Just came home to lousy news. My friend and the top human rights activist in former Yugoslavia Sonja Biserko has just had her office raided by the Serbian military intelligence. Books were seized, an author of one of Helsinki committee's reports was arrested, and Sonja has been called to testify. Things are so dark in Belgrade, I can hardly believe it. Still learning what is really going on, will post more later.

A brilliant veteran observer of the last decade's misery in the Balkans writes with the line that, sadly, sums it all up somehow. "Recall the timeless wisdom of: Send lawyers, guns, and money."

Oops! The Center for American Progress has an incredible scoop. Someone who was preparing to prep Don Rumsfeld before his Sunday morning talk show appearances left his notes in the Starbucks in Dupont Circle. As well as a hand drawn map to Rummy's house. Now those notes are online at CAP. Check them out!

Post Script: The New York Times on Sunday identified the Starbucks-swilling DoD staffer as Eric Ruff, who was hired two months ago as a deputy press officer at the Pentagon. His boss Larry Di Rita promises Eric has been forgiven.

Bad news: Bush & Kerry running even. Incredibly frustrating. Then again, seeing as how useless pre-Iowa polls were on the Democratic primary, maybe it's not worth taking too seriously at this point, but still....

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Kohut
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 12:31 PM
Subject: Poll: Bush Support Steady in Wake of Clarke Criticisms

A week's worth of criticism of his pre-Sept. 11 record on terrorism has had little impact on President Bush's support among voters. He is now running even with Sen. John Kerry in a head-to-head match-up among registered voters (47% Kerry-46% Bush) after trailing Kerry by 52%-43% in mid-March.

Voter opinions have been fluid in this early stage of the presidential contest, but Bush has held his own against Kerry with regard to personal qualities, while the Massachusetts senator has lost support on key issues like health care and jobs. And on the central question of which candidate would do the best job of defending the country against future terrorist attacks, Bush continues to lead Kerry by a wide margin (53%-29%).

The latest national survey of 1,501 Americans by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 22-28, finds Bush's job approval ratings still sub-par (47% approve and 44% disapprove). Kerry's strength continues to be on domestic issues, including health care, jobs and the economy, but voters' confidence in Kerry has slipped, not grown, over the past week. Today, Bush and Kerry run virtually even on the question of who can best improve economic conditions (44% Kerry, 39% Bush). Kerry held a sizable advantage on this issue as recently as two weeks ago.

This survey is embargoed for release on Monday, March 29 at 4:00 PM. It will be available online at www.people-press.org...

Andrew Kohut
Director
Pew Research Center

I have a contact from the spy world, who, in the early days of our acquaintanceship, it slowly dawned on me, was automatically probing for any potential vulnerabilities he might act on in recruiting a potential asset. Things like, say, money problems, or a weakness for alcohol. He wasn't trying to recruit me. The point is, he did it almost automatically, to everyone he met. It was a trade habit that had become so ingrained as to become almost second nature to him.

Over the past few years, we managed to become friends, minus at least initially a lot of the straightforwardness one enjoys in most friendships. That's a good thing, because he's not useful as a secret source; he's too much of a pro for that, although sometimes we bounce perspectives off each other in an informal way. But getting to observe the mentality and the tradecraft, some of which he has simply internalized, has been, in short, a useful education. Sometimes he has even made the tradecraft a little explicit. For instance, he acquainted me with the idea and practice of disinformation. Perhaps it's just a professional intel word for lying. But not really. It's creating a plausible cover story that trips the object of the disinformation campaign from the real path. It's an art, really.

Then there's the unsubtle art of blackmail. Which seems to be the bind that ties nuclear proliferator/supervillain A.Q. Khan and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, as described in this interesting piece from Pakistan in The New Republic. And it involves Khan's daughter, Dina. Perhaps fodder for LeCarre's next novel.

Rice will testify, after all, in public, and under oath, at the 9/11 commission. Bush and Cheney have now agreed to testify in private before all 10 members of the commission. [Does that mean the White House should face perjury charges for having said many times in the past that they would not testify?] In all seriousness, do they think that doing the right thing at this point, after so much opposition and resistance, really helps their credibility problem?

Meantime, via Federation of American Scientists' anti-government-secrecy guru Steve Aftergood, here is a .pdf file of a new Congressional Research Service report on the history of national security advisors testifying before Congressional committees.

See "Presidential Advisers' Testimony Before Congressional Committees: A Brief Overview" by Harold C. Relyea and Jay R. Shampansky, April 5, 2002:

http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL31351.pdf

For the families' sake, in any case, I am pleased that Rice has agreed to testify publicly. This from them, on Tuesday:

Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission Statement Regarding Condoleezza Rice’s Testimony www.911independentcommission.org March 30, 2004

The Family Steering Committee is pleased to learn that Condoleezza Rice will testify under oath in a public hearing.

This is good news and will undoubtedly make the 9/11 Commission's Final Report more complete, comprehensive, and transparent in nature.

More than anything, the families want to know why our nation was so vulnerable to 19 hijackers on the morning of 9/11. We look forward to Ms. Rice answering questions about her priorities as National Security Advisor to the President, the processes used before, and after, 9/11 to share critical intelligence and other related data regarding this country’s counter terrorism activities within the government, her knowledge of Al-Qaeda, and her role, and the role of the NSC- leading up to, on, and after the morning of 9/11.

We are hopeful that the information gleaned from Ms. Rice's public testimony can be used by the Commission as part of their investigation and be included in their Final Report and Recommendations to help minimize the chances of a future attack and thus, save lives.

Upon the signing of the 9/11 Commission into law, President Bush stated that the Commission's work was their most solemn duty. He also stated that the Commission must go wherever the facts may lead. We hope that the following qualifying language presented in the letter to the Commission regarding Ms. Rice's testimony does not know contradict these words:

"The Commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice. The National Security Advisor is uniquely situated to provide the Commission with information necessary to fulfill its statutory mandate. Indeed, it is for this reason that Dr. Rice privately met with the Commission for more than four hours on February 7, fully answered every question posed to her, and offered additional private meetings if necessary. Despite the fact that the Commission will therefore have access to all information of which Dr. Rice is aware, the Commission has nevertheless urged that public confidence in the work of the Commission would be enhanced by Dr. Rice appearing publicly before the Commission. Other White House officials with information relevant to the Commission's inquiry do not come within the scope of the Commission's rationale for seeking public testimony from Dr. Rice. These officials will continue to provide the Commission with information through private meetings, briefings, and documents, consistent with our previous practice."

Consistent with Bush’s statement upon the formation of the Commission, the FSC sincerely hopes that the commission will be given full and unfettered access to any officials in the White House whom they feel it is necessary to interview under oath. The above condition, which prohibits them from seeking further public testimony, is of particular concern because decisions made by those officials on the day of 9/11 are critically important to provide a full accounting to the American public.

Nevertheless, the families are cautiously optimistic that Dr. Rice's public appearance before the Commission will enhance its ability to produce the kind of Final Report that the nation deserves.

Thanks to family steering committee member Monica Gabrielle for the announcement.

These guys are finished. Is Karl Rove even still alive? From a sheerly tactical perspective, what was the point of having Condi Rice go on 60 Minutes to say pretty much nothing except that she will not testify at the 9/11 commission? How did the White House think this would help them? Even Republican 9/11 commissioner John Lehman, "who has written extensively on separation-of-power issues, said that 'the White House is making a huge mistake' by blocking Rice's testimony." Rice "has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Democratic 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste told the Times. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Post Script: A former Hill staffer friend yesterday pointed out to me one possible tactic I hadn't considered before: is the White House simply trying to bombard the American public with so very much essentially white noise on the Clarke affair that the public simply tunes out?

It is increasingly obvious that Ahmad Chalabi set out to deliberately deceive the American government about Iraq's WMD programs.

This story in the Los Angeles Times today describes the knowingly false intelligence provided by the brother of a top aide to Chalabi. Code named "Curveball," the "young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army..."

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.

"This is the one that's damning," he said. "This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward."

Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us." But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

Anyone who goes around continuing to vouche for Chalabi's integrity may want to watch it. This White House and its friends would be the last ones who should want to go throwing around perjury charges, don't you think?

Let's Declassify All of It. Richard Clarke on Meet the Press this morning continues to be absolutely devastating for the Bush administration. Just devastating.

