we've gone too far here.* Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed," and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we've inflamed the ideology.* We've played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others.* We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do.

Ninety percent of the Islamic people in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, allied countries to the United States--90 percent in polls taken last month hate the United States.* It's very hard when that's the game where 90 percent of the Arab people hate us.* It's very hard for us to win the battle of ideas.* We can arrest them.* We can kill them.* But as Don Rumsfeld said in the memo that leaked from the Pentagon, I'm afraid that they're generating more ideological radicals against us than we are arresting them and killing them.* They're producing more faster than we are.

The president of Egypt said, "If you invade Iraq, you will create a hundred bin Ladens."* He lives in the Arab world.* He knows.* It's turned out to be true.* It is now much more difficult for us to win the battle of ideas as well as arresting and killing them, and we're going to face a second generation of al-Qaeda. *We're going to catch bin Laden.* I have no doubt about that.* In the next few months, he'll be found dead or alive.* But it's two years too late because during those two years, al-Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization, independent cells like the organization that did the attack in Madrid.

And that's the second reason.* The attack in Madrid showed the vulnerabilities of the rails in Spain.* We have all sorts of vulnerabilities in our country, chemical plants, railroads.* We've done a very good job on passenger aircraft now, but there are all these other vulnerabilities that require enormous amount of money to reduce those vulnerabilities, and we're not doing that.

MR. RUSSERT:* And three?

MR. CLARKE:* And three is that we actually diverted military resources and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and from the hunt for bin Laden to the war in Iraq.

It is these kind of critiques that must be answered, not if Clarke is making too much money from the sale of his book or if he spun things in the past to make Bush look good.

[zimv20]

It is these kind of critiques that must be answered, not if Clarke is making too much money from the sale of his book or if he spun things in the past to make Bush look good.
imo, that bush's approval rating is above 10% is indicative of the fact that such tactics work

[IJ Reilly]

I think the key is right here:

Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat.

Bush ran as the anti-Clinton, which is why during the 2000 campaign he made absolutist statements in opposition to nation-building. He eventually had to disown them because they never made much sense beyond domestic political strategy. He also walked away from the Middle East peace process because it was a "Clinton thing." If ever the limits of political gamesmanship driven by ideology was apparent, it is here and now.

[mactastic]

Unfortunately, character assasination seems to work. First impressions and all that. Team Bush is proving quite adept at smearing those who have previously served them but provided inconvienient information. Loyalty is regarded higher than the truth it seems.

[Sayhey]

mac and zim,

I agree that these tactics do work to blind people to reality. They may even be successful in getting Bush reelected. I hope not and the shrill character of them makes me think they are not working. More importantly they won't deal with the problems caused by the invasion of Iraq that Clarke raises and they won't lead us to any kind of solution to the causes of terrorism in the Islamic world.