Clarke's colleagues say he's lost credibility

Many of former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's friends are saying his anti-Bush diatribe has cost him his credibility.

When Clarke fingered President Bush for having "botched the response to 9-11," he and other critics left out a major point: Until just two months before the attack, nearly all the senior counterterrorism and intelligence officials on duty at the time were holdovers from the Clinton administration.

From the CIA to the Pentagon to the National Security Council, Clinton holdovers populated the Bush administration's intelligence and counterterrorism community.

While maintaining a seasoned cadre of nonpolitical career professionals in senior national-security posts is considered crucial for any administration, former senior government officials say keeping too many can be damaging to a president when the toughest decisions must be made.

Clarke was the type of man any president would want on his team. Or so it seemed until his stunning denunciations of President Bush and his closest defense and security advisers in Clarke's newly released kiss-and-tell book.

One of the longest-serving staffers ever employed on the NSC, Clarke criticizes the former Clinton administration and trashes the current Bush administration in his revenge tale, "Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror." Afloat on a Niagara of publicity, the book is No. 1 on the Amazon.com sales list.

In his numerous television and press interviews, as well as in testimony before a bipartisan panel investigating U.S. intelligence failures, Clarke is harsher against Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who demoted him after 9-11, than ever he indicated even in his hostile book.

And while Clarke appears to be a righteously angry but often credible accuser, many of his longtime friends are saying publicly that his anti-Bush diatribe has cost him his credibility.

The Clarke drama is a textbook case of why presidents should put their own people in the most sensitive decision-making positions and be choosy about hanging on to officials who served in the previous administration, a former senior NSC official who has served both Democratic and Republican administrations tells Insight.

This flaw in the way Rice staffed the NSC, friends of the president say, led to one of the weakest National Security Councils since the office was created at the dawn of the Cold War, with career foreign-service officers and other Clinton holdovers providing continuity with the past instead of supporting the new president's effort to craft policies consistent with his vision.

Insight often has reported on Clinton-era officials and Republican defectors who have tied Bush's national-security strategy in knots since the beginning of his presidency. Indeed, this magazine reported on Sept. 7, 2001, just four days before the terrorist attacks, that Clinton holdovers continued to run the U.S. intelligence community without needed reforms to deal with post-Cold War threats such as international terrorism.

Days after the carnage, even the president's most bellicose critics in Congress, including Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., were on CNN saying as publicly as they could that they were reconsidering their long-held positions that limited the fight against the terrorist enemy and piously alluding to the need to repeal a post-Watergate executive order banning assassinations abroad.

At that point the president's own defense and security team was still taking shape. His top NSC special assistant for intelligence programs, Mary K. Sturtevant, had been on the job only eight weeks before the 9-11 attacks.

While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs – a fact that helps explain why it took eight months for the Bush administration to draw up a strategic operational plan to destroy al-Qaida.

Making matters worse for the Pentagon leadership after 9-11 were the machinations of a network of senior Clinton political appointees who still held sensitive posts, including Peter F. Verga, Clinton's deputy undersecretary of defense for policy integration, which was a major intelligence post. Senior administration sources tell Insight that Verga made himself useful to the Rumsfeld team but beavered to curry favor at the top, in part by "sniping and playing bureaucratic games" to make life difficult for the incoming defense policy team. Even today the divisive Verga holds a senior homeland-security post at the Defense Department.

Under Clinton, Clarke held a Cabinet-level post as "counterterrorism czar." His powerful position gave him wide-ranging authority to task the intelligence community to focus on specific terrorist threats, and to be the lead point man in developing counterterrorism policy for the president, advising the president and ensuring execution of the policy his way.

Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," is generating headlines around the world that diminish U.S. standing in the middle of the global war on terrorism. The Arabic-language satellite station Al-Jazeera reports that the book "paints a picture of a Bush White House almost impervious to security concerns prior to 11 September and overeager to pin the blame on Iraq after." Sample headlines follow.

Sydney Morning Herald: "Bush Has Made Us Less Safe, Says Counter-terrorism Expert"

Channel News Asia, Singapore: "Former Adviser Insists Bush Did 'Terrible Job' Fighting Terror"

Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates: "Ex-Adviser Says Bush Ignored Terror Threats"

Daily Telegraph, United Kingdom: "Ex-Aide Says Bush Ignored Warnings About Al-Qa'eda"

The Independent, United Kingdom: "Bush Ignored the Al-Qa'ida Threat Before 11 September"

World Socialist: "Former Terrorism Aide Charges Bush Manufactured Case For Iraq War"

He remained in that post until after the counterterrorism failures of 9-11 – failures he told the 9-11 commission were his own – and apparently was kept unaware of an aggressive strategy that the president's still-forming national-security team was developing to destroy al-Qaida and kill Osama bin Laden and his followers.