...TIM RUSSERT: Is there any inconsistency between your sworn testimony before the September 11 Commission last week and two years ago before the congressional committee?

MR. CLARKE: No, there isn't. And I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony.

MR. RUSSERT: You would request this morning that it all be declassified?

MR. CLARKE: And I want more declassified. I want Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission declassified, and I want the thing that the 9-11 Commission talked about in its staff report this week declassified, because there's been an issue about whether or not a strategy or a plan or something useful was given to Dr. Rice in early January. And she says it wasn't...Let's declassify that memo I sent on January 25th and let's declassify the national security directive that Dr. Rice's committee approved nine months later on September 4th, and let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't. And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on January 25th and what they finally agreed to on September 4th, is that they're basically the same thing and they wasted months when we could have had some action.

MR. RUSSERT: But to be clear, Mr. Clarke, you would urge Congress, the intelligence committees, to declassify your sworn testimony before the congressional inquiry two years ago as well as your testimony before the September 11th Commission?

MR. CLARKE: Yes, and those documents I just referred to and Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission because the victims' families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said. There weren't in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9-11 Commission. They want to know. So let's take her testimony before the 9-11 Commission and make it part of the package of what gets declassified along with the national security decision directive of September 4 and along with my memo of January 25.

In fact, Tim, 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 January 20 to September 11 and let's declassify all of it.

MR. RUSSERT: As well as her responses?

MR. CLARKE: As well as her responses.

MR. RUSSERT: As you know, the White House has been rather aggressive trying to undercut your credibility. They've released an e-mail which says it's Richard Clarke vs. Richard Clarke...

MR. CLARKE: And it's not inconsistent. Let me explain. I was asked by Condi Rice, by the White House press secretary, by the White House chief of staff, to give a press background. Why? Because Time magazine had come out--and this was almost a year after September 11. Time magazine had come out with a cover story, after extensive research, and the cover story was devastating. The cover story of Time magazine was that the White House had been given a plan by me on January 25 and had taken the entire nine months to get around to looking at it, at the principals level, that there had been over 100 meetings of Dr. Rice's committee on subjects involving Iraq, Star Wars, China, but only one on terrorism and that one was on September 4.

Now, the White House naturally wanted someone to say that things had been going on during that summer. I said, "Well, you know, it's true. Things had been going on. But the plan wasn't approved until September 4." And I was told, "But you can say that it was approved by the deputies. You can say that things were approved in principle." I was told to spin it in a positive way.

Now, the question is: Why do you do that? I thought Pat Buchanan, a conservative Republican, former White House aide, put it pretty well last night when he was asked the same question. He said, "When you're in the White House, you may disagree with policy." But when you're asked to defend that policy, you defend it, if you're a special assistant to the president, as Pat Buchanan was and as I was. I had a choice. I could have done what I was asked to do and defend them when they were being criticized for not having done enough before September 11 or I could have resigned. Why didn't I resign? Because I believed it was very, very important for the United States to develop a plan to secure its cyberspace from terrorism. And the president had asked me to do that. I did it. I didn't get it done until February of 2003. Here it is: The National Plan to Secure Cyberspace, which the president thanked me for effusively. I wouldn't have been able to do this--important document if I had quit on the date that you suggest. And so there's no inconsistency. I said the things that I was told to say. They're true. We did consider these things but no decisions were taken. And that's the point. It was an important issue for them but not an urgent issue. They had a hundred meetings before they got around to having one on terrorism.

MR. RUSSERT: But if you were willing to go forward, and, as you say, "spin" on behalf of the president, then why shouldn't people now think that this book is also spin? Why should people believe you?

MR. CLARKE: Because I have no obligation anymore to spin. When you're in the White House, you spin. And people have been doing a lot of that against me this week. You know, they're engaged in a campaign. People on the taxpayers' rolls, dozens of people, are engaged in the campaign to destroy me, personally and professionally, because I had the temerity to suggest that the American people should consider whether or not the president had done a good job on the war on terrorism. The issue is not me. The issue is the president's job on the role on terrorism.

I think, before 9/11, he himself said--if you look at what he said to Bob Woodward, he himself said before 9/11, "This was not an urgent issue for me. I didn't feel a sense of urgency." He acknowledged bin Laden was not the focus of him or his national security team. So, before 9/11, not as focused. After 9/11--I say by going into Iraq, he has really hurt the war on terrorism. Now, because I say that, the administration doesn't want to talk on the merits of that. They don't want to talk about the effect on the war on terrorism of our invasion of Iraq. And so, instead, A, they try to do character assassination of me; but, B, they try to punish me for having said it by going after my professional life, by going after me, besmirching me. This is just not appropriate.

And you know, Tim, what I would like to do, beginning today, it's been going on for a week now. What I would like to do beginning today, is let's raise the level of discourse. Let's get some civility back into this issue. And let's talk about the issues. Let's not talk about the personalities. I have great respect for Dr. Rice. People have been saying all week that, you know, I must have a grudge against Condi Rice. I have known Condi for a long time. I think she's a very, very good person. And I don't want this to be about personality. I want it to be about the issues, about the war in Iraq and its affect on the war on terror.

MR. RUSSERT: You did tell Time magazine that the review that the administration did moved as fast as could be expected.

MR. CLARKE: I said it was the normal process for the consideration of issues. Now, it's not a normal issue, however. Every day George Tenet was going in to see the president in the Oval Office. Because George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, now gives the president his daily briefing. And almost every day the president was hearing from George Tenet that there's an impending al-Qaeda attack. As far back as February, George Tenet testified before the Congress that al-Qaeda was the major national security threat. And yet, they have 100 meetings before they get around to dealing with it.

MR. RUSSERT: On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate President Bush's performance on the war on terror prior to September 11?

MR. CLARKE: Well, there wasn't any personal performance by the president prior to September 11. Now, the only thing that I was ever able to detect that he did on the war on terrorism was after Tenet had been briefing him day after day after day after day about an al-Qaeda threat, the president said, in May, "Well, let's, you know, get a strategy." That's the only thing I ever heard that he got involved in personally. And when he said that, Dr. Rice called me and said, "The president wants a strategy." And I said, "Well, you know the strategy was what I sent you on January 25, and it's been stuck in these low-level committees." And she said, "Fine. I'll deal with that." Well, she didn't deal with it until September.

And, interestingly enough, the president never said after that May conversation, "Where's the strategy?" And, again, if you go back to what the president himself says to Bob Woodward, he said, "I knew there was a strategy in the works. But I didn't know how mature the plan was." He's saying this on September 11. He didn't know where the strategy was. The strategy that he had asked for in May? He'd never come back and asked where it was. You know, basically, it wasn't an urgent issue for them before September 11.

MR. RUSSERT: It sounds like a failing grade.

MR. CLARKE: Well, I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before because, frankly, they didn't do--they never got around to doing anything. They held interim meetings, but they never actually decided anything before September 11.

MR. RUSSERT: Now, when you resigned, you sent a very polite letter to the president: "It's been an enormous privilege to serve you these past 24 months. I will always remember the courage, determination, calm leadership you demonstrated on September 11. I thank you again for the opportunity to serve you. You have provided me"--was that just being polite?

MR. CLARKE: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: Or are you now just being disloyal?

MR. CLARKE: No. Well, my mother taught me to be polite. Let me read another line from the letter, which I have. I don't know what you have over there. But this is the actual letter. "I will always have fond memories of our briefings for you on cybersecurity." Not on terrorism, Tim, because they didn't allow me to brief him on terrorism. You know, they're saying now that when I was afforded the opportunity to talk to him about cybersecurity, it was my choice. I could have talked about terrorism or cybersecurity. That's not true. I asked in January to brief him, the president, on terrorism, to give him the same briefing I had given Vice President Cheney, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And I was told, "You can't do that briefing, Dick, until after the policy development process."

MR. RUSSERT: Who told you that?

MR. CLARKE: Condi Rice. And I said, "Well, can I brief him on cybersecurity?" "Oh, yes, you can brief him on that." Now, you read my letter to him. Let's read his letter back to me. Maybe you'd like to read it, if you can read this.

MR. RUSSERT: Go ahead, please.

