Elisabeth Bumiller
and Judith Miller
March 23, 2004
WASHINGTON – As the White House began an aggressive personal attack yesterday against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, a furious debate broke out about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after Sept. 11, 2001, to come up with a link between the terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein.
The White House dismissed the allegations, described in a new book by Clarke, and cast him as a disgruntled, politically motivated job-seeker and a "best buddy" of a top adviser to Sen. John Kerry.
Clarke defended his account, and several allies rallied to his defense.
Clarke's former deputy, Roger Cressey, backed the thrust of one of the most incendiary allegations in the book, about a conversation that Clarke said he had with Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Clarke said Bush pressed him three times to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The charge is explosive because no such link has been proved.
" 'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything,' " Clarke writes that Bush told him. " 'See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.' "
When Clarke protested that the culprit was al-Qaeda, not Iraq, Bush ordered him, he writes, to " 'look into Iraq, Saddam,' " then left the room.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded at a White House briefing yesterday that Bush did not remember having the conversation, and that there were no records that placed the president in the Situation Room at the time.
Clarke countered in a telephone interview yesterday that he had four eyewitnesses, including Cressey, who is a partner with Clarke in a consulting company. In an interview, Cressey said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice also witnessed the exchange. Asked about the account, administration officials said Rice had no recollection of the exchange.
Cressey cast Bush's instructions to Clarke less as an order to come up with a link between Hussein and Sept. 11 and more as a request to "take a look at all options, including Iraq." He backed off Clarke's suggestion that the president's tone was intimidating.
"I'm not going to get into that," Cressey said. "That is Dick's characterization."
Clarke's assertion that Bush was focused on Iraq rather than al-Qaeda and wanted to strike Baghdad right after the attacks echoes a similar contention by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who published a separate account earlier this year and faced a similar response from the White House.
Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," also asserts that the administration did not heed warnings preceding the Sept. 11 attacks.
Another ally of Clarke's, Tom Maertens, yesterday confirmed the outlines of Clarke's critique of the White House. Maertens, who served as National Security Council director for nuclear nonproliferation on both the Clinton and Bush White House staffs, said Clarke repeatedly had tried to warn senior officials in the Bush administration about the growing threat of al-Qaeda.
"He was the guy pushing hardest, saying again and again that something big was going to happen, and here in the U.S.," Maertens said from his home in Minnesota. Maertens said the Bush White House was reluctant to believe a holdover from the previous administration.
"They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration," Maertens said. "So anything they did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it. And it's disgusting to see the administration now smearing Clarke with both hands."
Clarke also charges in his book that Bush began "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq" that strengthened Islamic terrorist movements around the world, and so has left the nation more vulnerable to attacks.
His book is the first by a former administration member to challenge the president directly on what Bush considers his greatest electoral strength, national security. It is arriving in bookstores not only during a presidential campaign, but also in the same week that Clarke and Clinton and Bush administration officials are to publicly testify before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Clarke said last week he was prepared to testify that Clinton administration officials repeatedly warned members of the incoming Bush administration in late 2000 about the threat posed by al-Qaeda.
In the hearings that begin tomorrow, the panel will call as witnesses four high-ranking officials from the Bush and Clinton administrations: Secretary of State Colin Powell; his immediate predecessor, Madeleine Albright; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and his immediate predecessor, William Cohen.
The White House response to Clarke was authorized by Bush. In a daylong assault yesterday, administration officials portrayed Clarke, a combative terrorism expert who spent more than three decades working in the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations, as a bitter former employee who had been denied the No. 2 position in the Department of Homeland Security and who was now trying to boost the Kerry campaign.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, noted that Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole, and "I didn't notice that they had any great success dealing with the terrorist threat."
McClellan told reporters: "He conveniently writes a book and releases it in the heat of a presidential campaign. We know that his best buddy is Sen. Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser." McClellan was referring to Rand Beers, a top Bush White House counterterrorism adviser who quit last March to join the Kerry team.
"This is Dick Clarke's American grandstand," McClellan added. "Clearly, this is more about politics and a book promotion than it is about policy."
Richard Clarke
Clarke fired back that the White House attacks were an attempt to divert attention from the substantive information in his book, including his impression that Rice, as the new national security adviser in early 2001, had not heard of al-Qaeda.
Rice yesterday vehemently denied Clarke's assertion.
"I just think it's ridiculous," Rice told CNN. "You know, I wasn't born yesterday when Clarke briefed me."
Clarke said by telephone yesterday from New York that "this is the way the Bush administration deals with people, with ad hominem attacks, and trying to suppress the truth."
He added that he had been friends with Rand Beers for 25 years, "and I'm not going to run away from him just because he's John Kerry's national security adviser."
Administration officials said Clarke, who was on Rice's staff, was kept on after the Clinton administration because she wanted to maintain continuity in counterterrorism policy. Clarke, they said, proved to be almost obsessive about attacking al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden – a description he applies to himself in the book – and impatient that many of his ideas, like forging a closer alliance with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan, were not adopted.
Administration officials said that throughout his tenure in the Bush administration, Clarke appeared to be generally supportive of the president's policies, and never brought to Rice a broad critique of either the administration's approach to terrorism or its plan for invading Iraq.
The Boston Globe and Scripps Howard News Service contributed to this report.
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