According to NSC Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, Bush had asked for a strategy to destroy al-Qaida in the earliest days of his presidency. For whatever reason, Clarke gave no indication in his book or his recent public comments that he knew of such a plan, and indeed alleged the opposite. Vice President Richard Cheney told reporters that the failed Clarke "wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff."

Cheney's comment is consistent with previous news reports, which administration officials confirm, that the White House national-security process is unusually compartmented, so that even senior NSC officials would not necessarily know of secret strategic planning.

Much of the reason, administration sources say, is because of the many Clinton holdovers in the top ranks of government who were from the start working to kill plans they didn't like by leaking them to left-wing media.

In October 2001, Rice demoted Clarke to a staff rank on the NSC and put him in charge of cybersecurity. Bush passed him over for an appointment as deputy secretary of the newly created Department of Homeland Security, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, whereupon the bristling Clarke began to boycott regular NSC meetings that Rice chaired.

There was talk in the NSC of Clarke quitting just as his self-described "best friend," NSC Senior Director for Combating Terrorism Rand Beers, was readying to leave to become coordinator of national-security and homeland-security issues for Kerry's presidential campaign in early 2003. After leaving the NSC, Clarke and Beers became adjunct lecturers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, coteaching a course called "Post-Cold War Security: Terrorism, Security and Failed States," according to a Harvard Website.

Some of those who have worked with Clarke have expressed surprise at his sudden vitriolic attacks. Rice and others on the NSC insist that Clarke never made known his present grievances on fighting al-Qaida or preparations for the battle with Iraq while he was in the White House, or even afterward during the early weeks of the Iraq fighting, when Rice and Clarke met for lunch.

The White House has released Clarke's January 2003 resignation letter, which expressed no dissatisfaction or concern about the president's policies.

"I really don't know what Richard Clarke's motivations are," Rice told CNN, "but I'll tell you this: Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction, and he chose not to."

Rice went further in an op-ed for the Washington Post, noting that, contrary to what he is saying now, Clarke never presented her with a plan to go after al-Qaida.

"In response to my request for a presidential initiative, the counterterrorism team, which we had held over from the Clinton administration, suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted. No al-Qaida plan was turned over to the new administration," she emphasized.

One of the most controversial points of Clarke's book is his allegation that after 9-11, "The president dragged me into 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.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection,' and in a very intimidating way."

The White House says it has no record of Clarke and Bush being together at that time. Clarke produced his former deputy, Roger Cressey, as a witness, to verify that the conversation did indeed occur. But Cressey, when questioned by the New York Times, "backed off Mr. Clarke's suggestion that the president's tone was intimidating." Another unnamed witness said the same, according to the Times.

"He's a very dedicated public servant, he's very credible, but he's selling books," said John Lehman, a member of the 9-11 commission, in talking to MSNBC the day before Clarke testified. The next day during the hearing, Lehman was disturbed that Clarke, whom he says he has admired for years, was destroying his credibility.

"You've got a real credibility problem," Lehman told Clarke during the testimony. "Because of my real, genuine, long-term admiration for you," he said, "I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book."

Is Clarke trashing President Bush for partisan reasons? He says he isn't. He implies he voted Republican in 2000. But what about the years since? According to Federal Election Commission records, Clarke has been giving his money to Democratic friends – not Republicans – running for national office.

In 2002, while still on the Bush NSC, Clarke gave the legal maximum limit of $2,000 to a Democratic candidate for Congress, Steve Andreasen, who tried to unseat Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota. Andreasen had been director for defense policy and arms control on the Clinton NSC. In making his donations of $1,000 on July 22 and another $1,000 on Nov. 7, 2002, Clarke listed his occupation as "U.S. Government/Civil Servant," according to FEC records indexed with the Center for Responsive Politics.

Clarke maxed out again in the 2004 election cycle, donating $2,000 to another Clinton White House veteran, Jamie Metzl, who is running as a Democrat for Congress from Missouri. Metzl was a staffer on the Clinton NSC and worked for Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., as deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With that donation, made on Sept. 15, 2003, after his resignation from the Bush NSC, Clarke listed his occupation as "Self Employed/Consultant."