MR. CLARKE: This is his [President Bush's] writing. This is the president of the United States' writing. And when they're engaged in character assassination of me, let's just remember that on January 31, 2003: "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 normal typewritten letter that everybody gets. This is the president's handwriting. He thinks I served with distinction and honor. The rest of his staff is out there trying to destroy my professional life, trying to destroy my reputation, because I had the temerity to suggest that a policy issue should be discussed. What is the role of the war on terror vis-a-vis the war in Iraq? Did the war in Iraq really hurt the war on terror? Because I suggest we should have a debate on that, I am now being the victim of a taxpayer-paid--because all these people work for the government-- character assassination campaign.

MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. `Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness--and anxiety--against imminent terrorist attack."

Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?

MR. CLARKE: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."
...

Our disgrace.

Richard Clarke will be on Meet the Press Sunday morning. Always a step ahead of Rice, huh?

This Post piece confirms what I have thought: the Republicans are starting to realize how very badly they misjudged what picking a battle with Clarke would mean. Meanwhile, can you catch how much sarcasm the Post's White House reporter dares to reveal against the Bush White House's total demolition of their own rules on background sourcing? "One Bush aide, who refused to be identified because the administration limits who may speak on the record, acknowledged that the White House had underestimated the political and media firestorm that Clarke would ignite." Jesus Christ, I hope the press who covers this White House strikes back in a big way.

[Meanwhile, what is up with McCain? Is there any possibility this shred of a rumor about a Kerry-McCain flirtation is real? This also is from the same Post piece:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who rode in Bush's limousine during a presidential visit to Phoenix on Friday, said the Clarke counterattack was "the most vigorous offensive I've ever seen from the administration on any issue.

"These attacks go to the heart of the strength of the president, and they felt it had to be put down and put down quickly," McCain said. "Whether they'll succeed or not is unclear."

For more tealeaves on how Clarke vs. Bush will fare, check out this from Romenesko.

Just to reiterate, Condoleezza Rice will be on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

Needless to say, while I am as interested as everyone else in what Rice will have to say, I firmly agree with candidate Kerry that, "If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do 60 minutes on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath. We are talking about the security of our country," Kerry was cited by the Washington Post.

Richard Clarke, and the Family Steering Committee for the Independent 9/11 Commission have called the White House's bluff. Declassify everything related to September 11th, they say.

Speaking with NPR's All Things Considered Saturday, Clarke called on the White House to declassify everything of his related to September 11th. The link is not available yet but I will get it up when I can.

Meantime, "the Family Steering Committee demands the appearance of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice under oath in a public hearing immediately," the Families said in a statement Saturday:

We believe that testifying before the Commission in a public forum is Ms. Rice’s moral obligation given her responsibility as National Security Advisor to protect our nation. The death of nearly 3000 innocent people warrants such a moral precedent...

We would encourage White House counsel to view this commission for what it is - a quasi-legislative entity. After all, Chairman Kean is an Executive Branch appointee to the Commission. Furthermore, the mere fact that the Commission has gained access—albeit limited access, to the Presidential Daily Briefings (something that the Joint Inquiry of Congress was refused for reasons of Separation of Powers principles) further supports the notion that this Commission is not a purely legislative body.

Assuming arguendo that White House counsel continues to persist that a legal precedent might be presented, Dr. Rice should testify to set a moral precedent that is aptly warranted by the murder of 3000 people. Voluntarily coming forward to testify under oath during a public hearing without the use of a subpoena would simply set a rare, refreshing, and appropriate moral precedent for all of history to judge.

Finally, in light of recent actions on behalf of Senate Majority Leader Frist, we also request the de-classification of the infamous 28 blank pages of the Joint Inquiry Final Report. The Saudi government stated to the media in August 2003 that they would like the 28 pages released. Members of the Joint Inquiry have stated on the record that the 28 pages did not include national security secrets. Nevertheless, the White House continues to refuse to release said information on grounds of national security.

One of the underlying themes of this past week’s hearings was the failure to garner the “will of the nation.” One way to arouse the will of the nation is to engage the American people in healthy debate and dialogue. In order to have the will, the nation must be properly informed. As such, we encourage the release of the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry Final Report that pertains to the foreign sponsorship of terrorism.

We hope that Senator Frist will show the same zeal to release the 28 pages as he has shown in de-classifying Mr. Clarke’s testimony. We request that all witness testimony to the Joint Inquiry of Congress be impartially reviewed and declassified if possible. We abhor the tendency to over-classify information and we support the release of any material as long such public release does not legitimately harm national security.

So, what do you say, Sen. Frist?

As I wrote a friend who works closely with the families of those killed September 11th, I think it is necessary that "the families" come out in favor of Clarke's gripping honestly. I think they should be on CNN and Good Morning America and every channel saying they are deeply offended by the White House's refusal to genuinely cooperate with the 9/11 commission hearings and to deny them the truth they are owed, and they are deeply offended by the White House's efforts to intimidate Clarke from speaking the truth that they desperately want to know.

Meantime, Newsweek reports that Clarke's revelations are causing the American public to lose confidence in Bush's handling of homeland security issues. [It's worth noting this poll was conducted Wednesday March 25 and Thursday March 26th, in other words, before the shocking show of naked threats and intimidation by Frist and Congressional Republicans Friday]. A friend of mine at Princeton Survey Research Associates which did the poll for Newsweek warned me last night that next week may not show a sustained Clarke "bounce," so stay tuned. On the contrary, it strikes me that the White House panic in the face of Clarke's revelations has only served to make Clarke's bounce last a hell of a lot longer. Wonder if they had just gone through the motions of cooperating with the 9/11 commission from the beginning, they would never have had this problem. But, of course, meeting the genuine search for truth with anything like decency and honesty is totally contrary to everything in their nature.

Certainly, everybody will want to watch Condoleezza Rice's appearance on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

Thanks to 9/11 Family Steering Committee member Kristen Breitweiser for forwarding me their statement.

This is simply must-read. Please, G-d, is it cocktail hour yet, this week has been endless. I had lunch with a friend of Clarke's today and this guy Clarke is fearless. He has enough in book sales to defend himself from the Politburo. But really this is too much. If it's any consolation to Clarke, Paul O'Neill was this week cleared of any mishandling of classified documents in his cooperation with Ron Suskind on his book, The Price of Loyalty. That title really resonates.

Funny. At least at the end of a very long week with very little sleep.

Big thanks and forever gratitude to reader Nathaniel I. who did indeed send me instructions on how to do indentation. Let me see if this works. This is more of an article of mine and Bob Dreyfuss's that came out today in the Nation, which is not available online. I'm afraid if I post anymore I'll get in trouble, so go buy the magazine, it's a good piece and looks to be a good issue, with book reviews by Juan Cole, a piece on Israel by Roane Carey and Adam Schatz, David Cole on security vs. civil liberties, etc.. Here's Part II of Still Dreaming of Tehran:

...Leading the charge against Iran is AEI's Michael Ledeen, perhaps best known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra. Supporting Ledeen's position are two other AEI fellows: Richard Perle, the ringleader of the neocons and a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and David Frum, a Weekly Standard contributing editor and the former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase "axis of evil."

In their new book, An End to Evil, Perle and Frum call for a covert
operation to "overthrow the terrorist mullahs of Iran." Speaking to retired US intelligence officers in McLean, Virginia, in January, Ledeen called Iran the "throbbing heart of terrorism" and urged the Bush Administration to support revolutionary change. "Tehran," he said, "is a city just waiting for us."

Ledeen is viewed skeptically by many experts, including at the State
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. "Ledeen doesn't know anything about Iran," says Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert on the Shiites of Iran and Iraq. "He doesn't speak Persian, and I believe he has never been there." But Ledeen does have connections in the Iranian exile community. For the past two years, he has maintained a relationship with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian wheeler-dealer who worked closely with him in Iran/contra. Ledeen introduced Ghorbanifar to a key neo-conservative official, Harold Rhode, a longtime Pentagon staffer who speaks Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Hebrew and who until recently served in Iraq as a liaison between the Defense Department and Ahmad Chalabi. Rhode and another Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, have been talking to Ghorbanifar about options for regime change in Tehran. "They were looking at getting introduced to alleged sources inside Iran, who could give them some inside information on the struggles in Iran," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. Ghorbanifar, he said, was spinning tall tales about alleged (but unsubstantiated) transfers of Iraqi uranium to Iran's nuclear weapons program...

