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Richard Clarke - RushOnline.com "It has been an enormous privilege to serve you these last 24 months," said the Jan. 20, 2003, letter from Clarke to President Bush. "I will always remember the courage, determination, calm, and leadership you demonstrated on September 11th." * * * The Search for Answers Richard Clarke is wrong about Iraq. BY BOB KERREY, April 8, 2004 The 9/11 Commission's objective is to answer the following question: How--at the end of a summer of high terrorist threat--did 19 men with a few hundred thousand dollars manage to utterly defeat every single defensive mechanism we had in place that September morning and murder 3,000 innocents on American soil? The search for this answer is especially painful because these 19 men were part of al Qaeda, a radical Islamic army called to war against the United States by Osama bin Laden in August 1996 and again in February 1998--and because Sept. 11, 2001, was not their first success. On Aug. 7, 1998, six months after Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against Americans world-wide, al Qaeda terrorists attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with truck bombs, killing more than 250 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and wounding thousands more. Attempts to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and the USS The Sullivans in Yemen were prevented by a combination of skilled spycraft and good luck. But our luck did not hold. On Oct. 12, 2000, a bomb ripped through the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17 American sailors. And less than a year later, Mohamed Atta and his suicidal crew crashed civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa. I believe Chairman Tom Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will lead our commission to write a bipartisan report that will provide Americans with the clearest picture yet of how this happened. I believe they will lead the commission to produce a report that will contain specific recommendations of what we need to do to make certain that nothing like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ever happens again. As a member of the commission, authorized under federal law as a consequence of the persistence and perseverance of the families of the victims of that terrible day, I sincerely hope our efforts will meet their highest expectations. Today's appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become personal and question motives instead of confronting the substance of the argument made by any individual. If we yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail. The best example of this came two weeks ago, when all the key national security officials of both the Clinton and Bush administrations, except Ms. Rice, testified under oath before the commission. This testimony came immediately after Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism director under both presidents, spoke. Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda. That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home. Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites. It is my view that a political victory for terrorism in Iraq is a much greater danger to us than whether or not we succeed in capturing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Victory in Iraq will embolden radical Islamists as much as our failure to recognize the original danger of their declaration of war against us. This debate becomes all the more important since the work of this commission--to examine an attack against the U.S. that occurred nearly three years ago--has been overshadowed by the events taking place in Iraq. The war there is not over. Twelve marines were killed in Ramadi Tuesday night in what has become a dramatic escalation of violence against coalition forces. I believe this escalation is taking place precisely because the country is about to be handed over to the Iraqi people to run themselves. More importantly, I believe this commission must try to provide a foundation for bipartisan agreement on what should be done in Iraq and the broader war against radical Islamists who use terror as a tactic to destroy our will. Whether you disagree with me or with Mr. Clarke, the only way for the 9/11 Commission to succeed is to confront every fact and every argument on its merits. If we do, the world will be safer. If we don't, we will have exercised our freedoms poorly. Mr. Kerrey, president of New School University in New York and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11" Commission). * * * Very Awkward Facts Richard Clarke's denials of Iraq's terror ties don't ring true. BY LAURIE MYLROIE Saturday, April 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. The credibility of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has come under withering fire. He has been caught in error after error, omission after omission. I can attest to one error more: a highly revealing error that tells us a great deal about who Richard Clarke really is. Mr. Clarke singles me out for special criticism in his book, "Against All Enemies." This is not surprising. He believes that Islamic terrorism is the work of a few individual criminals, many of them relatives. I have for years gathered the evidence that shows that terrorism is something more than a mom-and-pop operation: that it is supported by powerful states, very much including Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"? The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the facts: ¥ Fact No. 1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport. ¥ Fact No. 2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin. ¥ Fact No. 3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal. ¥ Fact No. 4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef, he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his father worked." To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait). Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center bombing. Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain. He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home, where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later, when Iraq invaded. Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Karim. That file appears to have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's prints. But Yousef is not Karim--as Judge Duffy implied--for many reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. Karim left at Swansea bear "no resemblance" to Yousef's prints. They are two different people. The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents. The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef's "brothers." A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country. When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable. Ms. Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, is author of "The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001). Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. * * * CONDI'S CUE John Podhoretz March 31, 2004 -- (NY POST) THIS week's national polls tell a fascinating and unexpected story. The president's approval ratings should have tanked owing to the conversion of the political news into the "Richard Clarke Show." Instead, according to the Pew poll, "A week's worth of criticism of his pre-9/11 record on terrorism has had little impact on President Bush's support among voters." Gallup's results say pretty much the same thing. And they also indicate that Bush has significantly improved his standing in relation to John Kerry. Indeed, the big story in the Gallup poll is that Bush's political advertising has helped cause Kerry's positive numbers to drop precipitously over the past few weeks. How can this be? It seemed inevitable that last week's 9/11 hearings and the media's relentless efforts to publicize Clarke's patently dishonest charges against the administration were going to hurt Bush badly. Something interesting is going on here - or rather, two interesting things are going on. The first might be called "Bush Attack Fatigue." The assaults against the president have been so constant for so many months - on every subject under the sun from his handling of the economy to the war in Iraq and now to the War on Terror - that a law of diminishing returns has set in. The people willing to believe the worst of George W. Bush have already gotten the message. The people who like him have tuned out the liberal criticism. And everybody else is just sick of the negativity. Clarke's effort to recast the events before and after 9/11 in a fashion almost entirely unfavorable to the president has made him famous and rich. He has been embraced by the Michael Moore-Al Franken crowd, and has been canonized by a liberal media that has basically decided it will do whatever it can to prevent Bush's re-election. But the very fact that Clarke's criticisms are so patently over the top and false - like suggesting his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, had never heard of al Qaeda before he mentioned the organization to her - has limited his book's political effectiveness. Had he been more judicious in his criticisms of the president, they might have been more wounding. The hysterical tone of Clarke's "Against All Enemies" and his absurd claim that he fears the White House is seeking to "destroy" him - this from a man who stands to make as much as $5 million to $10 million on this book alone - means that he has surrendered the possibility of talking to the great American middle. Ordinary Americans of all political leanings remember vividly the days after 9/11 (it was, after all, only 31 months ago) and formed a pretty solid opinion of Bush's handling of the matter that won't be shaken so easily by Clarke's score-settling and profiteering. The second factor helping the president is the nature of the 9/11 hearings themselves. There's something about congressional inquiries that just get people's hackles up. The grandstanding of committee members, the discomfort of the witnesses and the way everybody drones on for hours make it all seem a bit unseemly. This has happened time and time again whenever there are high-level inquiries involving the executive branch. The Iran-Contra hearings boomeranged on those who believed they would destroy the Reagan administration. And of course the Whitewater and Lewinsky proceedings before Congress backfired on Republicans, who were lucky to escape the 1998 elections with their majorities in the House and Senate intact. It's entirely possible that the president's decision to allow Rice to testify in public and under oath before the commission was a decision made not out of panic, but out of confidence. Surely by this point the incredibly flush Bush re-election campaign is doing nightly tracking polls for its own private use. The White House may have discovered late last week that despite Clarke's nastiness, the public retains a very strong positive opinion of Condi Rice (50 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable, according to Gallup). Given the inability of Democrats on the 9/11 Commission to take the administration down last week, political prudence dictated the new course. The only distressing number for the administration in the current polling is that 53 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup think Bush & Co. were hiding something about 9/11 - largely because Rice wouldn't testify in public and under oath. The administration never had anything to hide on the subject except for sensitive intelligence information. But what the current polls surprisingly suggest is that politically, Bush doesn't have much to fear either - and might even have something to gain - from the whole unfortunate process. Wouldn't it be delicious if Richard Clarke's book helps get Bush re-elected? * * * The Latest Clintonite Bashes Bush ... By George Neumayr Published 3/22/2004 Richard A. Clarke is a "terrorism expert" who doesn't consider