for which he has "little sympathy," as he writes in The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse, an op ed in today's Washington Post. He is very blunt - the White House ignored all it was told about the reality of terrorism until after 9/11, and then worried less about the security implications and more about the political implications for their administration.
Clarke has told us before about the dereliction of duty with respect to terrorism of the Bushites. From him - and Paul O'Neill - we know about the administration's fixation about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, from the beginning of the administration and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And it becomes ever more clear that the driving forces behind the flawed policy were most of the supposed experts on Bush's security team, starting with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and including both as mouthpiece and enabler Rice. We do not yet know the full scope of Powell's role, and if he wants any rehabilitation except by being attacked by Cheney and Limbaugh, perhaps he will need to speak out more.
But let's focus on what Clarke has to tell us:
Clarke takes us back to the day of the attack. Some of what he offers is telling, such as
Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room.
This seems to confirm what many have always expected - during much of that first day the President was out of the loop with the Vice President running the government. That may well have included issuing an order to shoot down the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania before it could hit Washington.
Clarke understands the traumatic effects - he notes that many did not expect to leave the White House alive that day. Certainly that would leave scars,and he does not discount that, even as he rejects the rhetoric of justification offered by Rice and Cheney, the latter increasingly so since reappearing recently on public airwaves. Here it is worth noting the superb piece dissecting Cheney's recent American Enterprise Institute speech on security by McClatchy's Jonathan Landau and Warren Strobel, entitled Cheney's speech ignored some inconvenient truths, in which they detail 10 clear misstatements and untruths offered by the former Vice President (Frank Rich also makes use of this McClatchy piece in his superb column today).
But Clarke disagrees - strongly - with the rhetoric the two Bush administration figures, Cheney and Rice, offer for the actions that flowed from that day of horror. He quotes Rice as saying that after the attacks "you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again." He then writes:
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Anyone who paid attention knew this much - for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack We have stories of Sandy Berger trying to tell Rice that the most important brief she would have would be Al Qaeda. We have Bush's response to the PDB of August 6 - "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U. S." - as being "you've covered your ass." We know that Ashcroft had stalled and refused to take any action on concerns about terrorism.
Clarke notes that the reaction after that horrible September day was to authorize the most extreme actions without any idea of whether they would work. That is probably not new to most reading this. But now he makes an assertion, phrased as a speculation, that is far more revealing. He begins it like this:
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
Ponder that. If Clarke is right, and I suspect he is in a position to know, the actions that flowed with respect to Iraq, an action which can fairly be called an aggressive war of choice costing the lives of tens of thousands, only a small fraction of which were American, was done for domestic political purposes. That is why anyone who opposed, who criticized, who offered more reasonable approaches in response, had to be destroyed, less the entire fabric of lies being posited unraveled and exposed the Bush administration's failure to protect the American people. That is why we hear continued assertions that no subsequent attack occurred as a justification for suspension of civil liberties and the use of torture, even though the most serious planned attack was called off because the planners did not think it a serious enough escalation - read Rich's column to understand this point.
Remember that the administration had ignored the warnings of many to pay attention to Al Qaeda. Lacking the requisite knowledge about the enemy who had attacked us, they went further astray:
While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea.
Clarke points us at multiple examples of how the actions of the administration merely aggravated an already bad situation. He reminds us that Charles Duelfer has written administration officials urged waterboarding of specific Iraqi prisoners of war, that the administration abandoned an extant system of incarceration and prosecution of terrorism suspects that had had a 100% rate of conviction for its untried alternative program that included Guantanamo and various black sites, it ignored the successful interrogation methods of the FBI and replaced them with untested methods of enhanced interrogation, and it used the minor flaws of the FISA system as an excuse to abandon a system that required oversight in favor of more extreme methods. On this last point Clarke does not mention something important: just as torture leads to many false leads that waste resources that should be narrowly focused on information obtained from proper interrogation, similarly the broad sweep of electronic communication gathered by the FBI was too unfocused to allow meaningful investigative followup. And we should remember that even before 9/11, the NSA had information that was not being processed in a timely matter, and that the administration's failures to act on the warnings they were given about Al Qaeda meant that two of the hijackers were living with a known FBI informant and yet that information was never appropriately communicated.
Of course, we know about the attempts of Colleen Rowley and others to alert the government to the threats at least implied by the information that was available. It is ironic that the government then was more concerned about procedures so that, for example, a computer in its possession was not properly search, something that COULD have provided information allowing disruption of the 9/11 plot. Ironic that the response by Bush and company was to cover their backsides by abandoning any meaningful procedure, and then attempting to blame figures in the previous administration - Reno and Gorelick - for the failure of THEIR ADMINISTRATION to properly evaluate and communicate important intelligence information.
Clarke notes that under Bush techniques and procedures that were working under Clinton were abandoned, and the reason that people like Cheney and Rice were surprised by 9/11 is that they had not listened to what they were being told. They chose to use untested methods - torture, for example - that were counterproductive.
Clarke offers a quote from Cheney arguing how the impact of 9?11 changed perspectives - surely by now we are sick of hearing that "9/11 changed everything." Clarke argues that "defense" does not stand up, and concludes as follows:
The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
Perhaps I missed it. Perhaps there has been serious discussion in the so-called mainstream media of how the reactions of the Bush administration were more for domestic political purposes than for those of national security. And certainly the administration did NOT keep us safe - that line of reasoning conveniently ignores the anthrax attacks. Nor were we ever directly asked how much of our liberty we were prepared to surrender to be "protected" by an administration that had failed miserably in that very task in its first year in office.
I sometimes wonder if the reluctance to fully examine what happened both before and immediately after 9/11 is because in the former case one could argue that criminal charges of dereliction of duty would have been appropriate, along with impeachments for failure to fulfill the responsibilities of various offices. And as to the latter, far too many in both parties acquiesced in the attempted destruction of the American system of government; they were complicit in the most serious undermining of our constitutional system in our history, which is why John Dean was correct to call it "Worse Than Watergate."
I fully expect that Cheney, Rice and company and their surrogates on talk radio and as talking heads will ferociously attack Clarke. If what he suggests becomes part of the conversation, they are in serious jeopardy, not merely legally, but in terms of being rejected in horror around the world, even more so than is already the case.
So let me repeat the important words, with emphasis added:
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
It is hard for me to pivot to my normal final salutation after exploring this, but I will, because it is our only hope, and should whenever possible be our goal:
Peace.