Wow, it worked! Thanks! And thanks as well to Mitchell P. who also emailed some technical advice. Next maybe we'll work on color.

The Center for American Progress's Progress Report has a contest for you, described here:

"Progress Report Contest Update"

"No winners yet, but political strategist James Carville has sweetened the pot. Yesterday on CNN's Crossfire, Carville promised a copy of his book to the first person to win the "Beat the Progress Report" contest by finding proof of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice saying the words "al Qaeda" or "bin Laden" between the time they took office and 9/10/01. (You can watch the video of Carville's announcement yesterday on Crossfire.) There's still time to play - submit your entries to pr@progressreport.org."

It continues to be extremely dangerous to be a journalist, or a translator, or a foreigner, or for that matter, an Iraqi, in Iraq. The wires are reporting that Time magazine's Iraqi translator died today from wounds sustained in an ambush earlier this week. Ambushes targeting those working with foreigners seem to be on the rise. I can't imagine the kind of courage it takes to stick it out to operate in such an environment, that is from all accounts I have read exponentially more risky than what I experienced in Kosovo. And the journalists can find little comfort with the coalition forces either, by many accounts, who are understandably on edge. Which really speaks volumes.

Meantime, if you happen to be a journalism fan in DC this weekend, they are having all the great classics of this genre at the AFI Silver theater-- the Killing Fields, All the President's Men, The Year of Living Dangerously, and some new ones, too.

A friend in the US intelligence business who reads my blog, if only to give himself heartburn, calls to say -- he has long respected Clarke. It's true the Bush administration and Rice did not take the threat from Al Qaeda seriously enough. But he's frustrated that Clarke denies ever seeing a shred of evidence to connect Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He says that is simply not true. I told him, that what I thought Clarke said was not that he saw no single piece of raw intelligence to suggest a connection, but that the overall judgment of the CIA and FBI and Clarke himself was that there was not a credible case to be made that the two were working in a serious way together.

Anyhow, I am not sure I even want to wade into this debate because I am never going to have access to the information he has seen, and don't have the training to understand what the context is. [What would the volume of raw intelligence suggesting elements of the Saudi Arabian government have worked with Al Qaeda look like by comparison? Pakistan?] It's clear if there is anything to this theory that Saddam and al Qaeda cooperated in some way, that its deep association with Laurie Mylroie has discredited it, at least to my mind.

But I share his overall point, that the findings of the 9/11 commission are being totally lost, at least for the moment, in the incredibly heated partisan debate swirling around.

Delete this message after you've read it.

Spencer Ackerman has an excellent article that captures the exact moment when it became clear to me that Bush would lose this election: when the families of 9/11 applauded Richard Clarke essentially telling Bush's lackies on the 9/11 commission to screw themselves. By extension, we the voters are on the side of the families of 9/11. And the pendulum has most definitely swung to Clarke's side. I am utterly convinced Bush is finished.

The Bush White House will come to regret that it made its battle Bush vs. Clarke. Because the families of 9/11 are clearly on Clarke's side -- and their judgment resonates, it's radioactive. Who else can call the White House's bluff that Bush is a capable or worthy post 9/11 president? Watch for advertisements to come out soon: September 11th -- Truth.

Maybe I'm getting carried away. As Greg Allen reported on NPR this morning from Kansas City on the heartland's reaction to the Clarke saga, for all the fuss and extraordinary 90% name recognition that Clarke now has and his books flying off the shelves, few hard core people on either side of the partisan debate feel Clarke vs. Bush changed their minds about Bush. But what about those who were undecided? or wavering?

As long as they are relaxing the rules on identifying senior officials giving background briefings and declassifying lots of White House documents, why doesn't the White House release this letter?

On September 4, 2001, "Clarke wrote to Rice summarizing many of his frustrations. He urged policy-makers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad and ask themselves what they could have done earlier...He warned that unless adequate funding was found for the planned effort, the directive would be a hollow shell. He feared, apparently referring to Bush's earlier comment, that Washington might be left with a modest effort to swat flies relying on foreign governments while waiting for the big attack."

--As told by 9/11 commission staff member Dan Marcus in a prepared staff report delivered in open testimony Thursday. See the linked .pdf, page 12.

Phil Carter points to an interesting discussion and article on a problem highlighted by Richard Clarke in his testimony Thursday: sure terrorism was a priority of the Bush National Security Council. But among how many other priorities? A lack of "discipline" in defining such priorities was something Condoleezza Rice tartly criticized the Clinton administration for, in her 2000 Foreign Affairs article describing what a Bush foreign policy might look like. But doesn't look like she got the priorities right either.

Couldn't the Times have gotten Judith Miller to write this?

Juan Cole notes that Chris Lehman, the brother of Republican 9/11 commissioner John Lehman who attacked Richard Clarke at his testimony Wednesday, worked in the Office of Special Plans. And as I pointed out previously, Lehman is also close with chief neocon Richard Perle, who once worked for Lehman's lobbying firm, Abington Corporation, back in the 1980s. The association came to light in a 1983 New York Times article which documented that then assistant secretary of defense for international affairs Richard Perle took $90,000 from an Israeli arms maker whose arms Perle then lobbied the Pentagon to buy.

So how does this play in the country? That the White House has been made so desperate by Richard Clarke's contentions that it is trying to destroy him? Or that the White House is on the side of truth? Right, exactly.

Nine out of ten Americans now say they have heard of Richard Clarke, a new Pew poll shows.

"The Pew Research Center reported on Thursday that about 42 percent of the 1,065 adults surveyed had heard 'a lot' about Mr. Clarke's claims; 47 percent said they had heard 'a little' about his charges. Only 10 percent said they had heard nothing about his criticisms," the New York Times reports today [italics added].

If your bookstore has run out of Clarke's book, Slate has a nice summary here.

As I noted....the hottest book in town and in the country...already in its FIFTH printing since Monday.

The White House takes on more water...

Just out...A piece Bob Dreyfuss and I wrote on the neocons' designs on Iran, "Still Dreaming of Tehran," at The Nation. Unfortunately, it's for the moment subscriber and in the print edition only, but I am working on seeing if I can get an on-line version made available.

Meanwhile, here's the top as it went through final edits:

Still Dreaming of Tehran
April 12, 2004
Robert Dreyfuss and Laura Rozen

The Bush Administration's hawks and their neoconservative allies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and The Weekly Standard are engaged in a high-risk and high-stakes effort to restore their fading power in Washington by pressing for a confrontation with Iran. It's no secret that the neocons' star has fallen since the war with Iraq.

The intelligence scandal plaguing the White House and the ongoing crisis in Iraq itself can both be laid at their doorstep, and it's widely believed that President Bush's re-election team would dearly like to extricate the President from the Iraqi tar baby.

But the neocons aren't giving up, and they are trying to pull the White House in even deeper. Not only are they undeterred by the chaos in Iraq, but they are pressing ahead to advance their regional strategy, one that calls for regime change in Iran, then Syria and Saudi Arabia. Says Chas Freeman, who served as US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War and a leading foe of the neocons, "It shows that they possess a level of fanaticism, or depth of
conviction, that is truly awesome. There is no cognitive dissonance there."

What makes the neocon strategy on Iran especially risky is that with Iraq teetering on the brink of civil war, neighboring Iran has significant clout inside Iraq, including ties to various Iraqi Shiite factions and a growing paramilitary and intelligence presence. If Iran chooses, it can help ease the daunting task that the United States faces in trying to put together a sovereign Iraqi government.

But if it seeks confrontation, it can help spark an anti-US revolt in southern Iraq, home to most of Iraq's Shiite majority. In that case, nearly all analysts agree, the American occupation could be overwhelmed...

I know this story has been out for a while now, but it really reveals such a shocking assault on the truth, even by this White House's standards:

"Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster told lawmakers Wednesday he had shared his higher estimate of the cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill with White House, Health and Human Services and Office of Management and Budget officials, but Democrats angered by the administration's suppression of that higher price tag did not find the 'smoking gun' they were seeking in the controversy," GovExec.com's Emily Heil reports today.

"In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Foster for the first time discussed publicly how Thomas Scully, the former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), threatened to fire him if he responded to requests by members of Congress seeking cost estimates of the Medicare bill that Congress passed last year.

