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Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth
Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 3:22 PM PT

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.

First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he's too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, "Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack."

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn't mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush's secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department's politico-military bureau. (Bush's NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we'll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel—not a point the Bush family's political savior is likely to make in an election season. (For details on this unwritten chapter and on why Clarke hasn't talked to me for over 15 years, click here.)

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument—made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS's 60 Minutes and PBS's Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission—is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden's propaganda—that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country—and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke's charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan's, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, designated Clarke as the "crisis manager;" he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating—in some cases, directing—the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they're nothing new. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron Suskind's* The Price of Loyalty, Bush's top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann's new book about Bush's war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke's importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, "Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank." At the same time, the paper denies—again, contrary to the book—that he was demoted: He "continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism."

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn't a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton's NCC, he ran the "Principals Committee" meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals' meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke's book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn't need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here's how Clarke describes those meetings:

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. ... We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was "very close" to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point "that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda."

Here's how Clarke describes that exchange:

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies' Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

Correction, March 24, 2004: This article originally identified former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as the author of The Price of Loyalty. In fact, Ron Suskind wrote the book; O'Neill was his chief source. (Return to corrected sentence.)

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The Bush administration is now being harshly criticized for (1) its policies of preemption and unilateralism and for (2) not unilaterally preempting the Taliban and al Qaeda immediately after coming into office in January 2001.

Needless to say, it will be a challenge for the White House to refute both criticisms simultaneously.

Richard Clarke, a long-time terrorism adviser, is leading the attack against the president, claiming that the Bush administration "squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda."

What's curious is that Clarke does not make the same charge regarding the Clinton administration. It was during that administration, you'll recall, that al Qaeda was founded, that it declared war on America, bombed two of our embassies in Africa, and attacked the USS Cole.

Surely, there were more opportunities to "eliminate al Qaeda" during the eight years that Clarke served President Clinton than there were during the eight months he served President Bush?

No, Clarke does not see it that way.

It is not hard to imagine what President Clinton might have done about al Qaeda in the 1990s. Terrorist training camps in Afghanistan could have been attacked by special forces. The Taliban might have been overthrown in a coup. It would not have been impossible to penetrate al Qaeda.

Our embassies abroad, the CIA, the FBI, and the INS might have worked together to target those whose backgrounds and movements raised suspicions, and either prevented them from entering the U.S. or sent them home. A Department of Homeland Security could have been set up. Something like the Patriot Act — legislation to overturn the wall that long separated intelligence and law-enforcement agencies — might have been enacted.

By contrast, what could President Bush have done between January and September of 2001? By that point, the terrorists had made their plans and were living in the U.S. Even if President Bush had launched a unilateral, preemptive attack against the Taliban and al Qaeda, the 9/11 suicide terrorists might have proceeded to fulfill their missions. Indeed, some would have said that 9/11 was in reprisal for the assaults on al Qaeda and the Taliban.

And who would have supported a preemptive attack in Afghanistan prior to 9/11? Not those who oppose preemption now. Not those who say President Bush was wrong to strike Saddam Hussein before being certain not just of his intentions, but also of his capabilities. Not Jacques Chirac or Vladimir Putin.

Clearly, Clarke did not manage to persuade many State Department officials that terrorism was a grave threat that required a robust response. Michael Ledeen, in his fine book, The War Against the Terror Masters, points to an op-ed that ran in the New York Times on July 10, 2001 — almost exactly two months before the 9/11 attack. Written by Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism specialist, it reflected the conventional wisdom within America's foreign-policy elites.

"...If you are drilling for oil in Colombia — or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia," Johnson wrote, "you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear."

Johnson actually predicted that terrorism would decline in the decade beginning in 2000 as, he argued, it had in the '90s because of "the current reluctance of countries like Iraq, Syria, and Libya, which once eagerly backed terrorist groups, to provide safe havens, funding and training."

Johnson blamed excessive fear of terrorism on "24-hour broadcast news operations too eager to find a dramatic story" and on "pundits who repeat myths while ignoring clear empirical data," along with politicians who "warn constituents of dire threats and then appropriate money for redundant military installations and new government investigators and agents."

Johnson also criticized the military and intelligence bureaucracies, saying they were "desperate to find an enemy to justify budget growth."

This is an astonishing analysis when you consider that Johnson was writing after the first bombing of the World Trade Towers, after the bloody battle depicted in the book, Blackhawk Down — involving Osama bin Laden-trained Somali guerillas — after the attempt by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait, after the bombing of our troops in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, after the terrorist attacks on America's embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the attack on the USS Cole, and after Secretary of State Albright included Iraq among the seven countries designated as state sponsors of international terrorism in 2000.

Despite this, Clarke also goes easy on the State Department in his new book, Against All Enemies. This is puzzling and makes one wonder what theories might be offered by Clarke's friend, Rand Beers, who left the Bush administration to join the Kerry campaign.

Clarke also mentions in his book "my friend Joe Wilson," the former diplomat who for reasons that remain mysterious was sent to Niger to check out the possibility that Saddam had attempted to purchase uranium — then launched a media blitz accusing President Bush of misleading Americans regarding Iraq, then also signed on with the Kerry campaign. Clarke charges that the administration took "revenge" on Wilson, a charge as yet unproven.

