Unheeded Warnings
Comment Unheeded Warnings Whenever Bush gets criticized, his palace guard descends upon the person who dares to question his Highness. That's the way it was when Paul O'Neill, Bush's former...
...From its first days in office, the Bush Administration showed a stunning disregard for the Al Qaeda threat and an obsession with going to war in Iraq, Clarke writes...
...And that shooting gallery is getting more dangerous by the day...
...troops there...
...He adds that he himself e-mailed Rice that "Al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America...
...It has metastasized," Clarke writes...
...Clarke said he told Powell that this was foolish...
...And that's the way it went from then on...
...Rice was especially uninformed, he says...
...My message was stark: Al Qaeda is at war with us, it is a highly capable organization, probably with sleeper cells in the U.S., and it is clearly planning a major series of attacks against us," he writes...
...Not since the most paranoid days of Richard Nixon has a group in the White House so abused its power...
...soldiers dead, ninety-nine Iraqis killed, and hundreds wounded just in the first three days...
...And that's the way it is today, with Bush surrogates unloading on Richard A. Clarke...
...In preparing for that meeting, Clarke said he urged Rice to "put herself in her own shoes when in the very near future Al Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans: 'What will you wish then that you had already done?'" At the September 4 meeting, Clarke said, no one disagreed about "the urgency and seriousness of the Al Qaeda threat...
...Clarke to dissemble in front of the media...
...That they would try to use an airplane as a missile...
...Wolfowitz: "Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much...
...That's the way it was when Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury Secretary, said Bush wanted to go to war against Iraq way before 9/11...
...There is good reason why the Bush Administration went all out against Clarke...
...Clarke said his team protected the 1996 Atlanta Olympics from the threat of an aerial attack by terrorists...
...At that briefing, he clearly identified Al Qaeda as the author of the attacks...
...Having been attacked by Al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor," Clarke said he told Powell, who agreed and responded, according to Clarke, "It's not over yet...
...At a preliminary meeting in April, Rice was the least of Clarke's problems...
...Paul Wolfowitz: "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden...
...President, Al Qaeda did this...
...And in August 2001, Rice was warned that Al Qaeda might hijack planes...
...But he didn't stop there...
...He deftly handled Tim Russert on Meet the Press...
...Bush's chief recourse is to increase the repression in Iraq...
...And much of the Iraqi population despises the presence of U.S...
...It is one thing for Mr...
...So he was surprised to see the discussion in the White House turn to Iraq within twenty-four hours...
...Rice took her sweet time, he writes...
...The commander in chief also was...
...And if she did know about them, she was flat-out lying...
...Within a week of Bush's inauguration, Clarke wrote Rice to urgently propose the convening of a meeting of the Principals Committee on the imminent Al Qaeda threat...
...Clarke says he did have some allies in the room, in particular Powell and George Tenet...
...See if he's linked in any way...
...It has left "our Army stretched to the breaking point, our international credibility at an all-time low, Muslims further radicalized against us, our relations with key allies damaged, and our soldiers in a shooting gallery...
...He's not going to make another dime in Washington again," one White House staffer said, according to Clarke, who said he heard about that comment from a friend he still has there...
...I want to know any shred...
...But in 1994, the French had intercepted a plot by Al Qaeda to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower...
...I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former Al Qaeda corporate board, and soon perhaps, Osama bin Laden, while the new clones of Al Qaeda are working the back alleys and dark warrens of Baghdad, Cairo, Jakarta, Karachi, Detroit, and Newark, using the scenes from Iraq to stoke the hatred of America even further, recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush's little charts, not until it is again too late...
...See if Saddam did this...
...But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress, it is a far more serious matter...
...You give bin Laden too much credit...
...Clarke says he briefed Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell about the danger...
...Clarke: "Absolutely, we will look...
...Bush acted like the fight against Al Qaeda is "a Harvard Business School exercise in a hostile takeover," Clarke writes...
...He more than held his own under sometimes harsh questioning by the bipartisan commission looking into 9/11...
...Rice did not call a formal Principals Meeting to discuss the Al Qaeda threat until September 4, 2001...
...At first, I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda...
...The resistance to the occupation has now morphed into something qualitively different-and more ominous...
...It waged this illegal, unnecessary war...
...That's the way it was when former ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with his account of how the Bush Administration played up the false story of uranium in Niger...
...it regenerates the hostility it sets out to conquer...
...Iraqi terrorism, for example...
...In 2002, Rice claimed she couldn't possibly have known about the possibility of Al Qaeda hijacking planes and using them as weapons...
...war on terrorism, Clarke maintains...
...Meanwhile, the threat from Al Qaeda may only be growing...