"The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the new law would cost $395 billion, while Foster's tally was $534 billion. Many conservatives resisted the bill, and others were only convinced to support it by promises that it would not top $400 billion. House Ways and Means ranking member Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said if Foster's estimate had been made public, the bill would have died..."

[Meanwhile, a most humble request. Forever gratitude from War & Piece to the reader who can tell me how to create indentations in movable type.]

Has it ever occurred to this idiot White House that they wouldn't look half so terrible and desperate if they would agree the first time to do things like back the 9/11 commission, allow their officials to testify publicly like Clinton era officials, etc? Condoleeza Rice asking to meet privately with the 9/11 commission after Richard Clarke has already framed the debate makes them look terrible. All I can say is, I hope they keep it up!

Life is just better with Coldplay. I can listen to Clocks endlessly.

Of course, the 9/11 commission hearings and findings are becoming hugely politicized in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign. The tension is so extraordinary one finds oneself irresistably cheering Clarke and muttering profanities at the obnoxious attacks by Republican bullies on the commission at hearings where, as press, one knows one should just keep it to oneself. Fortunately the rest of the room seemed to be erupting in applause at the same time, so it hopefully goes unnoticed.

The partisan tension is so heated, sometimes it's hard to really burrow down and recognize some of the real substance of what the 9/11 commission investigation is finding. Serious findings about how the US government puttered along half dysfunctionally most of the time, where the failings were, were they systemic or the fault of individuals, or both, many many things that truly cross administrations and parties and agency cultures, etc. I hope as some of the high drama of the hearings subsides, to be able to look more closely at some of the substance of the commission findings and try to surface some of their important insights. I have some training and exposure to these issues that makes me feel as a journalist I should try to grapple with some of the more substantive findings in not just a topical way, but it will take some time I just don't have at the moment. It would be a shame for all of that to get lost in the focus on the personalities, and the politics of the moment.

My read, having attended two thirds of the 9/11 commission hearings over the past year and having tried my best to listen to the rest on C-span or read the transcripts, is that George Tenet may be in some serious trouble. Today the commissioners seemed headed by staff reports towards blaming Tenet and in particular his former Clinton-era director of operations Jim Pavitt for resisting repeated calls by Richard Clarke to arm the Predator drone and use it for attacking Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently for various reasons the CIA was not willing to do this. If the plane was shot down, it didn't want to pay for it. Fear of covert operations in general. Disagreement between Tenet and Berger over whether CIA was authorized by the president to kill bin Laden, and fear by Pavitt (can you believe this?) that if the US had killed bin Laden, CIA agents around the world would be endangered (as if they aren't anyhow?). And intelligence was just so very poor under Tenet, they just could never have that high degree of confidence that a place they intended to strike would not be totally useless or worse, risk so many innocent bystanders killed, that it would erupt into a public scandal.

Then again, the CIA just doesn't come off half as bad as the FBI, which Clarke conceded was just useless. Clarke emphasized that even in the summer of 2001 with the enormous spike in intelligence chatter of an impending attack and he and Tenent raising the alarm across the US government, that the FBI never went through what its field offices had collected on Al Qaeda to recognize that it already had the Phoenix memo, the Moussaoui arrest, and awareness that two known Al Qaeda operatives had already entered the US. Because of the demonstrable inadequacies on the FBI in this regard, Clarke endorsed the idea of creating a domestic intelligence agency, with all sorts of protections put in place for civil liberties and privacy. I think this is a proposal that makes sense, and I am 100% sure this is a proposal the 9/11 commission will ultimately recommend.

Harrowing.

Bob Dreyfuss has a nice piece on Richard Clarke today, here.

Richard Clarke just rocked at the 9/11 commission hearings today. He was the only person so far who has said that not only the US government, but he personally had failed the families. He was the only official who has publicly apologized to the families. He conceded that the last time he registered to vote -- in Virginia in 2000 -- it was as a Republican, and that he had voted for Bush. He said under oath that he would never accept a position in the Kerry administration.

And when the Republican commissioners John Lehman (Reagan's former Navy Secretary who employed Richard Perle at his lobbying firm with its own whiff of scandal in the early 1980s, and whose brother Chris, Juan Cole notes, worked in the Office of Special Plans), Fred Fielding and former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson -- lined up, presumably with their faxes from the White House, to attack him, Clarke was unflappable. At one point Thompson tried to imply that Clarke lacked credibility because he had tried to highlight in an August 2002 background press briefing the White House's efforts to counter terrorism. [Copies of the Fox News report on Clarke's background (e.g. not for attribution) briefing were made plentifully available at the hearing today, a point which commissioner Bob Kerrey quipped showed just how "occasionally fair and balanced" Fox is]. Clarke calmly called Thompson's accusations that he lacked integrity for having tried to make the president he then worked for not look totally derelict in that briefing "politics." At which point the hearing room broke out in total sustained applause. Thompson got flustered and said he was just from the Midwest and had never worked for a president inside the Beltway, lah de dah, and ultimately fled the hearing room.

[For their part, the Democratic commissioners former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, former Congressman Tim Roemer, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben Veniste and former Sen. Bob Kerrey never missed an opportunity to remark on their sorrow that Dr. Condoleeza Rice had not been permitted by the White House to testify publicly at the hearings like her former Clinton administration counterpart.]

Word from friends of Clarke is his book is the number one bestseller in the US and has just gone for its fourth printing. That would be since Monday. And that "the White House is taking on water."

Post script: Slate's Fred Kaplan agrees, that Clarke dazzled at the hearings today. I feel like some major turning point has been crossed -- and the whole facade of the Bush administration's toughness in the war on terror is punctured.

Post-script II: As I just wrote a friend, as far as I am concerned, this is not really about Clarke as a person. I take Kaplan and others at their word that Clarke is an egotist who plays hardball with the best of them. But he clearly knows where the bodies are buried, quite literally. He's exposed with extraordinary credibility and insight the fact that the Bushies are totally incapable of understanding the post-Cold war world. That terrorism was not even on their radar. And that after 9/11, the only thing that occurred to them was all they knew - bombing iraq. And now they are stuck trying to hold it together before they lose the next election.

They are goners. Rice has all but resigned. Hadley has been exposed as a spineless pathetic nincompoop who unfailingly yields to Cheney's line. Rumsfeld may well be out next term. Wolfowitz is finished. Powell is out. Cheney is going to croak sometime. Tenet is out. Ashcroft is disgraced.

Joe Conason publishes an interview with Clarke, here.

In it, Clarke simply explodes attack after flailing attack the White House has fired at him since the publication of his book with devastating calm. This guy clearly has the truth on his side.

Conason: Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by [former national security advisor] Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

Clarke: They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.

Conason: Dr. Rice now says that your plans to "roll back" al-Qaida were not aggressive enough for the Bush administration. How do you answer that, in light of what we know about what they did and didn't do?

Clarke: I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

Two for two. Frankly, bring it on. This guy can clearly handle it. And just watching the White House meltdown in reaction is incredible. Here's their whole campaign strategy of using Bush's reaction to 9/11 melting down before our eyes.

Jamie Gorelick is the only 9/11 commissioner who has had the opportunity to read through all the intelligence briefings President Bush received before 9/11. And what she told the Times is that what she saw "would set your hair on fire."

This from the New York Times today:

The Bush administration has refused to discuss details of the Oval Office intelligence briefings in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The reports, known as the President's Daily Brief, are among the most highly classified documents in the executive branch.

But under an agreement with the White House last year, one member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was allowed to read through a full library of the briefings, and two other commissioners were allowed a partial review.

Ms. Gorelick said at the hearing Tuesday that information in the documents "would set your hair on fire, and not just George Tenet's hair on fire," referring to the director of central intelligence.

Though barred under secrecy regulations from discussing much of what was in the reports, she said that there had been "an extraordinary spike" of intelligence warning about Qaeda attacks in the Daily Brief during 2001 and that "it plateaued at a spike level for months."

Ms. Gorelick's comments came as the commission released a staff report finding that Mr. Rumsfeld did not order the preparation of any new military plans against Al Qaeda or its Taliban sponsors during the seven months between his arrival at the Pentagon and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report said that despite the intelligence alerts throughout the year, there was an impression among specialists at the Pentagon that Mr. Rumsfeld and his new team were "not especially interested in the counterterrorism agenda."

