Mr. Clarke

And watching that bastion of liberalism CNN...

BLITZER (question to King, Wednesday, 3/24/04): What administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well, that they don't know what made this guy come forward and make these accusations against the president. Is that the sense that you're getting, speaking to a wide range of officials?

OK Wolf...

BLITZER (3/30/04): Last Wednesday, while I was debriefing our senior White House correspondent, John King, I asked him if White House officials were suggesting there were some weird aspects to Richard Clarke's life. Clarke, of course, is the former counter-terrorism adviser who has sharply criticized the president's handling of the war on terror. I was not referring to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged today by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. I was simply seeking to flesh out what Bush National Security Council spokesman Jim Wilkinson had said on this program two days earlier.

WILKINSON (videotape): Let me also point something. If you look in this book, you find interesting things such as reported in the Washington Post this morning. He's talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and how bin Laden has some sort of mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of X-Files stuff. And what I'd say is, this is a man who was in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who was supposed to be focused on that. And he was focused on meetings.

 

Gee, for not doing much, the Clinton Administration sure produced a bunch of documents that the Bush Administration doesn't want the 9-11 Commission to see...
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April 2, 2004
Bush Aides Block Clinton's Papers From 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID E. SANGER, NYTIMES

WASHINGTON, April 1 — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Thursday that it was pressing the White House to explain why the Bush administration had blocked thousands of pages of classified foreign policy and counterterrorism documents from former President Bill Clinton's White House files from being turned over to the panel's investigators.

The White House confirmed on Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Mr. Clinton's files that had been gathered by the National Archives over the last two years in response to requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the attacks.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," while others were withheld because they were "highly sensitive" and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways. "We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job," Mr. McClellan said.

The commission and the White House were reacting to public complaints from former aides to Mr. Clinton, who said they had been surprised to learn in recent months that three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of files the former president was ready to offer the commission had been withheld by the Bush administration. The former aides said the files contained highly classified documents about the Clinton administration's efforts against Al Qaeda.

The commission said it was awaiting a full answer from the White House on why any documents were withheld.

"We need to be satisfied that we have everything we have asked to see," Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the bipartisan 10-member commission, said. "We have voiced the concern to the White House that not all of the material the Clinton library has made available to us has made its way to the commission."

The general counsel of Mr. Clinton's presidential foundation, Bruce Lindsey, who was his deputy White House counsel, said in an interview that he was concerned that the Bush administration had applied a "very legalistic approach to the documents" and might have blocked the release of material that would be valuable to the commission.

Mr. Lindsey said he first complained to the commission in February after learning from the archives that the Bush administration had withheld so many documents.

"I voiced a concern that the commission was making a judgment on an incomplete record," he said. "I want to know why there is a 75 percent difference between what we were ready to produce and what was being produced to the commission."

The debate over the Clinton files was disclosed as the commission announced that it had reached agreement with the White House to schedule a public hearing for next Thursday at which Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, will testify under oath for two and a half hours.

It also came as the White House, in an effort to bolster Ms. Rice's credibility before the hearing, released some of the language of a presidential directive awaiting Mr. Bush's signature on Sept. 11, 2001. It instructed the Pentagon to plan action against Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan, "including leadership, command-control-communication, training and logistics facilities."

White House officials said the language showed that the Bush administration had a tougher, more comprehensive plan than the Clinton administration had for dealing with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and the Taliban. Ms. Rice has cited the directive in recent interviews in trying to undermine the credibility of Richard A. Clarke, Mr. Bush's former counterterrorism director, who has accused the Bush administration of largely ignoring terrorist threats before Sept. 11.

The disclosure that many Clinton administration files had been withheld took several of the members of the panel by surprise on Thursday.

"If it did happen, it's an unintentional mistake or it's another intentional act of the White House that will backfire," said Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska who is a Democratic member of the commission.

Another Democrat on the panel, Timothy J. Roemer, a former House member from Indiana, said he learned only on Thursday that so many documents had been withheld. "There could be some innocent explanation for it," he said. "I am assured that our staff will be looking into it."

Mr. Lindsey said that President Clinton and his foundation, which is based in Little Rock, Ark., had given authorization to the National Archives to gather evidence from Mr. Clinton's files that was sought by the independent commission, which was created by Congress in late 2002. But the Bush administration, he said, had final authority to decide what would be turned over.

Mr. Lindsey, who is Mr. Clinton's liaison to the National Archives, said he was surprised to discover from the archives in later months that the Bush administration, after reviewing the Clinton documents gathered by researchers there, had decided not to turn over most of the material.

He said he had read through many of the 10,800 pages that were collected and believed them to be valuable to the work of the panel.

"They involved all of the issues — Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, terrorism, all of the areas with the commission's jurisdiction," he said. He made his first public complaints about the handling of the documents in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

In February, Mr. Lindsey said, he complained to the commission's staff director, Philip D. Zelikow. He said he renewed his complaint in a meeting with Mr. Zelikow last month.