...troops died in Iraq during March, up from twenty-one in February," the AP reported, making March the second deadliest month for U.S...
...But it ill serves our democracy...
...Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen...
...But it was not just Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who were obsessed with Iraq...
...I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term," Clarke writes...
...Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq...
...Not only is this the opposite of installing democracy...
...It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that the United States has worn out its welcome as an occupying power...
...But you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq...
...troops since last May...
...Condoleezza Rice, May 2002 Bush's Iraq War has "strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide...
...All along, it seemed inevitable that we would invade," he writes...
...Iraq was portrayed as the most dangerous thing in national security...
...In the lead up to the war, the Bush Administration repeatedly tried to lump September 11 and Iraq together...
...Even during the transition between the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration, the new team took little interest in Al Qaeda, Clarke writes...
...The April 4 uprising shows that the armed opposition has spread dramatically...
...The Bush Administration is in a trap of its own making...
...The White House guard wants to rule by fear and intimidation...
...The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster for the U.S...
...And the CIA Director provided Bush with daily briefings "replete with threat information on Al Qaeda," Clarke says...
...At least forty-eight U.S...
...Within hours, the Bush goons were threatening O'Neill with prosecution for allegedly publicizing classified information...
...Rumsfeld, however, "looked distracted throughout the session," Clarke says, "and took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq...
...Going to the United Nations was a charade, though Clarke does not use that term...
...Senator Bill Frist "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another and slam it into the Pentagon...
...Richard A. Clarke...
...Then the White House tried to blackball him...
...Just look...
...For those without Clarke's thick skin and fast feet, that threat may serve its silencing purpose...
...In 1995, police in the Philippines found evidence of a possible plot to hijack a plane and fly it into the CIA...
...Again...
...The Bush Administration has no credibility anymore on Iraq...
...A hijacked airplane as a missile...
...Clarke: "But, Mr...
...Clarke was not some lowly Administration official who played a minor part in the immediate aftermath of the Al Qaeda attack...
...It bungled the occupation in the early days...
...Nor can he maintain the fiction that the resistance confines itself to the so-called Sunni triangle...
...Frist went on to make unsubtle threats about prosecuting Clarke for perjury, alleging that Clarke lied to Congress...
...His book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, is a devastating critique of the one central issue that Bush and Rove want to run the election campaign on: the Administration's efforts to keep us safe...
...Its efforts at hand-picking the next government of Iraq are transparent and discredited...
...There are now many Al Qaedas, he argues, with cells dispersed far and wide, acting in a quasi-independent manner...
...The President: "Look into Iraq, Saddam...
...In January 2001, the new Administration really thought Clinton's recommendation that eliminating Al Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd...
...It was an id?e fixe, a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail...
...So if Rice didn't know about these threats, she was grossly incompetent...
...The President: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved...
...Actually, he was the guy who ran the emergency Principals Meeting in the White House late on September 11...
...Here is the account Clarke provides of a conversation the President had with him in the Situation Room late on September 11: The President: "I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything...
...Writes Clarke: "What a horrible thing it was to give such a false impression to our people, and our troops...
...And the reckless threats from Senator Frist have come off, even for this crowd, as heavy-handed...
...The gruesome murder and mutilation of the four Americans in Fallujah on March 31 was a horrific illustration of this...
...Like former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, Clarke says that Bush wanted to get Saddam long before September 11...
...Bush can no longer credibly maintain that the only two groups taking up arms against the occupation are Saddam holdouts and foreign terrorists...
...Clarke: "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...
...Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq...
...Within days, the White House was outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA officer, with Karl Rove reportedly saying, "His wife's now fair game...
...Even Dick Cheney said in his speech this March 17, "In 1996, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad-the mastermind of 9/11-first proposed to Osama bin Laden that they use hijacked airliners to attack targets in the USA...
...Doing Bush's dirty work, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist slammed Clarke for being, in Frist's words, "consumed by the desire to dodge blame for the 9/11 attacks" and for "profiteering...
...Her main recommendation, he says, was for him to downsize his office and downgrade his position as national coordinator for counterterrorism so he no longer would be a member of the Principals Committee-the gathering of Cabinet heads...
...The Administration's efforts to muzzle and smear Clarke have not succeeded...
...Fueling this hostility are two powerful forces: Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism...
...So, too, was the Shiite uprising that began on April 4, which left eighteen U.S...
...But the White House guard has sent a message to others who may want to come forward with crucial information to debate: If you do so, we're going to go after you...
...At the end of his book, Clarke ridicules Bush's penchant for having a chart of Al Qaeda leaders to cross off after they are captured or killed...
Vol. 68 • May 2004 • No. 5