A separate staff report on the government's diplomatic response to the terrorist threat found that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and her deputies rebuffed a proposal by aides in early 2001 that the administration step up its support for anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

Just what was Bush doing on vacation in Texas for a month in August 2001 given the extraordinary spike in intelligence warnings? Just why did this administration act as if it had forever to deal with this threat? That dealing with it could await a time of their own convenience? Was a three-year perfect plan really the way to deal with an organization that had struck US targets around the globe pretty much every year?

It's not often that one actually feels like the reporter of a New York Times article was moved by what he saw. But this piece by Todd Purdhum on the 9/11 commission hearing yesterday has that sense of having witnessed an important event for our democracy.

It's a joke....I think. [via Atrios]

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."

I'm pawing my way through Richard Clarke's new book, trying to get in some of the most salient points on a certain individual for an article.

It totally captures the petrified circa 1992 Cold War mentality of the Bush II administration's national security staff, and its members' utter lack of capacity to think and see and grapple with and get the realities of the post-Cold War world. And how the national security people around Bush and particularly Cheney and the Pentagon kept reinforcing each other's total myopia in this area.

[How fast can we return Paul Wolfowitz to academia? This guy is just beyond the bend. These are just not the people any American should want running the US government any time after 1992, where their thinking has sort of petrified, like sheetrock.]

All of that is highlighted in this long passage. I highly recommend getting your own copy. This is from pp. 230-232:

“I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC [in the first Bush administration]…. Steve Hadley had also been an NSC staffer assigned to do arms control issues with the Soviet Union. He had then been an Assistant Secretary in the Pentagon, also concerned with Soviet arms control. It struck me that neither of them had worked on the new post-Cold War security issues.

I tried to explain, ‘This office is new, you’re right. It’s post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the US now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they’re terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats too.’ I did not succeed entirely in making the case. Over the next several months, they suggested, I should figure out how to move some of these issues to some other organization.

Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the principals committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries or have the budget review mechanism with the Associate Director of OMB. She did, however, ask me to stay on and to keep my entire staff in place. Rice and Hadley did not seem to know anyone else whose expertise covered they regarded as my strange portfolio…

Within a week of the Inauguration I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking “urgently” for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee…would not address the issue until it had been framed by the Deputies….The first meeting… did not go well.

…Steve Hadley…ask[ed] me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with Al Qaeda. ‘We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator.’

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. ‘Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,’ Wolfowitz responded.

I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could. ‘We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States.’

‘Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example,’ Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.

‘I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?’ I pointed at CIA deputy dirctor John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, ‘Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the US.’

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. ‘You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1`993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because the FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.’ I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I think it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: ‘Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the US. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.’

Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it. ‘They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.’

Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. ‘I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.’

‘I wasn’t comparing the Holocaust to anything.’ I spoke slowly. ‘I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.’

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. ‘We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.’ The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

Hadley suggested a compromise. We would begin by focusing on al Qaeda and then later look at other terrorism, including any Iraqi terrorism. Because dealing with Al Qaeda involved its Afghan sanctuary, however, Hadley suggested that we needed policy on Afghanistan in general and on the related issue of US-Pakistani relations, including the return of democracy in that country and arms control with India. All of these issues were a ‘cluster’ that had to be decided together. Hadley proposed that several more papers be written and several more meetings be scheduled over the next few months.

--Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004, pp. 230-232.

The cult of secrecy for secrecy's sake, described by the National Security Archive's Tom Blanton, in Slate. Get a peak here of the President's Daily Brief, from the Johnson administration, here. Lots of details on Sukarno's visit to an acupuncturist, and discussion of whether he only has the flu, here [.pdf linked].

O'Neill cleared, just in time to investigate Clarke, perhaps. [Via MPE]

Does Bush really want to make his reaction to 9/11 the centerpiece of his reelection campaign? His reaction, really closely examined?

Apparently, what we've been told about how Bush and other administration officials conducted themselves on 9/11 is fiction, according to this Wall Street Journal piece. And the truth is not very flattering to Bush at all:

"Just after 9 a.m. [on September 11th], Mr. Bush took a seat in front of students, most of them from a poor neighborhood. He listened as teacher Sandra K. Daniels pointed to an easel, and the second-graders read aloud lists of words.

"Then, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card strode into the classroom, leaned down and whispered in the president's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," Mr. Card has recounted.

"Both Republican and Democratic commissioners have said they are focusing closely on what happened next -- and whether mere minutes could have affected the outcome on Sept. 11. The panel's investigators are looking at questions such as the timeliness of presidential orders about intercepting the jet that at 9:37 a.m. plowed into the Pentagon.

"In a CNBC television interview almost a year later, Mr. Card said that after he alerted Mr. Bush, 'I pulled away from the president, and not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.'

"But uncut videotape of the classroom visit obtained from the local cable-TV station director who shot it, and interviews with the teacher and principal, show that Mr. Bush remained in the classroom not for mere seconds, but for at least seven additional minutes. He followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat. Then he stayed for at least another two minutes, asking the children questions and explaining to Ms. Rigell that he would have to leave more quickly than planned.

"Mr. Bartlett confirmed in an interview that the president stayed in the classroom for at least seven minutes. The spokesman said that as the president's staff was trying to learn more about the plane crashes, there was no need to talk to Mr. Bush or pull him away. The president didn't leave immediately after receiving the news of the second crash from Mr. Card because Mr. Bush's 'instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room,' the spokesman added. Mr. Bush's motorcade left the school at approximately 9:35 a.m., 32 minutes after he entered the classroom, according to a White House timeline and analysis of the uncut videotape.

President Aloft

"The president learned the Pentagon also had been hit as his motorcade sped just over three miles to Sarasota/Bradenton International Airport, where Air Force One was waiting. At 9:56 a.m., the presidential 747 was airborne. Determined to avoid any dangers at lower altitudes, Air Force Col. Mark Tillman, the pilot, climbed so steeply that officials aboard said in interviews that the jet seemed to go almost vertical. It quickly reached the relatively safe altitude of 40,000 feet.

"In the Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting, the President said he didn't begin to make major decisions about the emergency until he was back aboard his plane. 'I got on the phone from Air Force One, asking to find out the facts,' he said."

Cheney doesn't come off so well either. The mind games he plays on the American public he also seems to play on W.

"As Air Force One left Sarasota, the president intended to return directly to Washington, Mr. Bartlett said. Mr. Bush initially had ignored advice from Vice President Dick Cheney, calling while en route to a White House basement command center, that Washington appeared to be under attack and the president for his own safety should remain away, according to an official in the vice president's office. Once airborne, Mr. Bush spoke again on a secure phone with Mr. Cheney, who relayed a new message that changed the president's mind, White House officials later said. The vice president urged Mr. Bush to postpone his return because, Mr. Cheney said, the government had received a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, 'Angel,' Mr. Bartlett said in an interview...

"Although in the days after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials recounted that a threat had been received against Air Force One, Mr. Bartlett said in a recent interview that there hadn't been any actual threat. Word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker, as multiple conversations went on simultaneously, he said. Many of these exchanges, he added, related to rumors that turned out to be false, such as reports of attacks on the president's ranch in Texas and the State Department. As for the Air Force One code name, Mr. Bartlett said, 'Somebody was using the word 'angel,' ' and 'that got interpreted as a threat based on the word 'angel.'' (Former Secret Service officials said the code wasn't an official secret, but a radio shorthand designation that had been made public well before 2001.)

"The vice president's office gave an account differing from Mr. Bartlett's, saying it still couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made.

"Days after the attacks, Mr. Cheney had said word of the threat had been passed to him by Secret Service agents. But in interviews, two former senior Secret Service agents on duty that day denied that their agency played any role in receiving or passing on a threat to the presidential jet.

"An official in Mr. Cheney's office said in an interview that Mr. Cheney had been mistaken in saying the threat came to him via the Secret Service. The official said that instead, Mr. Cheney had received word of the threat from 'a uniformed military person' manning the underground bunker. The official said the vice president and his staff don't know who the individual was. And the official said that he couldn't say definitively whether or not a threat had been made..."

Sort of like the WMD in Iraq, and the Al Qaeda-Saddam connection.

Read the whole thing here.

As War & Piece's better half points out, Don't you think the fact that the Terrorism Czar "wasn't involved in most of the meetings of the administration" proves Clarke's point?

