White House targets its former terrorism chief
Rebuts claims, launches attack on his credibility
WASHINGTON -- The White House launched a full-scale assault on its former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, yesterday, questioning his credibility and dismissing his accusations that senior Bush officials could have done more to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"He wasn't in the loop, frankly," Vice President Dick Cheney said of Clarke on conservative Rush Limbaugh's national radio show.
The fallout from the release of Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies" -- coupled with scheduled testimony this week by top Clinton officials before the federal Sept. 11 commission -- has thrust into the political spotlight the issue of whether the Bush administration did all it could to prevent the attacks.
The aggressive rebuttal yesterday indicated Bush is determined to use national security as his campaign centerpiece, despite the mounting allegations that he is politicizing the sensitive subject and the potential for more criticism of his terrorism policies to emerge. Earlier this month, the Bush campaign drew fire from some relatives of terror victims by using Ground Zero footage in an advertisement.
An unusual number of senior Bush aides emerged yesterday to knock down both Clarke and his allegations. In addition to Cheney's interview with Limbaugh, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and communications director Dan Bartlett joined White House press secretary Scott McClellan in the daylong public relations blitz -- accusing Clarke of being motivated by partisanship and revenge after being demoted by the Bush team.
"Why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?" McClellan told reporters at the White House. "He is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book, and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly, let's look at the politics of it; his best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy adviser to Senator [John F.] Kerry's campaign."
Clarke was unavailable for comment, but has said he was a registered Republican until 2000 and is not motivated by partisan politics.
Cheney, however, said the tough counterattack on Clarke was justified.
"This may be the most important presidential election in many years because of the issues that are going to be decided here, especially with respect to how we defend the country in this war on terror," Cheney said. "And it's very important we get our side of the story out."
The Bush administraton is likely to remain on the defensive as the week wears on, with former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright,former defense secretary William S. Cohen, and former national security adviser Samuel L. Berger scheduled to testify before the panel probing the intelligence failures leading up to Sept. 11.
On top of whatever damaging testimony the Clinton administration officials may give, Bush is fighting ongoing allegations that he snubbed the commission by initially agreeing to testify for only one hour. He has since offered more of his time, but has not authorized Rice to testify publicly about his briefings on the Al Qaeda threat in the days before the attacks.
Though Clarke contends his memoir of the struggle against terrorism is nonpartisan, he takes a thinly-veiled shot at Bush's decision to invade Iraq in the preface. Fighting terrorism, he writes, "should be our first calling, not unnecessary wars to test personal theories or expiate personal guilt or revenge."
Still, Clarke's assertion that Bush was focused on Iraq rather than Al Qaeda and wanted to strike Baghdad right after the attacks echoes a similar contention by former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who published his own account and faced similar retaliation from the White House.
"It creates problems for the administration in two respects," a former senior National Security Council official said on the condition of anonymity. "It reinforces a lot of other evidence that they intended to get Iraq from the get-go -- O'Neill's book, the 16 words about Niger, how they used the intelligence. There was a mindset here that `We are going to do Iraq.'
"I think it reinfoces the notion that this war was not fought to stop the terror threat; this was a preconceived objective."
So far, Clarke has about 15 to 20 hours of testimony to the commission, according to panel member Jamie Gorelick. Also expected to testify this week are Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, CIA Director George J. Tenet, and Undersecretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who will speak on Rice's behalf.
"We are doing our best to ignore the political swirl," Gorelick said. "Within the commission, we are not politicized and are operating very collegially with an eye on the truth. We have a nonpartisan staff for the most part. We have our heads down and are focused."
Clarke was the nation's crisis manager on Sept. 11 and received high marks for coordinating the federal response to the terrorist attacks. The book recounts his three decades in government service, including stints in counterterrorism posts in the Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush administrations.
Clarke reserves his most scathing criticism for the current administration. He accuses the White House of downplaying the Al Qaeda threat in the administration's first nine months and failing to take on the network aggressively enough after the attacks.
By contrast, he defends the Clinton administration's inability to stem the tide of terrorism on the grounds that Clinton was weakened by political scandal and could not get the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI to address the threat.
As Republicans were quick to point out, Clarke was promoted in the Clinton administration, then moved over to the cyberterrorism unit by the current Bush administration after Sept. 11, a lesser position than he had hoped for. He resigned soon afterward. 