America should heed Clarke's warnings : Greeley

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http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel02.html

America should heed Clarke's warnings

April 2, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY


Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is one very scary book. Unlike most people who have an opinion on it, I've read the book.

It is understandable that the administration has become hysterical in its attacks on Clarke. If his account is accurate, then the president is a man of limited talents, capable of absorbing only simple proposals and surrounded by advisers from Cloud Cuckooland. Yet for all the viciousness of the assault, no one has explained why a registered Republican civil servant who has served in five administrations, three of them Republican, would write such a book unless he was genuinely worried about the state of the country. As for it being a partisan political book, it would have been published last November, a year before the election, if a security check on it was not deemed necessary. Clarke's story fits with that of Paul O'Neill, the former secretary of the Treasury, who describes the same kind of White House. One can only hope that enough Americans take seriously the possibility that Clarke is telling the truth before al-Qaida blows up some American commuter trains.

Even more scary is the implication of the book that Americans are not much safer than they were in August 2001. The two agencies with primary responsibility for security -- the CIA and the FBI -- are apparently paralyzed by bureaucratic concerns about their turf. The former in particular seems worse than useless and its computer system doesn't work very well, if at all. The Department of Homeland Security has no control over either agency and has become, as many predicted it would, a cumbersome monstrosity. Clarke suggests that the billions of dollars pumped into the Iraq war could have been spent notably improving the domestic war against terrorism or setting up a single police agency to deal specifically with domestic terrorism.

However, the real creatures from Cloud Cuckooland are Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who had equated the war on terror with a war on Iraq before and after the Sept. 11 attack. Wolfowitz insisted that the first World Trade Center attack could not have been the work of ragtag Islamic radicals but must have been sponsored by a state -- Iraq, of course. At the one and only meeting on terrorism, Wolfowitz played the anti-Semitic card against Clarke for suggesting that, like Hitler, Osama bin Laden might do exactly what he said he would do. It was offensive, he said, to compare an unimportant person to the instigator of the Holocaust. After the attack, he insisted that it had to be the Iraqis who were responsible.

[bobbieinok]

1. Greeley rules!!!!!!!!