"Dick Clarke just does not know what he is talking about. He wasn't involved in most of the meetings of the administration," Rice told ABC's Good Morning America.

Honestly, it's like those old Road Runner cartoons. Al Qaeda suspects may have fled in tunnel.

Condoleeza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley should be fired. They have failed at their jobs from day one. Hadley's performance on 60 Minutes last night was just pathetic - there is no other word for it. Rice's revisionist oped in the Post today is even worse. If Rice had the courage of her convictions, she would be appearing at the 9/11 commission hearings this week to defend her actions in person. But she is a coward who represents a White House that knows it failed to take any steps to prevent 9/11 and that is why she refuses to appear.

We have two articles coming out this week on these issues, as well as a review of Clarke's new book, Against All Enemies.

Meantime, for anyone who missed it, here is the full transcript of last night's 60 Minutes Clarke interview:

March 21, 2004 Sunday

ANCHORS: LESLEY STAHL

LESLEY STAHL, co-host:

Right now a special presidential commission is investigating whether the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were preventable. There were few people in a better position to answer that question than Richard Clarke, the administration's former top advisor on counter-terrorism, who left the White House last year. Clarke has helped shape US policy on terrorism since the 1980s, when he got his first presidential appointment from Ronald Reagan. He went on to serve the first President Bush, then was President Clinton's terrorism czar, and was held over by President George W. Bush. In testimony before the 9/11 commission later this week, and in a new book to be published tomorrow, "Against All Enemies," Clarke will tell the story of what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after September 11th. He does so first tonight on 60 MINUTES.

(Footage of police car; employees; White House; policeman; policemen and employees; man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) When the terrorists struck on the morning of 9/11, it was thought that the White House would be the next target, and the building was evacuated.

Mr. CLARKE: It went from having hundreds of people in the White House complex, a hubbub of activity, to being totally abandoned.

(Footage of Richard Clarke and reporter walking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Richard Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, I kept thinking of the words from "Apocalypse Now," the whispered words of Marlon Brando when he thought about Vietnam, "The horror, the horror." Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows, people falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America.

(Footage of helicopter; George W. Bush; Clarke typing; book spine; Clarke and reporter; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) After the president returned to the White House on 9/11, he and his top advisors, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but was surprised that the talk quickly turned to another target.

You relate a conversation you had with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And--and we all said, 'But no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.'

STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.

Mr. CLARKE: Oh, initially, I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in--inn Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.

STAHL: Now, what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, what I said was, you know, invading Iraq, or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else--you know, it's akin to what did Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to war with Japan, he said, 'Let's invade Mexico.' You know, it's very analogous.

STAHL: Yeah, but didn't they think that there was a connection.

Mr. CLARKE: No, I--I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked for a connection, and there's just no connection.'

STAHL: And you told them that?

Mr. CLARKE: Absolutely.

STAHL: You personally?

Mr. CLARKE: I told them that, George Tenet told them that.

STAHL: Who did you tell?

Mr. CLARKE: I told that to the group, to the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, the attorney general. They all knew it.

STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.

Mr. CLARKE: Yes, the president--we were in the Situation Room complex. The president dragged me into a--a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now, he never said, 'Make it up,' but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'

STAHL: Didn't you tell him that you'd looked and--and there'd been no connection?

Mr. CLARKE: I said--I said 'Mr. President, we've done this before. We--we've been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind, there's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam--find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.

STAHL: You--in other words, you did go back and look?

Mr. CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.

STAHL: You did. And was it was a serious look? Did you really...

Mr. CLARKE: It was a serious look. We--we got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report, we sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the president, and it got bounced by the national security advisor, or deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'

STAHL: Come on.

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: 'Wrong answer'?

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: Did the president see it?

Mr. CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the president saw it, because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Lesley, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer.

(Photos of Clarke and Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke was the president's top advisor on terrorism, and yet it wasn't until 9/11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to 9/11, this administration did not take the threat seriously.

Mr. CLARKE: We had a terrorist organization that was going after us, al-Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda, and it was pushed back and back and back for months.

STAHL: You're about to testify publicly before a committee that wants to know if the Bush administration dropped the ball. What are you going to tell the committee when they ask you that?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for--urgently--underlined "urgently"--a cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo wasn't acted on.

STAHL: Do you blame her for--for not understanding the significance of terrorism?

Mr. CLARKE: I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in--in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back, they wanted to work on the same issues right away--Iraq, Star Wars--not new issues that--the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.

(Footage of Clarke walking; Paul Wolfowitz)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke finally got his meeting to brief about al-Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or the cabinet, it was with the number twos in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr. CLARKE: I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden, we have to deal with al-Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years.' And I turned to the deputy director of CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

STAHL: In eight years.

Mr. CLARKE: In eight years.

STAHL: Now explain that.

(Footage of Clarke; George Bush Sr. and man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He explained that there was no Iraqi terrorism against the US after 1993 when Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate the first President Bush while he was visiting Kuwait.

Mr. CLARKE: We responded to that by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters...

(Footage of bombed buildings)

Mr. CLARKE: (Voiceover) ...and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis saying, 'If you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won't just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it'll be your whole government.'

It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked, because there's absolutely no evidence since that day of Iraqi terrorism directed against the United States until we invaded them. Now there's Iraqi terrorism against the United States.

STAHL: Was there any connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?

Mr. CLARKE: Were they cooperating? No.

STAHL: Was Iraq supporting al-Qaeda?

Mr. CLARKE: No. There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda ever.

STAHL: But, you know, you call certain people in the administration and they'll say, 'That's still open. That's an open issue.'

Mr. CLARKE: Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over.

(Footage of the White House; Bush and man)

STAHL: (Voiceover) By June 2001 there still hadn't been a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though the US intelligence community was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House.

Mr. CLARKE: George Tenet...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: ...was saying to the White House, saying to the president because he briefed him every morning...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: 'A major al-Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead.' He said that in June, July, August.

(Footage of CIA seal; photo of Clarke and Bill Clinton; photo of cabinet meeting; photo of Clinton and Clarke; LA International Airport; photo of operative; photo of car; photo of explosives; Bush and man; Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of intelligence chatter was back in December 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says President Clinton ordered his cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they were on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack at Los Angeles International Airport, when this al-Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before 9/11.

Mr. CLARKE: He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his national security advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject.

STAHL: Why would having a meeting make a difference?

Mr. CLARKE: If you compare December '99 to June--June and July of 2001, 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 the meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done...

STAHL: Hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: ...to stop the al-Qaeda attack.

STAHL: Hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: So they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees, personally, 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--never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.

(Photos of operatives; Clarke and reporter walking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The FBI and the CIA knew that these two al-Qaeda operatives, both among the 9/11 hijackers, had been living in the United States since 2000, yet neither agency passed that information up the chain of command or told Dick Clarke, as the White House terrorism coordinator.

Mr. CLARKE: And here I am in the White House saying, 'Something's about to happen. Tell me, you know, if--if a sparrow falls from the tree. I want to know if anything unusual is going on, because we're about to be hit.'

STAHL: No one told you.

Mr. CLARKE: The...

STAHL: No one told you?

Mr. CLARKE: The--the FBI knows they're in the country.

STAHL: Oh.

Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, if we had put their picture on "The CBS Evening News," if we had put their picture on Dan Rather, on USA Today, we could have caught those guys, and then we might have been able to pull that thread and--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.

(Photos of 9/11 hijackers; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) But as we all know, the al-Qaeda sleeper cell was left free to plan the 9/11 attack while Dick Clarke kept agitating for the high-level White House meeting he'd been seeking.

STAHL: You finally did get your cabinet-level meeting, finally. When did that meeting take place?

Mr. CLARKE: The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place, one week prior to 9/11.

STAHL: When Clarke got his meeting on September 4th, he proposed a plan to bomb al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden. It's the same plan he had tried to persuade the Clinton administration to adopt to no avail. When we come back, Clarke's view of the president's actions after 9/11, and the White House view of Clarke.

