Clarke urges public airing of testimony

WASHINGTON -- Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, called on the White House yesterday to release his still-secret 2002 congressional testimony on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as well as reams of terrorism-related communication between Clarke and other top officials.

The request by Clarke, who has alleged that Bush did not do enough to fight terrorism before the attacks, was made as analysts debated the ethics of both Clarke's public disclosures and White House attempts to undermine his credibility by releasing carefully selected e-mails and other materials. Some critics not only said the White House strategy stands out from its normal obsession with secrecy, but they also warned that it could have a chilling effect on internal and public debate by Bush's top aides.

Meanwhile yesterday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice refused again to testify publicly before the independent commission investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Speaking on CBS's "60 Minutes," she also confirmed that Bush directed intelligence advisers to search for an Iraq link after the attacks -- a Clarke assertion that White House officials had previously questioned.

Clarke, just eight days earlier a relatively little-known former bureaucrat, capped his week in the spotlight with an appearance on the NBC news program "Meet the Press" yesterday in which he practically dared the administration to release documents that he thinks would buttress his case. Seeking to turn the tables on Republicans who have suggested that the release of Clarke's classified 2002 testimony would show conflicts with his testimony last week before the commission, Clarke said that he wanted as much of his secret White House material released as possible.

"I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there," Clarke said about his 2002 testimony. "Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony."

Moreover, Clarke said: "Let's go further. 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've sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from Jan. 20 to Sept. 11, and let's declassify all of it."

But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing yesterday on the CBS news program "Face the Nation," said: "When I looked at what [Clarke] said before the commission [last] week, and when I looked through his book, and when I also looked at what he had said to the Congress in 2002 and the background press briefings he gave, there are inconsistencies and contradictions between what he is saying now and what he said then."

During the past week, Clarke has alleged that Bush was not focused on fighting Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks and was overly concerned about going to war against Iraq, which Clarke has said diverted resources from the fight against terrorism.

The White House has responded by saying that Clarke told a different story while he was part of the administration and now is expressing criticism to sell his new book, "Against All Enemies," and because he did not get the number two job in the Department of Homeland Security. Clarke has denied both allegations and accused the White House of engaging in character assassination.

Clarke, during his NBC appearance, said the Bush administration deserves "a failing grade for what they did before" Sept. 11. Clarke also displayed what he said was a handwritten note from Bush that said: "Dear Dick, you will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government."

This is not the first time that the White House has sought to undermine the credibility of a former top official.

Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, cooperated with a book titled, "The Price of Loyalty," in which author Ron Suskind paints a picture of the Bush administration obsessed with keeping everyone on the same message and discouraging disagreement.

The effort against Clarke "is just the most dramatic permutation of the strategy of trying to chill or dissuade others from acting in a way that the White House thinks is improper," Suskind said. "These codes of silence really undercut meaningful public dialogue."

At stake is nothing less than the Bush presidency, according to Larry Sabato, director of the center for politics at the University of Virginia. Sabato criticized Clarke's methodology, saying, "It is unethical to publish a book about a president you advised during his term." But Sabato said that if Americans are convinced Clarke's charges are true, "I don't see how any American could vote for Bush if they think he did a poor job on leading the war on terror. It literally destroys Bush's candidacy if the charges are believed."

Former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said yesterday that he hoped Rice would testify in public on the terrorist attacks.

He played down White House concerns that Rice's public testimony would create constitutional problems.

"We do feel unanimously as a commission that she should testify in public," Kean told the "FOX News Sunday" program. "We feel it's important to get her case out there. We recognize there are arguments having to do with separation of powers. We think in a tragedy of this magnitude that those kind of legal arguments are probably overridden."

Rice, in an interview broadcast last night, said that although "nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify," she did not want to violate the "longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress."

Rice said she would meet again with the commission in private. She also confirmed that Bush had told intelligence advisers to search for an Iraq link in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, while defending the directive.

"The president asked a perfectly logical question," said Rice, according to a transcript provided by CBS. "We'd just been hit and hit hard. Was -- did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?"

One of the key questions to be answered in coming weeks is whether the White House attacks on Clarke will dissuade other senior members of the administration who disagree with Bush's war policies from making their views public, or whether the publicity generated by Clarke and O'Neill will give internal critics confidence to come forward.

Although Clarke and O'Neill are the best-known former administration members to criticize Bush, they are not the only ones.

Rand Beers, Bush's former senior assistant for counterterrorism, has echoed Clarke's concerns and now is a national security adviser for the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kerry.

Joseph C. Wilson, a former ambassador who has criticized Bush for saying that Iraq sought materials for weapons of mass destruction from Niger, also became the indirect subject of attack when an unnamed administration official disclosed to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, a fact that Novak then published. An investigation is underway to determine the source of the illegal leak, and Wilson has become an outspoken supporter of Kerry.

A month before the war began in Iraq, then Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress that "several hundred thousand" troops would be required for years to occupy and stabilize the country, an estimate that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz quickly rejected as "wildly off the mark." Shinseki, who retired last August, had long clashed with his civilian superiors at the Pentagon. He was effectively made a lame duck a year before his tour was over, when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld named his replacement, General Peter Schoomaker.

In addition, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White criticized his former bosses in an interview with USA Today last June after leaving his post, saying that the large number of US troops occupying Iraq "is not what they were selling before the war. It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long term."

Anne E. Kornblut of the Globe's Washington bureau contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.