Chapter One

For those who are curious about the juicy details of Clarke’s book, Tim at the road to surfdom is excerpting and commenting on it. Here’s just one little tasty bit:

On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. “How’s it going over here?” I asked.

“It’s fine, Major Fenzel whispered, “but I can’t hear the crisis conference because Mrs Cheney keeps turning down the volume so she can hear CNN…and the Vice President keeps hanging up the line to you.” Mrs Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker.

Try to imagine if Hillary….

These excerpts are in addition to his interesting posts from yesterday on The Age Of Sacred Terror, one of the authors of which, Daniel Benjamin, appeared on CNN yesterday backing Clarke up all the way.

BLITZER: Clarke is the latest former Bush administration official to question the handling of the war on terror. The former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said the Bush White House was looking to out of Saddam Hussein from the very start of the administration.

And the former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has questioned the intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war against Saddam Hussein.

So is Richard Clarke a courageous whistle-blower or an angry ex- employee with an axe to grind? Joining us is another former national security council staffer, Dan Benjamin, was director of counterterrorism in the Clinton administration. He’s the co-author of the book “The Age of Sacred Terror.” You worked for Richard Clarke the Clinton White House.

DAN BENJAMIN, DIRECTOR, COUNTERTERRORISM IN CLINTON ADMINISTRATION: That’s correct. For the last two years of the ’90s.

BLITZER: So what do you make of his allegations?

BENJAMIN: His allegations track with what the discontent he was expressing for quite awhile after the new team came into office in January of 2001.

And I have to say that his critique of the emphases in the war on terror also tracks with what a lot of us in the counterterrorism community have been saying. It very much stands up to what we have said in our book, “The Age of Sacred Terror.”

BLITZER: But the White House is coming back and saying, you know what? You had eight years in the Clinton administration to get rid of Osama bin Laden, to destroy the al Qaeda. You had repeated terror threats, the first World Trade Center, the Cole, the twin embassy bombings. You didn’t do it over eight years.

BENJAMIN: Well there’s no question it was a tragedy that we couldn’t get him in those first eight years. But what is also the case is that we were working flat-out to get him. We found out how hard it is to get him. We’ve been working flat-out since 9/11 and have still not been able to find and to capture, kill bin Laden.

I think Dick’s argument here is that we could have done better and might have had more successes and possibly even more prevention had we been working flat-out after the new team came in in January 2001.

BLITZER: Which raises this question, he was a career federal civil servant, highly respected going back to earlier Republican administrations as well. Were you surprised when he was held over into the Bush administration?

BENJAMIN: Not very. Dick is first of all deeply patriotic, he is eager to work for the government. I think that his whole life was invested in this kind of work. And I think he found it deeply rewarding to be so close to these issues, to really work on national security.

This has been his entire life. So I wasn’t very surprised. And I must say he’s also been very, very highly valued in Washington. He’s known as an insider’s insider who knows where all the levers and pullies are in government.

BLITZER: At the same time he was demoted at the beginning. During the Clinton administration, he had a cabinet-level jobs as counterterrorism czar. And he was demoted to a certain degree in the Bush administration.

BENJAMIN: During the Clinton administration, at end, he had a place at table as someone who was going to speak specifically for counterterrorism issues. And he was made national coordinator for counterterrorism.

He was stripped of that rank when the new team came in because frankly they didn’t think that terrorism was such a big issue that any one person should be at the table to speak for it.

And historically, that has meant that terrorism has not been taken as seriously in the discussions of national security policy.

BLITZER: The other charge that they’re making against Richard Clarke is that his — one of his best friends, Rand Beers, worked for you on the Clinton administration on the National Security Council. He teach, of course, with him at Harvard, at the Kennedy School. And that Rand Beers is now one of the top national security advisers to John Kerry.

In other words, politics behind these allegations.

BENJAMIN: I don’t think it’s politics because I think Dick is doing so well in the private sector with his consulting and with his speaking that I don’t think he’s looking for a way to get back in.

And what’s more is everyone in Washington, everyone in the political world knows exactly what Dick’s strengths are and his failings.

I don’t think he needs to audition for a job. This is because he felt strongly about the issues.

BLITZER: Are you surprised the way the White House is now going after him?

BENJAMIN: I’m not surprised. These are very, very serious accusations. And in fact, they go to the president’s perceived strength in the election. Of course, they’re going to fight back hard.

BLITZER: One final question. One of the charges the vice president made and others in the White House is once he was demoted at the start of the administration, he didn’t attend a lot of the high- level meetings where the decision were made.

So as a result, he didn’t know what the president and vice president were really doing to fight Osama bin Laden.

BENJAMIN: Well that’s impossible. Dick was the pointman in charge of coordinating counterterrorism policy. If he didn’t know what the policy was, and he didn’t know what steps were being taken, then no one did. And there was no policy.

So it’s simply inconceivable. If there were principals’ levels meetings on terrorism, he had to be there.

