Free Republic

Letter To the Editor [of The Sunday New York Times Book Review]: I would like to respond to your review of the timely books ''Against All Enemies,'' by Richard A. Clarke, and ''Ghost Wars,'' by Steve Coll (April 11). I say ''timely'' because I am in the process of reading both, and I find a curious difference in the way they report a certain incident. ''Ghost Wars'' describes a discussion at the Clinton White House of the pros and cons of cruise missile attacks on hunting camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden might have been. Despite his evident desire...

If you want the real book on Richard Clarke—minus the Bush-administration attacks and Clarke’s self-promotion—read Ghost Wars, Steve Coll’s new book on the CIA in Afghanistan. “His enemies regarded him as not only mean, but dangerous,” writes Coll, managing editor of the Washington Post. “So palpably did he thrive on an air of sinister mystery,” Coll writes, that Clarke chose Oliver North’s old White House office. Coll is not the first journalist to detect and use Clarke’s knowledge of the sinister and mysterious. While Clarke was White House terrorism czar, he often showed up in news dispatches as an unnamed...