(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)

(Announcements)

(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)

STAHL: Richard Clarke was in the Reagan, Bush one, and Clinton administrations before he became George W. Bush's top official on counter-terrorism. In a new book, he says that the Bush administration should have and could have taken out al-Qaeda and its training camps in Afghanistan long before the attacks of September 11th. He also says the fact that Osama bin Laden is still at large is another major failure, made possible by what he calls the administration's sluggish response to 9/11. Clarke's book, in effect an indictment of the president's handling of the war on terrorism, arrives just as Mr. Bush is beginning to hit the campaign trail in earnest.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From campaign ad) I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message.

(Ad footage of 9/11)

STAHL: (Voiceover) The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of 9/11. He's making it the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.

You're writing this book in the middle of this campaign. The timing, I'm sure, you will be questioned about and criticized for. Why are you doing it now?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me. But frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know.

STAHL: Does a person who works in a White House owe the president his loyalty?

Mr. CLARKE: Yes.

STAHL: Well, this is not a loyal book, I'm sorry.

Mr. CLARKE: No, no, I know. It just--up to a point. Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. And the way he's...

STAHL: You think he risked people's lives?

Mr. CLARKE: I think the way he has responded to al-Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe, absolutely.

STAHL: Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11? Showed strength, got us through it. You don't give him credit for that?

Mr. CLARKE: He gave a really good speech the week after 9/11.

STAHL: You don't give him credit for anything? Nothing?

Mr. CLARKE: I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.

(Footage of Clarke; Stephen Hadley and reporter climbing stairs; Hadley and reporter talking)

STAHL: (Voiceover) That may be the most serious indictment yet of the administration's handling of terrorism, since it comes from the president's own former terrorism advisor. It's not a surprise then that the number-two man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees with Clarke. He says the president has taken the fight to the terrorists and is hardening the homeland.

Dick Clarke--he was the administration's top official on counter-terrorism. How would you describe the job he did?

Mr. STEPHEN HADLEY: Look, Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the president came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration really...

(Footage of Hadley; reporter; Hadley)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He says Clarke did a good job but is just dead wrong when he says the president didn't heed the warnings about al-Qaeda before the attacks on 9/11.

Mr. HADLEY: The president heard those warnings. The president got--met daily with his chief of intelligence--the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, and his staff, and they kept him fully informed. And at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of--of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al-Qaeda?'

(Footage of Hadley; Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, the president didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

Mr. HADLEY: All the chatter was at--of an attack--a potential al-Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community, 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administrations, the FBI...

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HADLEY: ...saying, 'the--the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared, we don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore, preparatory steps need to be made.' So the president put us on battle stations.

STAHL: Now, he's the top terrorism official in this administration at that point. He says you didn't go to battle stations.

Mr. HADLEY: Well, I think that's just wrong, and the...

(Footage of Hadley; Hadley and reporter)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He also says Clarke was wrong when he said the president pressured him to find a link between Iraq and 9/11.

Mr. HADLEY: We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.

STAHL: Now, can I interrupt you for one second? We have done our own work on that ourselves, and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarke that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.

Mr. HADLEY: Look, the--I--I stand on what I said.

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HADLEY: But the point, I think, we're missing in this is of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.

STAHL: So he's not denying the president asked for another review, nor is he denying that Clarke wrote a memo stating once again that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. In fact, the White House showed us the memo dated September 18th. As Clarke said, it was bounced back. The notation reads: "Please update and resubmit," and it was written by Stephen Hadley.

Mr. HADLEY: I asked him to go--to go back, not "wrong answer." I asked him to go back and check it again a week or two later to make sure there was no new emerging evidence that Iraq was involved. That's what I was asking him to do.

(Footage of Hadley; photo of Bush and Colin Powell; photo of Condoleezza Rice; photo of cabinet meeting; Clarke and man walking; staircase)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says the whole issue about Iraq was moot by the time Clarke submitted his memo, since the president, at a meeting with his war cabinet at Camp David, had already decided to focus the US response to 9/11 on Afghanistan, which is what Clarke had been recommending. But Clarke says it was not moot, because the administration wanted to make Iraq phase two of the response no matter what happened in Afghanistan.

Pres. BUSH: (From file footage) You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

(Footage of Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke contends that with statements like that, the president continually left an impression that Saddam had been involved in 9/11.

Mr. CLARKE: The White House carefully manipulated public opinion. Never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it.

STAHL: Yeah, but you're suggesting here they knew better, and it was deliberate.

Mr. CLARKE: They did know better. They did know better. They did know better. We told them, the CIA told them, the FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging September 11th, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. I think for a commander-in-chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.

(Footage of Bush)

STAHL: (Voiceover) And he thinks the president to this day misinterprets the nature and the scope of the terrorist threat.

Mr. CLARKE: He asked us after 9/11 to give him cards with pictures of the major al-Qaeda leaders and tell us when they were arrested or killed so he could draw X's through their pictures.

STAHL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. CLARKE: And, you know, I write in the book I have this image of George Bush sitting by a warm fireplace in the White House drawing X's through al-Qaeda leaders and thinking that he's got most of them and therefore he's taken care of the problem. And while George Bush thinks he's crossing them out one by one, there are all these new al-Qaeda people who are being recruited who hate the United States in large measure because of what Bush has done.

(Photo of Saddam Hussein; burning American flag; protestors)

STAHL: (Voiceover) He says that the war in Iraq has not only inflamed anti-Americanism in the Arab world, it drained resources away from the fight to Afghanistan and the push to eliminate Osama bin Laden.

Mr. HADLEY: It's not correct. Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center in the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al-Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone, their sanctuary in Iraq is gone, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies in the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way to narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists.

STAHL: Don't you think that Iraq, the Middle East, and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?

Mr. CLARKE: I think that...

STAHL: I mean, it's a widely held view that that's--he was a man...

Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, I--I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay. The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it.

STAHL: What do you mean?

Mr. CLARKE: Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it--an oil-rich Arab country.' He'd been saying this. This was part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich, and occupy and oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al-Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al-Qaeda, have been greatly strengthened.

(Footage of Madrid train bombing)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Exhibit A, he now says, is the attack on the passenger trains in Madrid.

Dick Clarke worked for Reagan, Bush one, Clinton, and now here. He has a track record. Why do you think a man with those credentials would be so completely critical of the way this administration has handled the war on terrorism?

Mr. HADLEY: Well, I don't know. I have not read Dick's book. I don't know what he said about the prior administration, which, again, was in office and dealing with this problem for eight years. We were in office dealing with this problem for 230 days. At the time when he left us, the conversations I had with him was that he was pleased at the leadership provided by the president.

STAHL: He did tell you he was pleased when he left?

Mr. HADLEY: My--my belief was that he appreciated the leadership that the president had provided.

(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; photo of Clinton and man; Clarke)

STAHL: (Voiceover) But there's no hint of that in his book or in our interview. When Clarke worked for President Clinton he was known as the terrorism czar. When George Bush came into office, though he kept Clarke on at the White House, he stripped him of his cabinet-level rank.

They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, frankly, if I had been so upset that the national coordinator for counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a cabinet-level position to a staff-level position, if that had bothered me enough I would have quit. I didn't quit.

(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; Clarke typing; book spine)

STAHL: (Voiceover) Not for another two years. He finally resigned last year, after 30 years in government service. A senior White House official told us he thinks Clarke's book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.

Are you working to defeat Bush, and are you working to help Kerry get elected?

Mr. CLARKE: No, I'm not working for Kerry. I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign.

STAHL: We're here at Harvard right now. You teach a course at the Kennedy School with Kerry's national security advisor...

Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm.

STAHL: Rand Beers.

Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm. I have worked for Ronald Reagan, I have worked for George Bush one, I have worked for George Bush two. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know.

STAHL: Looking back on September 11th, the day itself, besides the attacks and the--and the horrible images of those planes hitting, what do you remember?

Mr. CLARKE: I remember trying very hard to keep my emotions in check. I knew people in the Pentagon, I knew people in the World Trade Center. I assumed that friends of mine had died, and, in fact, it turned out they had. I felt an enormous rage and anger against al-Qaeda, but also and anger against the US government that we hadn't been able to stop this.

STAHL: Well, I'll tell you something, some of that rage is in this book.

Mr. CLARKE: Well, it should be.

STAHL: Over the weekend we got a note from the Pentagon saying, 'Any suggestion that the president did anything other than act aggressively, quickly and effectively to address the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat in Afghanistan is absurd.'

Copyright 2004 CBS Worldwide Inc.
All Rights Reserved
CBS News Tra