Today, Wednesday, Clarke testifies before the 9/11 commission. Will his testimony be helpful to those seriously attempting to craft an effective policy to defeat terrorism? Or will he be selling books and giving a job interview? You watch and you make the call.

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Finished his book late last night – and have to say that while I began reading it with disapproval, I ended with dismay.

Here is a once great public servant engaging in the shabbiest kind of name-calling and George Soros-style paranoia. (The “Enemies” of the Constitution in the “Against All Enemies” title refers pretty clearly to George Bush and the Bush administration. Clarke goes on to tut-tut over how the Patriot Act has been interpreted as a fascist piece of legislation – without pausing to point out how crazy that interpretation that is or how essential the Patriot Act has been to just the kind of counter-terrorism work that he favors.)

Still, there are things that can be learned from the book. One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning account of the terrorism record of the Clinton administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan (air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military drags its feets or (most typically) President Clinton rules out courses of action that carry any risk at all.

Just as Bob Bartley and Barbara Olson predicted at the very onset of the Clinton presidency, so Clarke agrees that Clinton’s ability to defend the country was paralyzed by his personal failings. (Although Clarke shares that strange Clintonian self-pity which adjudged the president’s inaction always to be somebody else’s fault.)

“Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in ‘Wag the Dog’ tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States. He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and lamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more.” (p. 225.)

Sometimes reading Clarke’s book makes you wonder whether the United States had a president at all between 1993 and 2001. Please excuse the blue language in the following passage.

“On a brisk October day in 2000, [Army Special Forces colonel Mike] Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch[ed] as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. ‘What’s it gonna take, Dick?’ Sheehan demanded. ‘Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, ****in’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won’t even let the Air Force bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention.”

That same Constitution that Clarke accuses George Bush of violating also appoints the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

**

On to the Bush material.

Early on, the Bush team made a fateful decision about Clarke. They asked him to stay on at the National Security Council – but demoted him from the high position he had held under Bill Clinton. Clarke had for eight years enjoyed more access to the president than the head of the CIA or FBI. Suddenly he found himself just another NSC senior director.

It’s a general rule of management that you never demote anybody important: You fire them, and fast, or else they will sabotage your organization. If Bush wanted to retain Clarke’s services, he should have kept him in his old job. Failing that, he should have pushed him out the door on the Monday after Inauguration day.

That didn’t happen, for pardonable reasons and not so pardonable. The pardonable reason was the shortness of time: Bush had less than six weeks to complete his transition – the recount plus the ever-increasing sclerosis of the clearing and confirmation process meant that he did not have his own people up and ready to go until the second half of 2001. The not so pardonable reason was a phenomenon I noted in The Right Man: a reluctance to use the hiring and firing power to shape the NSC in favor of the president’s policies. For almost a year, Bush and Condoleezza Rice tried to use Clinton holdovers to carry out Bush’s policies. Unsurprisingly, the experiment has not been a happy one.

**

More important though is that Clarke confirms something else I saw – and that something is the essence of the case for George Bush’s leadership. The core of Clarke’s unhappiness with George Bush is that Bush disregarded the “expert” advice of government professionals after 9/11. Clarke saw 9/11 as a reason to continue and expand the policies of the Clinton years: to hunt down individual terrorists while taking one more whirligig ride on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so-called, Bush’s breakthrough after 9/11 was his willingness to rethink old assumptions and to consider new and seemingly radical ideas – because only such ideas were equal to the newness and radicalism of the situation.

When a set of ideas are tried over eight years – and result in one of the greatest disasters in American history – you’d think that might tend to discredit those ideas. You’d think so – but as we’re discovering in this campaign season, you’d be wrong.

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This week's testimony has made it much clearer that there was a wealth of intelligence available in the summer of 2001 indicating that a major terrorist attack was coming.

Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton), said she read the intelligence briefings given to Bush before Sept. 11 and the information on the gathering threats "would set your hair on fire."

But Richard Clarke, the head of counterintelligence under both Bush and Clinton, said he could not get the incoming Bush administration in 2001 to convene a top level meeting to even discuss the threat.

Finally, Clarke wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice asking her to imagine how she and others would feel if an attack did happen and killed hundreds of Americans. The letter was sent on Sept. 4 -- one week before hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

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A 76-year-old game show producer sued Dick Clark Monday, alleging the 74-year-old Clark called him a "dinosaur" and refused to hire him because of his age.

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In the complaint, Andrews says he spoke off and on for more than a year with Clark and other executives about joining the company and was told he would be considered for any openings.

But when he wrote Clark to say he was interested in available positions, Clark wrote back, allegedly turning Andrews down because of his age.

"I have great respect and admiration for your accomplishments, and wish you success in your desire to 'get back to work," Clark's letter read, according to the suit.

"(But) the last development guy we hired was 27 years old. Another person who is joining our staff next week is 30. People our age are considered dinosaurs! The business is being run by 'The Next Generation."'

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