April 2 – April 15, 2004
Rethinking 9/11
By Paul Rosenberg, Editor

     “I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurrence. 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. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask—once all the facts are out— for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”
— Former Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, testifying before the Independent 9/11 Commission, March 24.
     With  those  simple words, Richard  Clarke became the first high-ranking member of the pre-9/11 Bush team to apologize for his failings to those who suffered most.  His willingness to apologize was in stark contrast to those who continue to serve at Bush’s pleasure, and to defend and deny every hint of a possible failing. He instantly won over the 9/11 family members who packed the room, who have fought tooth and nail for the truth to come out, and who have become so disillusioned that they plan to ask Kerry for a completely new investigation if he is elected in November.
     The 9/11 families know in their gut that when mistakes are made, one cannot trust those who continue to deny them. That is the great advantage Clarke enjoys in their sight.  He failed. But he is on the road to redemption.  Not so the Bush Administration true believers.  This is why Clarke’s criticisms of the Bush Administration cut so deep.  Criticisms such as the following:“I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We’ll never know…. I think he’s done a terrible job on the war against terrorism….
     “There’s a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently — underlined urgently — a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo—wasn’t acted on.
     “I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.”     — Richard Clarke, on 60 Minutes
     On his 60 Minutes interview and his just-released  book,  Against  All  Enemies, Clarke mounts a devastating critique of Bush’s failure to act responsibly against terrorism, both before and after 9/11.  In his book, Clarke argues that Bush, “failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings, and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks; and launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.”
     Because Bush’s “leadership” in fighting terrorism is the core of his election campaign, the Administration attacks on Clarke have come fast and furious—but with little substance to match their venom.
     Indeed, the first wave of purely ad hominem attacks—launched even before his 60 Minutes appearance—actually bolstered Clarke’s charges.  In the interview, Leslie Stahl aired the charge that Clarke was disgruntled because Bush had demoted him from cabinet-level to sub-cabinet-level status.  But it wasn’t Clarke personally who had been demoted, it was his position as presidential advisor on counter-terrrorism that was demoted—a move that illustrates his claim that Bush downgraded terrorism from the top priority it enjoyed under Clinton.
     Further support comes from documents collected by the Center for American Progress. For example, the day before 9/11, Ashcroft’s budget request to the White House ignored FBI requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators. A month after s9/11, on October 12, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved just $530 million out of $1,499 requested by the FBI for the post-September 11 emergency supplemental.  These are cold hard facts that no amount of character assassination will destroy.
     Clarke’s claim that the Bush team was preoccupied with old issues, “Iraq, Star Wars,” echoes the charges of another top Bush advisor-turned-critic, former Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neill, as revealed in Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty. O’Neill says that invading Iraq was pushed relentlessly at the first meeting of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council—just one week after Clarke vainly requested that this same committee meet to discuss Al Qaeda.  A memo confirming the agenda item is on Suskind’s website.
     O’Neill’s concern was less with Iraq and Al Qaeda, than with the underlying lack of sound government across the board. There was “a pattern: either no process, or a truncated one, where efforts to collect evidence and construct smart policy are, with little warning, co-opted by the White House political team, or the Vice President, or whoever got to the President and said something, true or not.”
     This dovetails with accusations made by John DiIulio, the disillusioned former chief of faith-based programs in the Bush Administration. DiIulio told Suskind, for a piece in Equire, “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus.” According to DiIulio, everything was political. Administration pressure was far more effective with DiIulio than it has been with Clarke or O’Neill—he issued an apology soon after Karl Rove attacked the charges as “groundless and baseless.” But Suskind released a substantial email message which left no doubt of DiIulio’s uncensored views. “In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” DiIulio wrote. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.”
     ‘Political corruption of the policy process’ perfectly describes what happened to intelligence-gathering on Iraq, according to another retired insider, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a self-described conservative who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq. “What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,” Kwiatkowski wrote last August, following her retirement.  In diagnosing what was wrong she identified “three prevailing themes”—“Functional isolation of the professional corps….Cross-agency cliques…. [and] Groupthink. Defined as ‘reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view.’”
     Kwiatkowski described how key political appointees in different offices would communicate with one another, bypassing the normal channels of communication, which would involve career professionals who would challenge their ideological pre-conceptions.
     “Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to congregate,” she wrote, but “What is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the various agencies – in particular the State Department, the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President…. I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel. This cliquishness is cause for amusement in such movies as Never Been Kissed or The Hot Chick. In the development and implementation of war planning it is neither amusing nor beneficial for American security because opposing points of view and information that doesn’t ‘fit’ aren’t considered.”
     Kwiatkowski was writing about the process that built a case for invading Iraq, manufacturing the case for weapons of mass destruction and an Iraqi-Al Qaeda link that didn’t exist.  But the same political corruption of the policy process explains what happened to Clarke as well. He was a career professional who might muck things up, so he was demoted and ignored while the big boys concentrated on their pre-set agenda—getting rid of Saddam, firming up Star Wars, etc.  Al Qaeda could wait, the big boys assumed, because their groupthink told them so.
     For proof of their thinking, one need look no further than the neo-conservative blueprint issued by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in September, 2000, Rebuilding America’s Defenses.  It spoke of “Homeland Defense” one of four “core missions”—but in terms of Star Wars, not anti-terrorism, rejected planning for two simultaneous wars in favor of planning for three or more, and spoke of redeploying military forces across Asia, into oil-rich regions and to surround China.  The word “Iraq” occurs 25 times in this document, including this telling passage: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” In contrast, the word “terrorism” never appears. “Terrorist” appears just three times, once in laundry list of general threats, once in passing in a criticism of naval force reduction, and once as a future threat…in outer space: “national military forces, paramilitary units, terrorists, and any other potential adversaries will share the high ground of space with the United States and its allies.”  No specific terrorist group is mentioned even once.
     Condoleezza Rice was only marginally more interested.  In early 2000, she wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, the Bible of America’s foreign policy elite.  In it, she identifies five foreign policy priorities, while never mentioning bin Laden or Al Qaeda.  Terrorism appears in the last priority—but only as a potential instrument of rogue states, along with weapons of mass destruction.
     No wonder Rice, Rumfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz dismissed Clarke’s concerns.  They “knew” better.
     When it came his time to testify to the “independent commission” investigating 9/11, Clarke’s only opening statement was an apology to the families of 9/11 victims.  He was the first—and so far, only—person to do this.  He was also, arguably, the person with the least to apologize for.
     The guiltier ones are now out for his blood.  They are selectively leaking material from Clarke’s past, trying to show him contradicting himself. Republican Senate Leader Bill First hopes to go further, sending Clarke to jail for perjury.  But Clarke, unflustered, has responded by asking for everything to be released.
     In other words: Bring it on.

Links:
   The Center for American Progress
       Backgrounder: Internal Documents Show Bush Admin Reduced Counterterrorism
   The Price of Loyalty Documents supporting Paul O'Neill's account
       Agenda for first NSC meeting, February1, 2001
   John DiIulio's email re almost total politicizing of political process.
   The Lie Factory expands upon Karen Kwiatkowski's account

To Read the entire Story, please pick up a FREE copy of Random Lengths, or subscribe.