http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4608698/----------------------
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: Is there any inconsistency between your sworn testimony before the September 11 Commission last week and two years ago before the congressional committee?
MR. CLARKE: No, there isn't. And I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony.
MR. RUSSERT: You would request this morning that it all be declassified?
MR. CLARKE: And I want more declassified. I want Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission declassified, and I want the thing that the 9-11 Commission talked about in its staff report this week declassified, because there's been an issue about whether or not a strategy or a plan or something useful was given to Dr. Rice in early January. And she says it wasn't. So we now have the staff report of the 9-11 Commission, and it says, "On January 25th, Clarke forwarded his December strategy paper to the new national security adviser, and it proposed covert action to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, significantly increasing CIA funding, retaliating for the USS Cole, arming the Predator aircraft, going after terrorist fund raising."
Now, Dr. Rice has characterized this as not a plan, not a strategy, not a series of decisions which could be made right away, but warmed-over Clinton material. Let's declassify that memo I sent on January 25th and let's declassify the national security directive that Dr. Rice's committee approved nine months later on September 4th, and let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't. And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on January 25th and what they finally agreed to on September 4th, is that they're basically the same thing and they wasted months when we could have had some action.
MR. RUSSERT: But to be clear, Mr. Clarke, you would urge Congress, the intelligence committees, to declassify your sworn testimony before the congressional inquiry two years ago as well as your testimony before the September 11th Commission?
MR. CLARKE: Yes, and those documents I just referred to and Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission because the victims' families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said. There weren't in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9-11 Commission. They want to know. So let's take her testimony before the 9-11 Commission and make it part of the package of what gets declassified along with the national security decision directive of September 4 and along with my memo of January 25.
In fact, Tim, let's go further. The White House is selectively now finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed were covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press. Let's take all of my e-mails and all of the memos that I've sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11 and let's declassify all of it.
MR. RUSSERT: As well as her responses?
MR. CLARKE: As well as her responses.
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: You did tell Time magazine that the review that the administration did moved as fast as could be expected.
MR. CLARKE: I said it was the normal process for the consideration of issues. Now, it's not a normal issue, however. Every day George Tenet was going in to see the president in the Oval Office. Because George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, now gives the president his daily briefing. And almost every day the president was hearing from George Tenet that there's an impending al-Qaeda attack. As far back as February, George Tenet testified before the Congress that al-Qaeda was the major national security threat. And yet, they have 100 meetings before they get around to dealing with it.
MR. RUSSERT: On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate President Bush's performance on the war on terror prior to September 11?
MR. CLARKE: Well, there wasn't any personal performance by the president prior to September 11. Now, the only thing that I was ever able to detect that he did on the war on terrorism was after Tenet had been briefing him day after day after day after day about an al-Qaeda threat, the president said, in May, "Well, let's, you know, get a strategy." That's the only thing I ever heard that he got involved in personally. And when he said that, Dr. Rice called me and said, "The president wants a strategy." And I said, "Well, you know the strategy was what I sent you on January 25, and it's been stuck in these low-level committees." And she said, "Fine. I'll deal with that." Well, she didn't deal with it until September.
And, interestingly enough, the president never said after that May conversation, "Where's the strategy?" And, again, if you go back to what the president himself says to Bob Woodward, he said, "I knew there was a strategy in the works. But I didn't know how mature the plan was." He's saying this on September 11. He didn't know where the strategy was. The strategy that he had asked for in May? He'd never come back and asked where it was. You know, basically, it wasn't an urgent issue for them before September 11.
MR. RUSSERT: It sounds like a failing grade.
MR. CLARKE: Well, I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before because, frankly, they didn't do--they never got around to doing anything. They held interim meetings, but they never actually decided anything before September 11.
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. `Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness--and anxiety--against imminent terrorist attack."
Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?
MR. CLARKE: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."
Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.
Now, in retrospect, we now know that there was information in the FBI that hadn't bubbled to the top, that two of the hijackers were in the United States. If we had had that kind of process in the summer of 2001 that we had in December '99, where the national security adviser was every day in the White House asking the FBI director and the attorney general and the secretary of defense, "Go back to your building, find out all that you can"--if we had done that in the summer of 2001, maybe the information that was in the FBI would have shaken loose.
