"By invading Iraq, the President has greatly undermined the war on terrorism" Richard Clarke by The Globe & Mail / The Guardian / Reuters 10:41pm 25th Mar, 2004   March 25, 2004    "By invading Iraq, the President has greatly undermined the war on terrorism" Richard Clarke. By Paul Koring (The Globe & Mail / Canada).    WASHINGTON -- After a dramatic apology to the families of Sept. 11 victims, the White House's former counterterrorism czar transformed a sedate and serious investigation into an emotional and political spectacle yesterday as he accused President George W. Bush of failing to stand guard against al-Qaeda.    Richard Clarke, who served three presidents as a largely unknown bureaucrat but has been transformed into a political celebrity with his recently published book Against All Enemies, added to those accusations by saying that Mr. Bush had even worked against his own terrorism initiatives.    "By invading Iraq, the President of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism," he testified yesterday.    Speaking before the 10-member panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, he sounded at times like Chicken Little, who was finally proven right because the sky did fall. Mr. Clarke riveted the panel and a nationwide TV audience as he laid out a series of unheeded warnings.    He began by issuing a dramatic apology to the families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.    "I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11 -- to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you," Mr. Clarke said. Family members dabbed their eyes and some gave him a standing ovation when he finished.    Mr. Clarke then proceeded to paint himself as a powerless but prescient adviser who failed to convince his superiors of a growing menace. In one letter, written exactly a week before the hijackings, he urged top policy makers to imagine how they would feel if hundreds of Americans were killed in a domestic terrorist attack.    Perhaps inadvertently, he also gave the 10-member panel a simple explanation for why successive administrations failed to regard fighting al-Qaeda as a top priority. "Before there's been a 9/11, people tend to think you're nuts," he said. "And I got a lot of that."    Mr. Clarke's book, which was released yesterday, and his contested claims that Mr. Bush's administration failed to heed his warnings have created a Washington brouhaha and have become political fodder with the U.S. presidential election looming large on the horizon.    One commissioner told him: "You've got a real credibility problem." Another called Mr. Clarke as "silver-tongued as anyone could be." "Congressman, it is very easy, in retrospect, to say that I would have done this or I would have done that. And we'll never know," Mr. Clarke acknowledged.    "I would like to think that had I been informed by the FBI that two senior al-Qaeda operatives who had been in a planning meeting earlier in Kuala Lumpur were now in the United States . . . I would like to think that I would have released or had the FBI release a press release with their names, with their descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names and pictures on the front page of every paper, America's Most Wanted, the evening news -- and caused a successful nationwide manhunt for those two, two of the 19 hijackers."    Mr. Clarke, who worked for Mr. Bush, Mr. Bush's father and Bill Clinton, insisted that he had no partisan motivation. But that hasn't stopped the White House from painting him as a disgruntled former employee seeking to besmirch the government.    "I really don't know what Richard Clarke's motivations are, but I'll tell you this: Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to," said his former boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.    Aside from the political impact of Mr. Clarke's testimony, the crucial aspect is whether Mr. Bush's administration treated the terrorist threat less seriously than Mr. Clinton's did.    March 24, 2004    Enemies of the Truth. (Editorial: The Guardian/UK)    Among members of Congress and Washington journalists, George Bush's administration was already a byword for discipline and secrecy even before 9/11. Whistleblowers in any field of policy were beneath its contempt. Once Mr Bush reinvented himself as a war president, however, the White House code of omertà became more unforgiving still. To ask questions about the war on terror was treated as an act of disloyalty. To refuse to answer them became proof of patriotism. So it is all the more striking that two senior Bush officials have now been prepared to brave the inevitable abuse to give the world a vivid picture of the response to 9/11 which startlingly differs from the authorized version.    