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<p>A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.</p>

`So,'' Lincoln supposedly said to the White House visitor, ``you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.'' Harriet Beecher Stowe's ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' published in 1852, quickly sold 300,000 copies -- equivalent to 3 million today -- and remains the only book to become an American history-shaping political event. When the dust settles from the eight days that shook the world of Washington -- spanning Richard Clarke's appearance two Sundays ago on ``60 Minutes'' to his appearance last Sunday on ``Meet the Press'' -- no one will say of his ``Against All Enemies'' what Longfellow...

In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't." So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme. The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard...

First we had It Takes a Village. Then there was Living History. Now we have Against All Enemies. Like the first, it was not written by Hillary Clinton and, like the second, it is revisionist history at its worst. Mr. Clarke -- former White House terrorism "czar" during the era of al-Qaeda's first round of attacks on America -- is doing his best to sink President Bush. If you listened to Clarke's testimony to the 9-11 Commission this week, you would have heard that Mr. Bush came into office and -- with the Wolfowitz snarling at the White House door...

The always fascinating Dan Drezner has a bunch of good posts up.. sorry, we are going to skip to the red meat: On Page 127 [of his new "Against All Enemies"], Clarke notes that it's possible that al-Qaida operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building." Intelligence places Nichols there on the same days as Ramzi Yousef, and "we do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippines stay and were deadly when he returned." This ties in to the theory that Clinton quashed investigations into a foreign connection to Terry...

WASHINGTON - Anyone picking up Richard Clarke’s book "Against All Enemies" who hopes for a strict, dry bureaucratic tome on counter-terror policy will be disappointed. Yes, the book has its share of cumbersome phrases like Critical Infrastructure Protection Group and Strategic Information and Operations Center. But Clarke talks beyond the wonks. He heads straight for the politicos. He gets real juicy — liberally taking potshots at President Bush while heaping praise on President Clinton. And he makes pop political references, which some might find odd for a counterterrorism czar. In short, Clarke’s book is a Clinton defenders’ delight. Some examples:...

<p>Books about public policy and the careers of bureaucrats rarely become national sensations. But Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is generating intense interest far beyond Washington's Beltway.</p> <p>Clarke, the former top White House counterterrorism official, says President Bush and his advisers ignored his warnings in 2001 that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent and were fixated on going to war in Iraq.</p>

SOURCES: CLARKE 'TO EARN OVER $1 MILLION FOR BOOK'; CONTRACT: BONUSES ADDED **Exclusive** Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke is on track to earn over $1 million in cash advance and royalties for his controversial book AGAINST ALL ENEMIES, publishing sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. "Mr. Clarke's six-figure advance will soon turn into a seven-figure compensation, if sales continue at this pace," a top source at Clarke's imprint SIMON & SCHUSTER reveals. "Astonishingly, we are already approaching a point where the advance paid to Mr. Clarke is covered." AGAINST ALL ENEMIES sold more than 140,000 unites in its first week, a...

Best-selling 9/11 author Richard Clarke rebuffed critics on Sunday who urged him to donate all the proceeds from his bestselling book "Against All Enemies," saying he might need to keep the money to defend himself against Republican attacks "directed at my bank account." While saying he "plans" to make "a substantial donation" to 9/11 victim families if book profits allow, Clarke told NBC's "Meet the Press," "The word is out in the White House to destroy me professionally." "One line that somebody overheard is that he's not going to make another dime I Washington again in his life," Clarke explained....

<p>March 27, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The Senate's top Republican yesterday accused former anti-terror czar Richard Clarke of an "appalling act of profiteering" by using his insider status to sell a book about 9/11. In a dramatic speech on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) slammed Clarke as an opportunist and called his decision to write a book relying on insider information from his time in the White House "self-serving."</p>

Kowtowing to terror invites more atrocities WE live in the age of the great terror, or so our politicians must think. Terrorism and how to combat it is the dominant political issue across the Western world. Tom Friedman, the liberal foreign affairs columnist in The New York Times, wrote passionately this week, imploring the Spanish Socialists to reverse their decision to pull troops out of Iraq. Friedman's logic is incontestable. Up to now, every terrorist bombing against the West has hardened resolve to fight the terrorists. But the Spanish decision to withdraw looks like al-Qa'ida had a victory, convincing a...

The former White House counter-terrorism advisor, Richard A. Clarke, has scored a coup by forcing official Washington to buy a book. Clarke's newly released tome, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, unleashed a media firestorm because it accuses the Bush administration of manipulating the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was lost on no one that Clarke's most damning allegation—that the administration sought, deceitfully, to implicate the former Iraqi regime in the Al Qaeda hijackings—came on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Nor could anyone avoid linking the book's publication to...

NEW YORK (AFP) - A book that charges President George W. Bush (news - web sites) with failing to take al-Qaeda seriously enough before the September 11 attacks has shot to the top of the bestseller lists on a wave of hype and controversy. Since going on sale Monday, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" has gone through six printings as the publisher, the Free Press -- an imprint of Simon and Schuster -- has struggled to keep up with demand. Written by Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents, including Bush, the book says...

Clinton administration diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz charged Monday that one-time White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke blocked his efforts to have Osama bin Laden extradited from the Sudan to the United States five years before the 9/11 attacks. "I was personally asked to brief Condoleezza Rice's deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, on exactly what had gone wrong in the previous efforts to get bin Laden out of the Sudan, to get the terrorism data out of the Sudan," Ijaz told Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends." "In each case of things that were involved in the Clinton administration, Richard...