Saddam Hussein a terrorist. Clarke's much-touted 60 Minutes interview last night aimed to expose George Bush's obtuseness. But it succeeded more in exposing his own. He came across as a "terrorism expert" more worried about provoking the terrorists than catching them. In a Time magazine column that appeared last week after the Madrid bombings, Clarke gave himself away as a softheaded liberal who seeks to understand the terrorists. "So, in addition to placing more cameras on our subway platforms, maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us," he writes. "If we do not focus on the reasons for terrorism as well as the terrorists, the body searches we accept at airports may be only the beginning of life in the new fortress America." Clarke was a favored figure in the Clinton administration. "My name is on the table next to Madeleine Albright and Bill Cohen," he proudly told the press in the 1990s. But press stories now are more eager to describe him as an ex-Bush aide than Clinton holdover. As even 60 Minutes had to acknowledge, Clarke is team-teaching a course at Harvard with a John Kerry adviser. Clarke is only an ex- Bush aide in the most accidental sense. Like David Stockman, Paul O'Neill, etc., Clarke is proof that whenever a Republican administration extends an olive branch to an establishment liberal he just grabs it and starts beating Republicans with it once he gets the chance. Clarke has long been a controversial figure, collecting enemies over the years through cocksure bullying and arrogant administration. "In 1992, he was accused by the State Department's Inspector General of looking the other way as Israel transferred American military technology to China," reports a New York Times profile from 1999. The Times reported that Clarke began his government service in the State Department, a job he got through Leslie Gelb, a former New York Times columnist. Clarke still views the world like a State Department official. His comment that "maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us" typifies the striped-pants State Department liberalism. Which, by the way, John Kerry ably described in Sunday's Washington Post. Kerry's father was a State Department diplomat. Kerry said that he absorbed from his father's experience "the benefit of learning how to look at other countries and their problems and their hopes and challenges through their eyes." Clarke's own liberalism contributed to America's lack of preparedness. In the 60 Minutes interview, he said that Bush's invasion of Iraq has provoked the terrorists and proven bin Laden's propaganda right. This is a rich claim coming from Clinton's terrorism czar: Why doesn't Clinton's clumsy strike on bin Laden, which turned Osama into a hero in the Arab world, count as a provocation?) Despite all his tough talk, Clarke makes a point in his new book, which his 60 Minutes appearance was designed to launch (Against All Enemies goes on sale today), of belittling John Ashcroft for the Patriot Act. "The attorney general, rather than bringing us together, managed to persuade much of the country that the needed reforms of the Patriot Act were actually the beginning of fascism." Clarke dismisses Ashcroft as man who lost "a Senate re-election to a dead man." 60 Minutes, other than noting that Clarke is teaching a Harvard course with a John Kerry adviser, didn't challenge the liberal biases driving Clarke's critique of Bush. Lesley Stahl's eyes bulged with excitement as Clarke declared no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. No connection? Even the Los Angeles Times, while trying to minimize the connection, has reported that "U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was a contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq." Nor was Clarke asked about the Bush administration memo, publicized by the Weekly Standard, which laid out evidence that Osama bin Laden received bomb training from the Iraqi Intelligence Service's principal technical expert, that Al Qaeda agents met with Hussein's officials to set up terrorist camps, received money and weapons from them, and continued meeting with them after 9/11. Hussein harbored terrorists, wrote checks to terrorists, cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks (as his newspapers showed the day after the 9/11 attacks). Yet Clarke didn't consider Hussein a terrorist worthy of Bush's attention. Clarke is right in a sense: America was ill- prepared for 9/11, and softheaded terrorism experts like him explain why. * * * Mark Steyn: Bush has nothing to fear from this hilarious work of fiction The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) Mark Steyn 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 Clarke, and by the time you read this his 15 minutes should be just about up. Mr Clarke was Bill Clinton's terrorism guy for eight years and George W Bush's for a somewhat briefer period, and he has now written a book called If Only They'd Listened to Me - whoops, sorry, that should be Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror - What Really Happened (Because They Didn't Listen to Me). Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away." The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism". Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to hell. Richard Clarke was supposed to be the expert who could make this argument with a straight face. And, indeed, his week started well. The media were very taken by this passage from his book, in which he alerts Mr Bush's incoming National Security Adviser to the terrorist threat: "As I briefed Rice on al-Qa'eda, her facial _expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before, so I added, 'Most people think of it as Osama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organisations with cells in over 50 countries, including the US.' " Mr Clarke would seem to be channelling Leslie Nielsen's deadpan doctor in Airplane!: "Stewardess, we need to get this passenger to a hospital." "A hospital? What is it?" "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now." As it turns out, Clarke's ability to read "facial expressions" is not as reliable as one might wish in a "counter-terrorism expert". In October the previous year, Dr Rice gave an interview to WJR Radio in Detroit in which she discoursed authoritatively on al-Qa'eda and bin Laden - and without ever having met Richard Clarke! I don't know how good Clarke was at counter-terrorism, but as a media performer he is a total dummy. He seemed to think that he could claim the lucrative star role of Lead Bush Basher without anybody noticing the huge paper trail of statements he has left contradicting the argument in his book. The reality is that there is a Richard Clarke for everyone. If you are like me and reckon there was an Islamist angle to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, then Clarke's your guy: he supports the theory that al-Qa'eda operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building". On the other hand, if you're one of those Michael Moore-type conspirazoids who wants to know why Bush let his cronies in the House of Saud and the bin Laden family sneak out of America on September 11, then Clarke's also your guy: he is the official who gave the go-ahead for the bigshot Saudis with the embarrassing surnames to be hustled out of the country before they could be questioned. Does this mean Clarke is Enron - an equal-opportunity scandal whose explicitly political aspects are too ambiguous to offer crude party advantage? Not quite. Although his book sets out to praise Clinton and bury Bush, he can't quite pull it off. Except for his suggestion to send in a team of "ninjas" to take out Osama, Clinton had virtually no interest in the subject. In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'" Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did. And now the same people who claim Bush had no right to be "pre-emptive" about Iraq insist he should have been about September 11. As for Clarke's beef with Bush, that's simple. For eight years, he had pottered away on the terrorism brief undisturbed. The new President took it away from him and adopted the strategy outlined by Condoleezza Rice in that Detroit radio interview, months before the self-regarding Mr Clarke claims he brought her up to speed on who bin Laden was: "We really need a stronger policy of holding the states accountable that support him," Dr Rice told WJR. "Terrorists who are just operating out there without basis and without state support are a lot less dangerous than ones that find safe haven, as bin Laden does sometimes in places like Afghanistan or Sudan." Just so. In the 1990s when al-Qa'eda blew up American targets abroad, the FBI would fly in and work it as a "crime scene" - like a liquor-store hold-up in Cleveland. It doesn't address the problem. Sure, there are millions of disaffected young Muslim men, but, if they get the urge to blow up infidels, they need training and organisation. Somehow all those British Taliban knew that if you wanted a quick course in jihad studies Afghanistan was the place to go. Bush got it right: go to where the terrorists are, overthrow their sponsoring regimes, destroy their camps, kill their leaders. Instead, all the Islamists who went to Afghanistan in the 1990s graduated from Camp Osama and were dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, where they lurk to this day. That's the Clarke-Clinton legacy. And, if it were mine, I wouldn't be going around boasting about it. * * * Records Show Richard Clarke Gave Only to Democrats / Posted March 25, 2004 By J. Michael Waller Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke insists his attacks on > President George W. Bush have nothing to do with politics, but an Insight > check of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records shows that his only political contributions in the last decade have gone to Democrats. Clarke is suspected of using his former post in the Bush White House as a weapon with which to slash and wound the president during his re-election campaign against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). The Kerry campaign's coordinator for national security issues, Rand Beers, has described Clarke as his "best friend." According to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where Clarke and Beers are adjunct lecturers, they teach a course together about terrorism. Clarke's detailed Harvard biography specifically mentions his service under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President Bush, but says nothing about his eight years working for President Bill Clinton. During the 9/11 commission hearings this week, Clarke denied any partisan leanings. "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he told Commissioner John Lehman, pointing out that he, like Lehman, had served in the Reagan administration. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," he said. "So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one." He said he was a registered Republican in 2000. But what about this presidential election year? According to FEC records, Clarke has been giving his money to Democratic friends -- not Republicans -- running for national office. In 2002, while still on the Bush National Security Council (NSC), Clarke gave the legal maximum limit of $2,000 to a Democratic candidate for Congress, Steve Andreasen, who tried to unseat Republican Congressman Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota. Andreason had been director for defense policy and arms control on the Clinton NSC. In making his donations of $1,000 on July 22 and another $1,000 on Nov. 7, 2002, Clarke listed his occupation as "U.S. Government/Civil Servant," according to FEC records indexed with the Center for Responsive Politics. Clarke maxed out again in the 2004 election cycle, donating $2,000 to another Clinton White House veteran, Jamie Metzl, who is running as a Democrat for Congress from Missouri. Metzl was a staffer on the Clinton NSC and worked for Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) as deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With that donation, made on Sept. 15, 2003, after his resignation from the Bush NSC, Clarke listed his occupation as "Self-Employed/Consultant." FEC records show that Clarke reported no political contributions when he worked in the Clinton administration in the electoral cycles of the 1990s and 2000, when he said he was a Republican. J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight. An in-depth story about Clarke will be posted at Insightmag.com on Monday. * * * Richard Clark: Terrorism and The Middle East Amed Demirhan (April 5, 2004) The former White House Counterterrorism official Richard Clarke's interview with Tim Russert "NBC NEWS" MEET THE PRESS. 