One of Tim’s commenters mentions that my good friend Jim Wilkinson was all over FOXNews calling it “a book of lies.” He also appears on this Blitzer transcript rebutting Benjamin, in full character assassination mode, almost frothing at the mouth:

JAMES WILKINSON, DEP. NATL. SECURITY ADVISER: You know when I go try to buy this book tonight I’m going to look probably in the fantasy fiction section of my local bookstore. But there are so many inaccuracies in this book. For example, he says that he could never get a meeting. He asked for one meeting with the president of the United States. He asked for that during this time of research and he to briefed on cybersecurity. I brought an email I want to read to you. He claims he could never get a meeting yet, Wolf, I work for Condi Rice and we meet with her every single morning in the situation room. Anyone is welcome to come to those meetings and Dick Clarke refused to come to those meetings. He thought they were beneath him. Let me read you a note that was sent to him.

“Condi noted your absence this morning and asked me to remind you of the importance she attaches to the meeting and her expectation that all senior directors will be there.”

Why didn’t Dick Clarke go to these meetings? Let me remind you, it was Dick Clarke that was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the USS Cole happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the embassies in Africa happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the threat was building towards 9/11 and it was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country in June when the FBI said 16 of 19 hijackers were already here, Wolf. And on the day of 9/11, he was giving a speech on cybersecurity. This book is full of so many inaccuracies.

BLITZER: What about…

WILKINSON: Wolf, let me finish. The terrorists weren’t overseas, the terrorists were here in America. By June, the FBI says 16 of 19 terrorists in the 9/11 attacks were already here. I just don’t see what this focus on process and titles and meetings. Let me also point something. If you look in this book you find interesting things such as reported in the “Washington Post” this morning. He’s talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of “X-Files” stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings.

BLITZER: What about the other charge that he makes is that the president and the vice president, the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of defense, they were all literally obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq after 9/11, even though the CIA and the FBI repeatedly told them Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or 9/11.

WILKINSON: Let me ask the question this way, let me go even further than you. Wouldn’t your viewers have found it strange if the president didn’t ask about Iraq? Wouldn’t they have found it strange if they didn’t order his counterterrorism team and his FBI director and his intelligence director to look in every corner of the globe for who might be involved? I just don’t see the point with all this Iraq business.

I was working at central command for the last year as you know from our time together. In the northern and southern no-fly zone, Iraq was shooting at our pilots hundreds of times a day. Iraq had dug in deep. Iraq was threatening its neighbors. I just don’t see the point of this Iraq connection. I think the American people would be comforted to know that this president wanted to know everything possible. I want to bring up another point, Wolf.

I brought with me a copy of the January issue of “Publisher’s Weekly.” It shows that this was supposed to come out April 27 of this year. Do you think it’s a coincidence, and you’ve been in this town a long, could it be a coincidence that this book is released the very week he’s giving his public testimony before the 9/11 commission. A commission we’ve spent hours with. We’ve given documents, 800 tapes, cooperating with fully and private, working on these sorts of issues. Is that a coincidence? I think the publisher and Dick Clarke have some answering to do. Why is he focused on book tours and these sorts of things. He should have been focused on terrorism like this president is.

Can you believe this shit? Clarke shouldn’t be “focused on book tours” because he should have been focused on terrorism like the president is now. OK. And, you’ve got to love, “I just don’t see the point of this Iraq connection.”

Wilkinson needs to lay off the coffee and krispy kreme’s. He’s bordering on incoherence.

Tim also mentions Kevin Drum’s opinion that the Bush administration is being foolish not to admit to what he thinks is a reasonable explanation as to why they didn’t care much about terrorism:

The answer seems pretty simple to me: most people before 9/11 thought of terrorism as simply one among many foreign policy problems. There wasn’t really any compelling reason to develop a crash program to deal with it.

I think that is missing the whole point of Clarke’s story, frankly. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the administration might not have known the scope of the terrorist threat before taking office. But, the minute they entered the White House, the entire national security establishment was warning them about it and they blew them off. That’s the entire thrust of what Clarke, Benjamin, Kerrick and others have all said which is that the Bush administration was distinctly uninterested in terrorism even though throughout the spring and summer of 2001 people were screaming that there was a huge amount of chatter and something really big was about to happen. They were focused on Iraq and missile defense and the rest of their fossilized agenda despite what all of the experts were telling them.

And besides, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise. I knew that al Qaeda was the likely culprit the minute I saw the WTC with a big hole in it and I’m no terrorism expert. The African embassy bombings were in 1998. The USS Cole was bombed in October of 2000 (which, considering the total lack of bipartisan patriotism on the part of Republicans, explains why Clinton didn’t move on al Qaeda then. The GOP thugs would have tried to impeach him again for wagging the dog on behalf of Gore in the presidential campaign. I’m sure that was another reason why they counterterrorism guys were were just a little bit surprised when the Bush people told them to take a hike.)

The issue of terrorism may not have been on a hot burner in most Americans’ minds, but after the millenium plot was foiled I think everybody certainly assumed that the government was very much aware of and working on the threat. The Clinton team was. The Bushies weren’t — and we paid, bigtime. That’s why Clarke came forward.

Update: Read this great post by Avedon on the subject. Fiesty and wise.