President Asked Aide to Explore Iraq Link to 9/11

ASHINGTON, March 28 — The White House acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked his top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to find out whether Iraq was involved.

Mr. Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recounted in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Mr. Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Mr. Clarke "a perfectly logical question," Ms. Rice said.

The conversation — which the White House suggested last week had never taken place — centers on perhaps the most volatile charge Mr. Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on Al Qaeda.

In his new book, "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke recounts that the president pulled him and several other aides into the White House Situation Room on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, and instructed them "to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."

Mr. Clarke was incredulous, he said in the book. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this," he said he responded.

Mr. Bush answered: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred," according to Mr. Clarke's account. Mr. Clarke added in later interviews that he felt he was being intimidated to find a link between the attacks and Iraq.

Last week, the White House said it had no record that Mr. Bush had even been in the Situation Room that day and said the president had no recollection of such a conversation. Although administration officials stopped short of denying the account, they used it to cast doubt on Mr. Clarke's credibility as they sought to debunk the charge that the administration played down the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks and worried instead about Iraq.

The political fallout over Mr. Clarke's charges intensified on Sunday, as he and four of the president's top advisers traded jabs in separate televised appearances over the question of whether the Bush White House did enough to deter terrorism before Sept. 11.

Mr. Clarke, in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," urged the Bush administration to make public the testimony he gave in 2002 to a joint Congressional committee that was investigating the attacks.

He said declassifying his testimony — as well as other memorandums and materials from Ms. Rice and the administration — would show he had long complained that the Bush administration failed to take aggressive action against Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In particular, he urged the administration to make public a memorandum on counterterrorism initiatives that he wrote just days after Mr. Bush took office, as well as a counterterrorism plan that the White House ultimately approved more than seven months later, a week before the attacks.

"Let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't," he said. "And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on Jan. 25 and what they finally agreed to on Sept. 4 is that they are basically the same thing, and they wasted months when we could have had some action."

Meanwhile, members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Ms. Rice to appear publicly before the commission to explain the events leading up to the attack.

Ms. Rice "has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission, said in an interview. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Ms. Rice met with the commission in February to discuss pre-Sept. 11 initiatives, but an official involved in that meeting said the White House insisted that she not be put under oath and that the session not be recorded. Commissioners were allowed to take notes, but no transcript of her comments is thought to exist.

The White House says that having the national security adviser testify in public would compromise executive privilege and the president's ability to get confidential advice.

The commission and the White House are continuing to discuss the possibility of Ms. Rice's reappearance. Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who is co-chairman of the panel, said on "Fox News Sunday" that "we are still going to press and still believe unanimously as a commission that we should hear from her in public," although he added that a subpoena was unlikely.

Ms. Rice, for her part, said on "60 Minutes" that "nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify."

Analysts say Mr. Clarke's charges could do significant political damage to a president who has built his foreign policy record largely around the campaign against terrorism. Republican leaders have responded in force, suggesting that Mr. Clarke's testimony last week was at odds with the closed testimony he gave before the joint Congressional panel in 2002 and that he may have lied in one or both appearances.

But intelligence officials familiar with his classified briefing said they were aware of no obvious contradictions. Mr. Ben-Veniste said he thought Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony should be declassified to resolve any dispute, but he added that "it is not my recollection that there were any notable or substantive differences in testimony."

Mr. Clarke's Congressional testimony, given while he was still at the White House, put a more "positive spin" on the administration's counterterrorism efforts, just as he did in a 2002 press briefing that was released last week, said a senior Democratic Congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. But factually, it did not appear to contradict what Mr. Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week, the aide said.

Mr. Clarke's assessment last week is also generally consistent with journalistic and Congressional accounts of the early Bush administration's approach to terrorism.

In Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," the president himself acknowledged that Osama bin Laden had not been a central focus in the eight months before the attacks.

"I was not on point," Mr. Bush was quoted in the book as saying. "I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Similarly, the public report of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures, released last December, said that the Bush administration did not begin a major counterterrorism policy review until April 2001 and that "significant slippage in counterterrorism policy may have taken place in late 2000 and early 2001," in part because of Mr. Clarke's "unresolved status" as head of counterterrorism. He had that role under Clinton and for the first few months of the Bush administration. After Sept. 11, 2001, he had a more limited role as cyberterrorism adviser.

The public report does not describe Mr. Clarke's testimony before the joint committee in great detail, but it does suggest that he found areas of concern in counterterrorism coordination during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Although Mr. Bin Laden would become an urgent priority in the late 1990's, "Mr. Clarke told the Joint Inquiry that Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah were the most important terrorist concerns during the first Clinton administration," the report said.

In general, the report said, "Mr. Clarke noted that the White House `never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the Intelligence Community about what the priorities were at the national level,' " although the time period he described was unclear.

The Bush administration, which fought successfully to keep sensitive parts of last year's joint inquiry out of the public report, did not say if it would agree to declassify material from Mr. Clarke or Ms. Rice.