03/28/2004 was very interesting. In general, I am very sympathetic to whistle blower especial in public institution, they can be very useful for public interest, but Mr. Clarke is not a whistle blower even. However, Mr. Clarke interview shows despite his 30 years career in the state department and national security he still hasn't understand the nature of the Middle East and source of terrorism that has been threatening U.S.A. national security. One should be very thankful that Mr. Clarke is not longer in charge of national security issues. Tim Russert asks: "Why do you think the Iraq war has undermined the war on terrorism?" Mr. Clarke respond: ": Well, I think it's obvious, but there are three major reasons. Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism? We're fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us. Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, "Wait a minute. Maybe we've gone too far here. Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed," and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we've inflamed the ideology. We've played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others. We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do. Ninety percent of the Islamic people in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, allied countries to the United States--90 percent in polls taken last month hate the United States. It's very hard when that's the game where 90 percent of the Arab people hate us. It's very hard for us to win the battle of ideasÉ..The president of Egypt said, "If you invade Iraq, you will create a hundred bin Ladens." He lives in the Arab world. He knows. It's turned out to be true. It is now much more difficult for us to win the battle of ideas as well as arresting and killing them, and we're going to face a second generation of al-Qaeda. " In Kurdish there is a saying: "If Fox witness is Fox tail, how do you find the true?" This is seems to be the case with Mr. Clarke; his best witness is Mr. Mubarek the President of Egypt, one of the worst dictator of the Middle East and hotbed of Islamic terrorism. There are multidimensional reasons why some people of the Middle East "hate the US"; one should rather say US foreign policy but one of the most important reasons is the US support for dictator like Mr. Mubarek and his regime. Mr. Mubareks regime kills its opponent on the middle of the street before taking them to the court. There is not freedom of speech or neither freedom of worship in Mr. Mubarek's Egypt but his regime is second biggest recipient of the US foreign aid. Yes, many Egyptians think if US didn't support their brutal, dictator, and intolerant regime it could not survive very long as many other Middle Eastern countries people think about their dictators. In fact most of the dictators opponents are against US foreign policy not necessarily against US but Mr. Mubarek and other US friendly dictators supporter are against US, just look to state sponsored media largely anti American and for years have been supporting Palestinian Suicide bomber and encouraged spread of this epidemic. The country like Turkey NATO ally and third largest US foreign aid recipient has always supported and propagated anti Americanism. Turkish text books from elementary schools and on and mass media are best examples of this. For example last months news in Turkish media was full of stories about Turkish generals attendance of anti US meetings in Ankara. While the same generals and their moth piece news media claim current Turkish government is pro American, the government supported media claim the generals are US toys, in short both side blame their short coming in US because both of them are afraid an US style pluralistic democracy. Mr. Clarke claim: "Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, ÔWait a minute. Maybe we've gone too far here. Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed Ô and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world, we've inflamed the ideology. We've played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others. We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do." It seems Mr. Clarke doesn't have any idea about Islamic world, the way his portraying it: as a uniform world, it is as realistic as saying Christian world; how unified Russian and US as two "Christian Countries"? Iraq is the best example about "Islamic World" and its "uniformity". How Mr. Clarke would have changed "the ideology in the Islamic World"? The rathless terrorist would have mercy because they went too far with September 11? The Dictator like Husni Mubarek and Kemalist regime , or Basher Esad would have been Harsh on Islamic Radical" weren't they always harsh on them? What about Hama 1982 in Syria? No one should take such ideas serious. How Mr. Clarke would have won the "battle of ideas"? By continuing to support dictators like Mubarek, Oligarchic, racist Kemalist dictatorship in Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries? Appease to Saddams' mercy? How? Mr. Clarke doesn't have any explanation except begging mercy from his "Islamic world". Contrary to Mr. Clarke claim the President Bush is not just waging a military war in the Middle East but a