By Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fuming U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice accused former counter-terrorism aide Richard Clarke on Wednesday of shifting positions from backing President Bush's war on terrorism to now questioning it.
Clarke has accused Bush of a fixation on Iraq, but Rice said Clarke did not raise those concerns with her. She said after his resignation 13 months ago, she invited him to lunch three weeks before the start of the U.S.-led war against Iraq to thank him for his years of service.
Clarke had "not a word about concerns that Iraq was going to somehow take us off the path of the war on terrorism. It would've been easy to do, kick the others out, close the door, say 'I just want you to know I think you're making a mistake.' He didn't do it," she told reporters in her West Wing office.
Rice, in normal circumstances an even-keeled top White House aide, was unusually incensed during a half-hour briefing for reporters in her West Wing office, as she castigated her former employee. She also went on television to make her case.
Her comments reflected ongoing White House frustration with Clarke, who has threatened the underpinning of Bush's re-election strategy as an activist in the war on terrorism.
Clarke has dominated news cycles this week with a book, interviews and public testimony accusing Bush of failing to act on the threat of al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and for being fixated on Iraq.
To underline her case that the Bush administration was acting on the threat, Rice read from a letter from Clarke on Sept. 15, 2001, in which Clarke detailed meetings from the previous June and July about preparations being taken to prepare for the possibility of a "spectacular al Qaeda terrorist attack."
MEETING WITH OFFICIALS
"We asked that they take special measures to increase security and surveillance," Clarke wrote of a July 5, 2001, meeting with FBI, Secret Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Customs, Coast Guard and Immigration officials.
The White House has gone to great lengths to try to discredit Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism czar, by accusing him of being a disgruntled former employee who did not get a promotion and whose best friend is a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Rice said Clarke's criticism expressed in his book, in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview and testimony on Capitol Hill, were directly opposite to what he told reporters in an August 2002 briefing.
Clarke said in testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration considered terrorism important but not urgent, while the previous Clinton administration, for which he also served, considered it a top priority.
"There's two very different pictures here, and the fact of the matter is these stories can't be reconciled," Rice said. "Either we were ignoring the threat, or now it's changed that it was important but not urgent, or we were actually responding to the things that he actually suggested, which is what he said in the August 2002 interview."
Rice is not testifying before the 9/11 commission based on a White House principle that a presidential adviser who has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate should not give public testimony. Commissioners are calling on her to testify.
About that call, she said: "I would like to be very clear that this is not a matter of preference. I would like nothing better than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."
In February she spent four hours privately with the commission and said she would be available to answer more questions. "I'm prepared to spend longer with them, any where they want, any time they want, answer as many questions as they have," she said.
Rice described Clarke as a sometimes difficult employee who was "too busy" to come to some meetings she chaired until she finally demanded he appear.
"I know how to manage people, and I asked him to come once. We continued to have a problem, I asked him to come twice. We didn't have a problem after that," she said.
