Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Two Interviews with Clarke Julian Borger (UK Guardian) and Joe Conason (Salon) published excellent interviews with Richard Clarke today. Some highlights from the Borger interview: JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true? RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it. JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue? RC: Its not true. I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level - the principal's committee - to review the plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them. JB: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference? RC: Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others. JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks? RC: I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance. JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance? RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it. And from the Conason interview: Why did you write the book now? That's a question they raise. Did it occur to you that this would be an election year and it would be especially controversial because of that, and that these commission hearings were coming up? I wanted the book to come out much earlier, but the White House has a policy of reviewing the text of all books written by former White House personnel -- to review them for security reasons. And they actually took a very long time to do that. This book could have come out much earlier. It's the White House that decided when it would be published, not me. I turned it in toward the end of last year, and even though there was nothing in it that was not already obviously unclassified, they took a very, very long time. Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that you were not "in the loop," and that you're angry because you were passed over by Condi Rice for greater authority. And in fact you were dropped from Cabinet-level position to something less than that. How do you respond to what the Vice President said? The vice president is becoming an attack dog, on a personal level, which should be beneath him but evidently is not. I was in the same meetings that Dick Cheney was in, during the days after 9/11. Condi Rice and Dick Cheney appointed me as co-chairman of the interagency committee called the "Campaign Committee" -- the "campaign" being the war on terrorism. So I was co-chairing the interagency process to fight the war on terrorism after 9/11. I don't think I was "out of the loop." The vice president commented that there was "no great success in dealing with terrorists" during the 1990s, when you were serving under President Clinton. He asked, "What were they doing?" It's possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn't know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn't notice. Why did they keep you on, if they were so uninterested in what you were focused on? And then why did they downgrade your position? They said, in so many words, at the time, that they didn't have anyone in their Republican coterie of people that came in with Bush, who had an expertise in this [counterterrorism] area [and] who wanted the job. And they actually said they found the job a little strange -- since it wasn't there when they had been in power before. Dr. Rice said that. Yes, Dr. Rice said that. And the first thing they asked was for me to look at taking some of the responsibilities, with regard to domestic 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? 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. Is it true that you're a registered Republican, as someone told me yesterday? Well, I vote in Virginia, and you can't register as a Republican or a Democrat in Virginia. The only way that anybody ever knows your party affiliation in Virginia is when you vote in a primary, because you have to ask for either a Republican or a Democratic ballot. And in the year 2000, I voted in the Republican presidential primary. That's the only record in the state of Virginia of my interest or allegiance. Will you tell me whom you voted for in the Republican presidential primary in Virginia in 2000? Yeah, I voted for John McCain. 10:57:44 AM    comment [] Time Magazine on Clarke (August 2002) It's interesting how Richard Clarke has to be interviewed on 60 Minutes to attract significant media attention, because his story was already told in an extensive August 2002 Time magazine article. Here are some quotes that put recent comments about Clarke by Administration officials in a different light (note especially the bold sections): "... Clarke had a set of proposals to 'roll back' al-Qaeda ... Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble -- Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen -- would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to 'eliminate the sanctuary' where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. ... Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost 'several hundreds of millions of dollars.' In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to 'everything we've done since 9/11.' And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. "A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, [Clark] has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat." "Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, 'had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy.' But doing so meant delay." "It was Bush who broke the deadlock [regarding Clark's plan]. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of 'swatting at flies' and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and said, 'The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda.' Clarke reminded her that he already had one." "In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. 'George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack,' says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ('They always have wall charts') with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. ... But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of relief: 'A lot of folks started letting their guard down.' After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. 'There was one meeting scheduled for August,' says a senior official, 'but too many principals were out of town.' Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper. The article is well worth reading. It provides an excellent synopsis of pre-9/11 intelligence on Al-Quaeda and counter-terrorism planning. And it implies plenty of damning things about the Clinton Administration's response to Al-Qaeda -- things that support Bob Kerry's expressions of frustration today during the hearings. 1:12:37 AM    comment []

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