war of ideas that is stronger even than military power. This is war of ideas for "greater middle East" The President want to transform archaic middle eastern totalitarian regimes to a pluralistic democratic system that socially, economically, and culturally integrated with world. This is the greatest idea and vision an US president has produced since World War II and only very few US Presidents have had such great vision since its foundation. Therefore dictators like Mr. Mubarek have been very uncomfortable and critical to the president Middle Eastern initiative and intervention in Iraq. All Middle Eastern dictators from Turkey to Egypt from Morocco to Pakistan were against US intervention in Iraq and removal of dictator as Mr. Clarke. The source of Anti-Americanism is dictatorships of the Middle East regardless if they are secular or fundamentalist regimes. Therefore both US "friendly regimes" and anti US regimes are feeding their population with racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism. The culture of suicide bomber started in 1980s "by the "secular" groups with support of secular regimes, like Iraq and Syria, tacitly Egypt and later extended to "Islamic Fascist" organization. Most of those organizations have been supported by some secular regimes not only Saudi and Iranian fundamentalist regimes. The change in Iraq is already has inspired hope of change in "greater Middle East" just look to Saudi, Turkey, Libya, the civic organization and reform demands in Iran and Syria. It seems Mr. Clarke in his 30 years career has not understood this reality. * * * Clarke's Blabbering - Charles Krauthammer April 2, 2004 WASHINGTON -- The New York Times swooned. Newsweek put it on its cover. Commentators everywhere expressed sorrowful dismay that Bush had not done it long ago. Indeed, one has to admire it -- the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke using the nationally televised Sept. 11 commission hearings to address the families of the victims. ``Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you.'' Many were moved. I was not. For two reasons. First, the climactic confession ``I failed you'' -- the one that packed the emotional punch -- was entirely disingenuous. Clarke did the mea culpa then spent the next 2 1/2 hours of testimony -- as he did on every talk show known to man and in the 300 pages of his book -- demonstrating how everyone else except Richard Clarke had failed. And they failed because the stubborn, ignorant, ideologically blinkered, poll-driven knaves and fools he had been heroically fighting against in government would not listen to him. Message: They failed you. Second, by blaming the government for the deaths of their loved ones, Clarke deftly endorsed the grotesque moral inversion by which those who died on Sept. 11 are victims of ... George Bush. This is about as morally obscene as the implication (made by, among others, the irrepressible Howard Dean) that those who died in the Madrid bombings were also victims of George Bush. This is false. They were all victims of al Qaeda and al Qaeda alone. Clinton did not apologize for Oklahoma City. Reagan did not apologize for the Beirut bombing. FDR did not apologize for Pearl Harbor. George Bush owes no apology. If an apology is owed, it is owed to the entire country and not just the families, and it is owed by the murderers who planned and carried out Sept. 11. The most telling remark Clarke made in the entire hearing was one that did not make the cover of Newsweek. SEN. SLADE GORTON: ``Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001 ... had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" CLARKE: ``No." Thus, doing everything demanded by the most hawkish, most prescient, most brilliant, most heroic, most swaggering antiterrorism chief in American history -- i.e. Clarke, in his own mind -- would not have prevented Sept. 11. Why then should the administration apologize? What exactly was the failure? What was Bush supposed to do in order to prevent Sept. 11? Invade Afghanistan? Clarke has expressed outrage at Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. So: Bush deserves excoriation for pre-emptively invading Iraq based on massive, universally accepted intelligence of its weapons, to say nothing of its hostility and virulence; and simultaneously, Bush deserves excoriation for not pre-emptively attacking Afghanistan on the basis of ... what? Increased terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001? At the hearing, Clarke was particularly brilliant in playing to the gallery, mainly to the families in the gallery. By some strange cultural transmutation, the families -- or more accurately, a small number of politically active families -- have claimed, and been ceded, special status in the war on terrorism. Surely they deserve our sympathy and our care. And they have received an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, outpouring of both from the public and from the government. But some families go much further, and claim the moral high ground in judging the war on terror and how it is to be waged. On what grounds? Did the Pearl Harbor families enjoy special status in critiquing FDR's decisions in World War II? The Oklahoma City families were denied any special status at all -- they never even got compensation of the sort the Sept. 11 families received. Just this week the widow of Daniel Pearl was denied a claim for similar government compensation, on the grounds that, while Pearl was surely a victim of the war on terror -- and, in fact, was engaged in it by pursuing the truth about those waging war against us -- he happened to die on a date other than Sept. 11. Clarke's clever pseudo-apology -- we failed, meaning, they failed -- played perfectly to the families in the gallery, who applauded and warmly embraced the very man who for 12 years was the U.S. government official most responsible for preventing a Sept. 11. A neat trick. (Washington Post)
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