The insider
Page 3 of 4 -- ''Make it a little exciting. Take a page out of the way the 9/11 Commission wrote prose, and talk about Joe and Mary in the trailer park getting knifed on their way to Las Vegas," he said, referring to an incident in the Atlantic article that set the catastrophic chain of events in motion. ''Bring it home. Make it real, and people will read it."
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If there is a Cassandra quality to such talk of future attacks, it is worth remembering that Clarke's warnings about the menace of Al Qaeda were written off by some as hysteria in the years before Sept. 11. And when it comes to informing the public about when it should and should not feel threatened, Clarke is not the only one whose credibility is at issue.
''The administration as a user or manipulator of intelligence has really lost its credibility and the intelligence community's credibility," says Rand Beers, pointing to the trumped-up case of Iraqi WMDs and the failure, ''despite a hemorrhage of data points in the summer of 2001," to appreciate the terrorist threat prior to Sept. 11. One result has been the perception, especially in the charged atmosphere of the election campaign, that the administration's decisions about when to go public with threat assessments have been driven as much by politics as security.
''Have there been any Al Qaeda press conferences since the 5th of November?" former senator and 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey asked. ''None. How many were there leading up to the election? About one every week. My guess is that the number of threats has not gone down."
The repeated warnings, Clarke believes, have caused the country to drop its guard. He says that the fire and police chiefs whom he advises have told him that the terror alert level ''can go orange, red, yellow, polka dot," and they will not react, because they have become inured to such warnings.
And yet Clarke, who maintains many contacts inside the government, knows that some alerts are more legitimate than others. He recalled the warning early last fall of a terror attack on financial institutions, which was met with skeptical jokes by late-night talk show hosts.
''That one was actually something they probably should have believed," he said. But ''they had been so lulled by Tom Ridge's color codes and duct tape, thinking that all of these people who issue warnings are just boobs."
For all his own forthrightness, Clarke says that officials need to know when to keep their mouths shut. ''I think it's the duty of government sometimes not to share information when that information's clearly bogus," Clarke said. ''There should be some quality control. And [the Bush administration] didn't do that. That's how they lost credibility." Continued...