Mr. Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman, said that after the meeting, Mr. Zelikow and other staff members began pressing the White House for an explanation of what had happened. "The commission has voiced Mr. Lindsey's concern to the White House," he said. "We made the concerns known and we are awaiting a definitive answer."

The White House decision to release some of the wording of the classified September 2001 presidential directive on Al Qaeda and the Taliban was an opening volley in what is expected to be an aggressive public relations campaign on behalf of Ms. Rice in the days before her testimony next Thursday.

Mr. Bush bowed to political pressure this week and agreed to allow Ms. Rice to testify to the commission after insisting for weeks that public testimony by such an important White House aide would erode his constitutional authority.

The so-called National Security Presidential Directive envisioned the military action as the last step of a three-to-five year plan. It called for two earlier steps — a diplomatic mission to the Taliban and covert action — and envisioned military strikes only as a last resort.

The actual language in the directive could be interpreted in two very different ways when Ms. Rice testifies. On the one hand, she will undoubtedly use it to build her case that the administration took the Qaeda threat seriously.

But because the policy was supposed to unfold over three to five years, it suggests that the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan was not considered an urgent one by the White House, bolstering Mr. Clarke's accusations.

 

Framework of Clarke's Book Is Bolstered


By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page A01


When Condoleezza Rice appears Thursday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush's national security adviser will have the administration's best opportunity to rebut her former aide's stinging critique of Bush's terrorism policy.

Since former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke charged March 24 that the Bush White House reacted slowly to warnings of a terrorist attack, his former colleagues have poked holes in parts of his narration of the early months of 2001 and have found what they say is evidence that Clarke elevated his own importance in those events.

The most sweeping challenge to Clarke's account has come from two Bush allies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Fred F. Fielding, a member of the investigative panel. They have suggested that sworn testimony Clarke gave in 2002 to a joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures was at odds with his sworn testimony last month. Frist said Clarke may have "lied under oath to the United States Congress."

But the broad outline of Clarke's criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book "Bush at War" that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.

In addition, a review of dozens of declassified citations from Clarke's 2002 testimony provides no evidence of contradiction, and White House officials familiar with the testimony agree that any differences are matters of emphasis, not fact. Indeed, the declassified 838-page report of the 2002 congressional inquiry includes many passages that appear to bolster the arguments Clarke has made.

For example, Rice and others in the administration have said that they implemented much more aggressive policies than those of Clarke and President Bill Clinton. Rice said the Bush team developed "a comprehensive strategy that would not just roll back al Qaeda -- which had been the policy of the Clinton administration -- but we needed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda."

But in 2002, Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, wrote to the joint committee that the new policy was exactly what Rice described as the old one. "The goal was to move beyond the policy of containment, criminal prosecution, and limited retaliation for specific attacks, toward attempting to 'roll back' al Qaeda."

The joint committee's declassified report, released last July, contains dozens of quotations and references to Clarke's testimony, and none appears to contradict the former White House counterterrorism chief's testimony last month. In its July 2003 report, the congressional panel cited Clark's "uncertain mandate to coordinate Bush administration policy on terrorism and specifically on bin Laden." It also said that because Bush officials did not begin their major counterterrorism policy review until April 2001, "significant slippage in counterterrorism policy may have taken place in late 2000 and early 2001."

Eleanor Hill, staff director of the House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry, said last week that she heard some of Clarke's March 24 presentation before the 9/11 commission and remembered his six-hour, closed-door appearance.

"I was there," she said of Clarke's 2002 testimony, "and without a transcript I can't have a final conclusion, but nothing jumped out at me, no contradiction" between what he said last month and his testimony almost two years ago. She also noted that Rice refused to be interviewed by the joint intelligence panel, citing executive privilege.

Repeated efforts to reach Clarke for comment last week were unsuccessful.

Administration officials have been preparing a number of points -- already known to the 9/11 commission but not to the public -- that Rice will make on Thursday; the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging Rice, said these arguments will go more directly to the heart of Clarke's criticism that the Bush administration did not take terrorism as seriously as the Clinton administration did.

In the meantime, officials have pointed to a number of what they consider misrepresentations and inconsistencies in Clarke's book and testimony. Perhaps the most important is Clarke's complaint that the Bush administration did not arm the unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft more quickly in 2001, to give it the capability to attack bin Laden.

In testimony before the 9/11 commission, Clarke said a decision to arm the predator should have been made "right away," at the start of the Bush administration. He complained about the "refusal of the administration to spin out for earlier decision things like the armed Predator." And on page 27 of his book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," Clarke quotes his deputy as complaining that the administration had not deployed "an armed Predator when it was ready."

While the commission staff has found that Clarke did agitate for the armed Predator, several Bush administration officials, reading from a memo prepared by Clarke's staff for a Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of national security principals, said the recommendation about the Predator was this: "We believe concerns about the warhead's effectiveness argue against flying armed missions this fall."

