If the Bush White House had heeded warnings in early 2001 about the threat from al-Qaeda, at least two of the September 11 hijackers would ”probably have been caught” and ”there was a chance” the attacks could have been prevented, the president’s former top counter-terrorism adviser told The Guardian newspaper this week.
Richard Clarke, who served in the White House for 10 years under three presidents, also claimed that United States President George W Bush had come to office already convinced of the necessity to topple Saddam Hussein and had remained focused on that goal until the invasion last March — when Clarke resigned.
In a wide-ranging interview the former counter-terrorism ”czar” also argued that the White House’s obsession with Iraq had undermined the military effort in Afghanistan, and helped Osama bin Laden escape.
Clarke said that despite the extent of the support offered by United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, British influence in Washington was small. He conceded that without British pressure Bush might not have issued a major policy statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but dismissed this as a hollow gesture.
”He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time,” Clarke said. ”There hasn’t been a lot of follow through, and I don’t think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us.”
Clarke’s White House memoir, Against All Enemies, which was published on Monday, represents the first account of the Bush ”global war on terrorism” from a top national security official inside that war.
His suggestion that the September 11 attacks might have been prevented by more decisive action is an explosive allegation in an election year.
The White House this week mounted a counter-attack, rebutting many of Clarke’s allegations. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the administration had spent much of 2001 developing a strategy ”to eliminate al-Qaeda”.
But Clarke said that plan had been inherited from the Clinton administration in January 2001 and that the White House had done little to act on it. ”The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it,” Clarke said. ”I asked — on January 24 in writing to Condi [Rice] — urgently for a meeting on Cabinet level, ‘the principals committee’, to review the plan and I was told I can’t have that.”
Instead, Clarke was told a meeting of deputy secretaries would be arranged to ”frame” the al-Qaeda issue for discussion. He said even that meeting did not take place until April — although the White House says it was in March — and a top-level Cabinet meeting did not take place until September 4.
Instead, the regular meetings of the national security ”principals committee”, which includes the heads of the CIA, FBI, State Department and Defence Department, over the first eight months of the administration focused on what Clarke considered to be Cold War issues.
”There were a lot of meetings on Star Wars, [a proposed anti-missile defence system]. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China,” he said.
The other big issue was Iraq, and the national security principals first met to discuss the perceived threat posed by Saddam in early February.
Clarke wrote that when he briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, ”her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before”.
He said Bush’s failure to put his administration on ”battle stations” in anticipation of an attack meant vital clues had been missed. He compared Bush’s actions with those of the former US president, Bill Clinton, in similar circumstances in late 1999.
”In December ’99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaeda was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security adviser to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the CIA, FBI,” Clarke said.
”They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack [an al-Qaeda millennium bomb plot aimed at Los Angeles airport].
”Contrast that with June, July, August 2001, when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi Rice to chair a meeting about what we’re doing about stopping the attacks. She didn’t hold one meeting during all those three months.
”Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA there was information about two of these al-Qaeda terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi],” he said. ”The leadership of the FBI didn’t know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis … to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them.”
”Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don’t know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.”
Clarke concluded that ”there was a chance” the whole plot could have been unravelled, ”but they didn’t take it”.
In a rebuttal published in The Washington Post this week, Rice denied Clarke’s claim that the Bush White House had failed to take the al-Qaeda threat seriously enough
”The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals,” she wrote.
”Our plan called for military options to attack al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets — taking the fight to the enemy where he lived.”
Clarke counters that the plan she referred to was one he helped draw up under the Clinton administration and passed on to its successor, envisaging increasing pressure, backed with the ultimate threat of military force, on the Taliban to force it to surrender Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.
He said the Clinton plan had not been enacted until after September 11, and even then it was botched. Because of White House plans to invade Iraq at a later date, ”troops were held back”, he argued.
”There were 11 000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in the whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan,” he said. ”They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after [the war had started].”
The timing of Clarke’s book could hardly be more damaging for the Bush administration, but he denied White House suggestions it amounted to an ”audition” to join the campaign of the Democratic challenger, John Kerry.
”I’m not a registered Democrat and I don’t want a job in the Kerry administration,” he said. ”What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions.” — Â