FEC records show that Clarke reported no political contributions when he worked in the Clinton administration in the electoral cycles of the 1990s and 2000, when he said he was a Republican.

While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs

This needs to be brought up again and again

Yes, President Bush handled it so badly that Al-Qaeda's puported operations chief Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, now in detention, said that the US response disrupted the terrorist organisations' plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed.

Source.

I can't imagine what would have happened if Gore had been in his place. I shudder to think of it--or of Kerry sitting there.

I can't imagine what would have happened if Gore had been in his place. I shudder to think of it--or of Kerry sitting there.

That reminds me of what Saddam's evil spawn said about President Bush: something to the effect that he wasn't passive like Bill Clinton.

2 posted on 03/30/2004 5:35:22 PM CST by scarface367 (This tagline will work for food, money, or large weapons)

I had just highlighted the same comments when I noticed you had already posted them so....here they are again. Keep bring it up until people understand the truth laid out here.

For months, Levin personally had held up the confirmation hearings of Bush's appointees who were to design the U.S. antiterrorism strategy – Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Assistant Secretary of "Defense for International Security Programs J.D. Crouch and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman – refusing for apparently partisan purposes to allow them to take office until late July 2001."

"While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs"

"This needs to be brought up again and again"

Bump!!

Beginning December 12, 2000, the Clinton administration did everything they could to impede the transition to the Bush administration and the Democrats continued to drag their feet, hold up nominations and act childish. Someone also should point out that the Director of the FBI was not confirmed until August 2, 2001.

Very cheap hit on Pete Verga. Pete is a real pro who served Reagan and every admin since. One of the best SES people I know of. Highly regarded by the uniformed folks as a square shooter. The unwarranted hit on Verga undermines the rest of the article severely. Though I am sure it has some other points that are valid.

That post should be copied and sent to Hannity, Rush and O'Reilly. It goes to the heart of why the Bush Admin. was having difficulty in the early days. The dims have impeded every action the President has attempted. It's a miracle that he has managed to do anything at all.

What was appalling about the way he tried to convey the 2000 Republican vote was we freepers watching him testify live accurately parsed out what he had just said, yet we had to endure ABC radio news and Norah O'Donnell to be specific, and countless other reporters, screw up and say things like "He testified he's a Republican" or "He voted for George Bush".

Why just yesterday some lib caller to Rush said the latter and Rush knew to correct him that Clarke voted Gore in the general, but even Rush thought Clarke voted Bush in the primary when it was McCain.

Ack

Regarding your very correct comment about Karl Lenin "This needs to be brought up again and again.

It seems to be like swimming upstream to try to stick any of his many hateful attributes to Karl Lenin. The voters of Michigan have elected him to 4 or 5 (6) year terms, and will probably do so again. This is just such a damn dirty shame. Trying to get any of the major newspapers in Michigan, which are all left wing, to follow up on this ba$tard is like pulling teeth.

Uhhhhh .... ok, I'll bite. This was meant as kind of a joke. But with all funny parodies, they are based in the truth. I'll explain.

Missile attacks did nothing to erode al-Queda or it's established position within Afghanistan. If anything, they merely convinced OBL and his band of merry men that they risked no serious military retaliation from the US. Even after attacking US troops in Saudi Arabia. Even after attacking two US embassy's. Even after attacking a US naval warship. A few dozen missiles were launched. Obviously, no serious damage was done to the terrorist network. They were still free to operate unmolested from any one of their dozens of camps within Afghanistan.

I do not remember AlGore suggesting we go after Afghanistan or al-Queda after any of those attacks. I do not remember the "hawk" AlGore suggesting any military action to back up his well documented rhetoric about the WMD's within Iraq and the threat they impose. But, then again, I do not remember President/CIC AlGore making the decision to fire those missiles. Must have missed that.

Back in 1991, I do remember AlGore selling his Gulf War One vote to the side who gave him the most time to speak. Real "hawk" that guy, yessirree.

My point is, given his past performances, I believe he would have treated it as a crime scene, and launched an investigation. Get it.

According to opensecrets.org, Clarke has given to the Democrats for the past 10 years.

And ONLY to the Democrats

...I wonder if Clarke's FBI File was amongst those stolen by Hillary....?

Just a thought...

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