On page 237 of his book, Clarke writes about the Sept. 4 meeting. He said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, "who looked distracted throughout the session, took the [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.] Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq." Officials said Rumsfeld was not even at the meeting.

Similarly, those in the White House Situation Room with Clarke on Sept. 11, 2001, dispute some elements of his description. They say there was no audible countdown of how many minutes a "hostile aircraft" was from the White House. They say Clarke was never told by his colleague, Franklin Miller, "I'll stay here with you, if you're staying." And Miller disputes Clarke's statement, on page 7, that Miller urged Rumsfeld to take a helicopter to an alternate site. "I never spoke with Secretary Rumsfeld that day, either about him taking a helicopter or anything else," Miller said.

Administration officials also protest Clarke's assertion that, before Sept. 11, others in the Bush administration resisted his proposal that a national security directive include a call to "eliminate" al Qaeda.

With the exception of the Predator issue, Clarke's alleged misrepresentations are largely peripheral to his central argument about Bush's lack of attention to terrorism before Sept. 11. The White House believes this nevertheless suggests flaws in Clarke's overall credibility.

"The public continues to get different stories on different days depending on which Mr. Clarke they ask or read," said James R. Wilkinson, the deputy national security director for communications. "These contradictions directly undermine his overall case against the administration."

Beyond that, Bush aides and defenders have argued that Clarke's book, recent interviews and testimony are lopsided in their criticism of Bush and praise of Clinton. They say his still-classified 2002 testimony was much friendlier to Bush. Frist said Clarke was "effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush administration."

Robert G. Stevenson, spokesman for Frist, said yesterday that because the material is classified he could not discuss details of Clarke's praise for the Bush administration. But he said that on March 24, while Clarke was testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the panel is formally known, a number of staff members of the Senate intelligence committee familiar with Clarke's 2002 joint intelligence committee testimony contacted the senator's staff and said "the tone" was "quite different from 2002."

Hill, the intelligence inquiry's staff director, said she could not recall Clarke saying much about Bush or the National Security Council, because the purpose of the joint committee was to examine the intelligence community's activities before Sept. 11. "We were looking at intelligence and Clarke was quite vocal about his views of intelligence."

Clarke himself pointed out that he provided the 2002 testimony as a representative of the Bush administration. Whatever the reason, he devoted proportionately more criticism to events during the Clinton administration in his 2002 testimony. From the declassified portions, it appears that Clarke's 2002 criticism was directed at the military, the FBI and the CIA rather than at Clinton or Bush policymakers.

Clarke told the 2002 hearing exactly what he said on March 24 about the hesitancy of the CIA's Directorate of Operations to launch covert actions against terrorist groups. He said this about individuals who directed CIA covert operations in the 1970s and 1980s: "One after another of them was either fired or indicted or condemned by a Senate committee."

The result, he said, was "they institutionalized a sense [that] covert action is risky and is likely to blow up in your face." Clarke added: "I think it is changed because of 9/11. I think it is changed because [CIA Director] George Tenet has been pushing them to change it."

In his 2002 testimony, Clarke criticized both administrations for not setting clear priorities for the intelligence community. The White House, Clarke told the joint panel, "never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the intelligence community about what priorities were at the national level."

When the Clinton administration first took office, he told the panel, "the furthest thing from [its] mind in terms of the policy agenda was terrorism." That changed, he said, after the murder of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters in 1993.

Clarke criticized the CIA for failing to have adequate human sources to penetrate the terrorist networks, particularly al Qaeda. One result was that when it came to military action against bin Laden, "we never knew where he was going to be in advance, and usually we were only informed about where he was after the fact."

Clarke repeatedly cited the FBI's failure to have a domestic intelligence analysis capability before the 2001 attacks. "Their job was to do law enforcement, and they didn't have the rules that permitted them to do domestic intelligence collection," he said then.

He also was outspoken about the FBI's failure, after the thwarting of the 1999-2000 millennium attacks, to involve field offices in looking at al Qaeda and potential sleeper cells in the United States. "I got sort of blank looks of, 'What is al Qaeda?' " he said then.

In the Clinton and Bush White Houses, Clarke found that the military was hesitant to take action against bin Laden before 9/11. He said that before Sept. 11, "the military repeatedly came back with recommendations that their capability not be utilized for commando operations in Afghanistan." Clarke also criticized the pre-attack hesitancy to go after bin Laden's finances.

Clarke faulted the CIA for devoting only a small portion of its counterterrorism budget to al Qaeda, telling the joint panel that the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget asked the CIA in vain to sacrifice lower-priority programs to beef up the terrorism budget.

Even as of June 2002, according to Clarke's testimony to the congressional panel, there were still unanswered questions. The CIA, he said, was "unable to tell us what it cost to be bin Laden, what it cost to be al Qaeda, how much was their annual operating budget within some parameters, where did the money come from, where did it stay when it wasn't being used, how it was transmitted. . . . They were unable to find answers to those questions."