But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said he would prefer publicizing as much relevant material as possible. "We're not trying to hide anything," he said.

Mr. Powell said an examination of Mr. Clarke's assessment in 2002 showed "inconsistencies and contradictions between what he is saying now and what he said then." And he said it was wrong to suggest the Bush administration simply abandoned the counterterrorism priorities of the Clinton administration.

"That's not the case," he said. "They weren't out bombing Afghanistan and invading Afghanistan and we suddenly said stop."

Ms. Rice, in particular, "is getting a bit of a bum rap," Mr. Powell said. She and other key advisers aggressively formulated counterterrorism policy, he said, but "unfortunately, we never got the information or intelligence that we needed to tell us that these 19 guys were in the country and already there was a plot under way."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and ABC's "This Week," disputing Mr. Clarke's charges that the administration had not devoted sufficient attention to terrorism and had been unduly focused on Iraq. And Terry Holt, the chief spokesman of the Bush campaign, called Mr. Clarke "a political opportunist" on CNN's "Inside Politics Sunday."

Mr. Clarke said the administration is intent on attacking him personally through a "character assassination campaign" rather than debating the arguments he has raised about Mr. Bush's prosecution of the campaign against terrorism.

"After 9/11, I say that by going into Iraq he has really hurt the war on terrorism," he said. "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."

To rebut the administration's criticism of his credibility, he produced a handwritten letter from Mr. Bush at the time of his resignation, dated Jan. 31, 2003, that read: "Dear Dick: You will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government."

Last week, the White House produced a resignation letter of its own — one from Mr. Clarke to Mr. Bush — in which the seasoned adviser praised the president for his "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11.

It was only logical that Bush would ask if Iraq did it after fifteen Saudis were involved. After Pearl Harbor and seeing the rising sun on the planes involved, FDR asked: "Did the Germans do it"?

According to Clarke's logic, this post card proves that Bush warrants everything Clarke says about him subsequently. It's no wonder that Clarke carried little weight while at his job, a fact which we can all understand by his performance before us.

"Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who is co-chairman of the panel, said on "Fox News Sunday" that "we are still going to press and still believe unanimously as a commission that we should hear from her in public,"

His publisher (Simon & Shultzer) has told him that the publicity that would be generated by the TV coverage of Condi...'s testimony would be worth an additional $1,000,000 in sales of the book he is writing.

I know...ridiculous. It's all a part of the DEM strategy to say "Iraq was a distraction in the war on terror" which is a complete lie.

Besides, it was CLINTON that signed the order to make REGIME CHANGE IN IRAQ government policy in 1998! So Bush was just following his lead!

Face it. Democrats are nothing but worthless, lying pieces of human feces rotting under the bed of whores. And that is their good trait.

That seems to be what stands out...Clarke wanted a personal forum instead of a procedural forum...and he acts like HE was the only one working on terrorism. As far as I can tell, he was submitting bits and quips and nothing comprehensive.

On Meet The Press, Clarke claimed terrorists were being turned out in "conveyor belt" fashion by the "thousands" prior to 9/11, apparently only in Afganistan. He also claimed that the Muslims were really p.o.'d by our invasion of Iraq, thus increasing terrorist production, which he seems to think is now occurring outside of Afganistan as a result, leading to the "creating terrorists" charge.

Clarke appears to be arguing that the Muslims would not have been p.o.'d if we had stuck only to Afganistan, thus not increasing or causing terrorist production outside of Afganistan. This assumption seems to me arbitrary at best, delusional otherwise. [Or is there some other factor here I'm missing?]

Along that line, Clarke characterized what he alleged was toning or slanting to praise the Bush Adm. [when he gave his "background" briefing] not in terms of "morality" [lying] but rather as "politics", for which he received some applause from the peanut gallery.

Apparently he has no idea that there is something called reality, and that this is what he was supposed to be dealing with in his job as chief counterterrorist. He seems to be a true liberal, concerned only with himself.

And wasn't there a connection between VX nerve gas, which was supposedly being produced in a Sudanese factory in 1998, and Saddam Hussein? In fact, it was Clarke who insisted it was so, which led to the bombing of an aspirin factory. The US later had to pay restitution, hundreds of thousands of dollars IIRC, to the owner of the factory.

In my opinion, we the people should get the proceeds from lil Dicky's book -- he owes it to us!

And for more on why on the president would want to explore an Iraq connection, read Appendix A from Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden. And see what James Woolsey has to say on the subject.

The one thing that really caught my attention on 60 Minutes last night was Ed Bradley stating as a matter of fact that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Condi should have blown her top when he said that. Here is Ed Bradley, national correspondent for 60 minutes, who hasn't done his homework.

Case Closed OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1022083/posts

Lo and behold, two weeks after 9-11, Anthrax shows up at media centers with a "9-11-01" date at the top of the notes.

Now, who does one think of when one thinks "hmmm, who uses WMD?". I believe Kelly said that they were surprised to find during their search that Iraq had progressed in their Anthrax program and was specific to the milling.

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