First it was the former treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, who alleged that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had always been "topic A" in Bush foreign policy circles from inauguration day onwards. That claim moved the White House to deposit a large volume of solids on Mr O'Neill's head. He got away lightly, though, when compared with the president's former counter-terrorism chief. Richard Clarke alleges that Mr Bush has done a "terrible job" on terrorism and charges that many in the administration, including Mr Bush himself, saw 9/11 more as an opportunity to go after Iraq than to strike back against al-Qaida. Every form of rebuttal and smear in the book - grudgebearer, minor official, friend of John Kerry - is now being deployed against the White House's accuser. Just about the only consolation for Mr Clarke is that Ariel Sharon is not in charge of the administration's response.    Mr Clarke is the latest of several witnesses who have charged that the obsession with overthrowing Saddam warped the whole US response to 9/11, with catastrophic consequences for America's standing in the world, especially among Muslims. Some outlines of this picture first appeared in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, published in 2002. Since then, the details have been increasingly colored in by several hands, including Mr O'Neill's and now Mr Clarke's. It has long been claimed that the most hawkish members of the administration seized on 9/11 to argue the case for an attack on Iraq; a CBS News report in 2002 even had the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pushing this line less than five hours after a hijacked plane had ploughed into his own Pentagon HQ. The significance of Mr Clarke is that he moves the focus directly on to Mr Bush and his immediate circle, including the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose refusal to answer questions on these issues raised the temperature on Capitol Hill yesterday. The accumulating picture of an administration in thrall to a predetermined view of what to do in the wake of 9/11 is a truly chilling one. It tends to confirm the long-held fear that the administration was so imprisoned within its ideology that it not only focused on the wrong enemy but also failed to grasp the nature of the real foes ranged against it.    Mr Clarke will be cross-examined about his account when he appears today in front of the federal commission investigating the failures that led to the 2001 attacks. But his allegations already pose major challenges to the official American and British accounts of the war on terror. For Americans, the issue raised by Mr Clarke is principally one of failure to protect. He charges that the US government - under Bill Clinton as well as Mr Bush - let its people down by not defending them against the lethal assaults germinating in Osama bin Laden's networks. The officials giving evidence in Washington yesterday inevitably pointed the finger at political opponents. Everyone knows, though, that the buck stops with the man in the Oval Office. In an election year, the consequences of Mr Clarke's charges could be devastating.    © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004    March 23, 2004    Former Chief United States weapons inspector fears US is losing credibility (Reuters).    The former chief United States weapons inspector in Iraq has warned that the US is in "grave danger" of destroying its credibility at home and abroad if it does not own up to its mistakes in Iraq.    In a speech at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, former inspector David Kay said: "The cost of our mistakes ... with regard to the explanation of why we went to war in Iraq are far greater than Iraq itself.    "We are in grave danger of having destroyed our credibility internationally and domestically with regard to warning about future events," he said.    "The answer is to admit you were wrong and what I find most disturbing around Washington ... is the belief ... you can never admit you're wrong."    Mr Kay's comments come as the White House seeks to fend off accusations from its former anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke.    Mr Clarke said President George W Bush ignored the Al Qaeda threat before the September 11 attacks and focused on Iraq rather than the Islamic militant group afterwards.    The White House last year cited Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for going to war.    Mr Kay resigned from his post in January, saying he believed no such arms existed and that the failure to find any such weapons raised serious questions about the quality of pre-war intelligence.    Mr Kay, who was part of United Nations weapons probes in Iraq in the early 1990s, said US intelligence there was poor in the decade before the war, relying entirely on international inspectors themselves, Iraqi defectors or intelligence from allies like France and Britain.    He cautioned the intelligence community against jumping to premature conclusions, as it did in Iraq.    "One of the most dangerous things abroad in the world of intelligence today actually came out of 9/11...the insistence of 'Why didn't you connect the dots?' The dots were all there," he said.    "When we finally do the sums on Iraq, what will turn out is that we simply didn't know what was going on, but we connected the dots - the dots from 1991 behaviour were connected with 2000 behaviour and 2003 behaviour, and it became an explanation and a picture of Iraq that simply didn't exist," Mr Kay said.    -- Reuters
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