Richard Clarke Nation. Here is one of the best cases for why Clarke is right, and why the Bush White House is running so scared, by Slate's Fred Kaplan. Does make one long to read George Tenet's book. As Kaplan cites Clarke about the early days of the Bush administration, "'Tenet and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration...We agreed that Tenet would insure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.'

"The problem is: Nothing happened," Kaplan continues. "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."

Though from the very first days of the Bush administration, Clarke urgently requested a Principals meeting of cabinet level secretaries to address the impending Al Qaeda threat, such a meeting did not take place until a week before the September 11 attacks. By contrast, how did the Clinton administration handle Al Qaeda threats? By instantly going to battle stations. As Kaplan writes:

"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."

And also worth reading at Slate, William Saletan's analysis of how Bush's allergy to all things Clinton contributed to failure to take measures to prevent 9/11.

"Every once in a while, in the course of spinning the issue of the day, an administration accidentally betrays its broader mentality," Saletan writes. "Six weeks ago on Meet the Press, President Bush revealed his abstract notion of reality. Three weeks ago in his re-election ads, Bush displayed a confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances. This week, in response to criticism of its terrorism policy by a former Bush aide, the administration is betraying a third fundamental flaw: a categorical aversion to the ideas of the Clinton years.

..."In his book, Clarke recalls, 'In general, the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration.' Thomas Maertens, a Clarke ally who ran the National Security Council's nuclear nonproliferation shop under Clinton and Bush, tells the New York Times that while Clarke was 'saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.,' the Bush team discounted his pleas because he had served under Clinton. 'They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration,' Maertens tells the Times. 'So anything [the Clinton aides] did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it.'"

It concludes with these thoughts:

"It's funny, in retrospect, that Bush ran for president as a uniter. To unite a country, you have to acknowledge and reconcile differences. Bush doesn't work toward unity; he assumes it. He doesn't reconcile differences; he denies them. It's his tax cut or nothing. It's his homeland security bill or nothing. It's his terrorism policy or nothing. If you're playing politics, this is smart strategy. But if you're trying to help the country, it's foolish. The odds are that 50 percent of the other party's ideas are right. By ruling them out, you start your presidency 50 percent wrong.

"Some of the resulting mistakes may be inconsequential. Some may cost 3,000 lives. Some may cost 2 million jobs. 'If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years … we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had,' Cheney bragged three weeks ago. That's the way this administration thinks: We do things differently. But being different doesn't guarantee you a better result—just a different one."

Posted by Laura at March 23, 2004 08:41 PM