/ 7 September 2011

Living with 9/11: The anti-terror chief

Richard Clarke might have been expected to feel a sense of intense satisfaction from the death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, killed by a team of US Navy Seals in the northern Pakistani town of Abbottabad in May of this year.

After all Clarke (60) was the top counterterrorism expert under president George Bush and had long helped hunt Bin Laden across the world. He had worked in counterterrorism for Bill Clinton and was fully versed in the threat of al-Qaeda long before most other Americans had ever heard of it.

Then on the grim day of 9/11 itself it was Clarke who manned the White House’s emergency response as hijacked planes screamed out of the sky in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. While the vice-president Dick Cheney hid in the White House’s bomb bunker, Clarke stayed above ground and helped halt all air traffic over America. “We thought we were going to die. We were not in the bomb shelter. I told everyone I wanted them to leave, and they didn’t. At least my team didn’t. I am very proud of what my team did that day,” he says.

No satisfaction
So one would imagine that Clarke felt a brief flash of joy when he got a call from a journalist at his country home in Virginia to tell him Bin Laden had been killed in his Pakistani hideaway. But Clarke did not respond in that way. Not even for a moment. “I had a surprising reaction. I did not feel any sense of satisfaction at all. I put it this way: if you order a pizza that arrives 15 years late you are not going to find it satisfying,” he says from a comfy couch in the offices of his security consultancy firm in Washington DC’s suburbs.

Was there no sense of closure? After all, across the US crowds of people had spontaneously poured into the streets to celebrate the news of the death of their nation’s archenemy. “No. I thought that closure would happen. But really it did not help. It just sort of reminded me it had taken 15 years,” he says.

There is likely a simple reason for Clarke’s hard-headed, unemotional response: his still burning anger that his repeated warnings about the al-Qaeda threat to the US prior to 9/11 were not treated seriously enough. For Richard Clarke is the Cassandra of the war on terror. Not only were his dire prophecies ignored, but when he later went public about them, and also accused the Bush administration of seeking to use 9/11 as a false premise to invade Iraq, he was targeted by a vicious smear campaign.

Bush, Cheney and a host of other powerful figures did not like Clarke breaking ranks. He still remains one of the few top government officials of the time to have publicly apologised for failing to protect the American people from the attacks. For Clarke such an apology seemed an obvious step. After all, he had repeatedly warned top Bush officials of the threat. Yet his memos and requests for meetings, which continued right through 2001, only resulted in being excluded from some top-level briefings.

Rather than being heeded, he was cut out of the loop. Given that Clarke thinks the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, no wonder he still fumes. “I have a huge remaining anger that I was not told certain things at a time when I was supposed to be told everything,” he says. Then he adds, through teeth that seem clenched: “You can’t change the past.”

Yet the cost of not listening to Clarke was so high. Not only would the victims of 9/11 perhaps still be alive, America would likely not have embarked on the bloody, gruelling and expensive war in Iraq. The world would be a different place.

“We played precisely into al-Qaida’s game plan, both in terms of the invasion of Iraq and the torture and the CIA black sites. We conveyed perfectly that we were at war with Islam,” he says. His analysis of the sheer scale of the Iraq disaster is blunt and to the point. “We spent seven years failing to go after al-Qaeda and actually made it worse at cost of a trillion dollars, 100,000 Iraqi dead, two million Iraqi refugees and more dead Americans in Iraq than died on 9/11.”

But these are not the words of some anti-war peacenik. Few people know as much about the threat of Islamist terrorism as Clarke and he knows full well what a threat it is. He praises Obama’s drone strikes in Pakistan, the destruction of the Afghan training camps and the work of the FBI in rooting out potential terrorists in the US. America is a little safer now than it was on 10 September 2001, he believes. He knows that warnings about terrorism are likely to get listened to now, rather than ignored. “The slightest hint of a terrorist plot gets rocketed up to a high level relatively quickly,” he says.

But he still worries about how America would react if it were to be attacked again on anything like the same scale. He believes the post-9/11 world was not shaped by the events of the day itself, but instead created by the US’s reaction to it. “It was a world in which we threw away our core values with regards to constitutional protection and human rights. It destroyed for us a lot of good will. We had massive popular support and we blew it all and we didn’t just lose it; we turned it around and made people hate us around the Islamic world,” he says.

Ten years after 9/11 Clarke believes America learned the counter-terrorism lessons it needed to learn, but he frets about the cultural ones.

Still, he hopes that the last decade and the blood bath of the Iraq war have shown the importance of dissent, even when the nation is baying for revenge. “When there is a big disaster and we want to be patriotic and we want to support the country under attack, one way to do that is to not shut off our critical thinking,” he says “We can be patriotic and still have critical thinking.” – guardian.co.uk