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: As you know, your motivation has been widely questioned both at the White House and by some on Capitol Hill. One article captured it this way: "Mr. Clarke... who had sought the No. 2 spot at Homeland Security, was passed over for the post in October 2002 and demoted by Secretary Tom Ridge and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to the position of special adviser for cyberspace security." You had applied for a position and didn't get it. Are you a disgruntled job-seeker?
MR. CLARKE: Now, here we go again, you know, with it's about Dick Clarke and it's about his motivation, when really this is what the White House is trying to get you and others to do is to focus on me. I'll answer the question, Tim, but I want to point out again that this is about the president's job in the war on terrorism. This is about how going into Iraq hurt the war on terrorism. This is not about Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke's not running for office.
MR. RUSSERT: But the messenger's important.
MR. CLARKE: No, no, I understand. So let me answer the question.
MR. RUSSERT: And people have questioned your motivation. Were you happy? Did you feel dissed for being passed over?
MR. CLARKE: No. And the information you read is somewhat inaccurate. I wasn't demoted to a position of national cybersecurity adviser. I--and there's lots of paper trail on this one. I asked in June of 2001 to be transferred from the terrorism job, I did and my chief of staff, Roger Cressey, did, because in June 2001, we were so frustrated with the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism that we no longer wanted to work on the issue. As obsessed as I was with going after al-Qaeda, I felt I had to get out of the terrorism business because I couldn't work for an administration that was treating it in such an unimportant way. I asked the president to create the position of special adviser to the president for cyberspace security so that I could go into it. I didn't consider it a demotion. I considered it an important job and I consider it today, the protection of our cyberspace, to be a very important task which we haven't done...
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: The book is dedicated to those who were murdered on September 11 and you apologize to the families. Would you consider giving the royalties or profits from the book to the children of those families who were murdered?
MR. CLARKE: Tim, long before Senator Frist said what he said, I planned to make a substantial contribution, not only to them but also to the widows and orphans of our Special Forces who have fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when we see the results of the book sales, we'll know how much we have to make donations. I also have to consider the fact that friends of mine in the White House, because I still have friends in the White House, having worked there for 11 years, are telling me that the word is out in the White House to destroy me professionally. One line that somebody overheard was "he's not going to make another dime again in Washington in his life." So I have to take that into account, too, this sort of vicious personal attack is also directed at my bank account. But this is not about me making money. It's about getting the truth out. And long before Senator Frist said what he said, I planned to make substantial donations, and I will make substantial donations.
<snip>
MR. RUSSERT: Some critics have said, Mr. Clarke, that you're much more forgiving and tolerant of President Clinton than you have been of President Bush. Charles Krauthammer wrote this essay.
"In March of 2002, a `Frontline' interviewer asked Clarke whether failing to blow up camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a `pretty basic mistake.' Clarke's answer is unbelievable; `I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues." The Middle East was going on. "There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."
"This is significant for two reasons. First, if Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week--the one who told the September 11 Commission under oath that `fighting terrorism in general and fighting Al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration-- certainly
no higher priority'--is a liar."
"Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages President Bush for not having made Al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a `mistake' Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia (!) above fighting Al Qaeda."
And also, when the USS Cole was bombed, there was a riveting scene in your book with Mike Sheehan from the State Department, who screamed out, "What's it going to take, Dick? Who the" expletive "do they think attacked the Cole," expletive "Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go in there? Hell, they won't even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al-Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"
MR. CLARKE: I...
MR. RUSSERT: President Clinton did not bomb the al-Qaeda camps that you wanted, destroy them, did not respond after the Cole was attacked, 17 sailors killed.
MR. CLARKE: Sure. Right. Right.
MR. RUSSERT: And yet, you're saying that he was more aggressive than President Bush?
MR. CLARKE: Well, he did something, and President Bush did nothing prior to September 11. So, yeah.
But let's talk about the Cole. The Cole was attacked in October of 2000. President Bush was running for office; he never mentioned it. Vice President Gore was running for office; he never mentioned it. The media hardly touched it. What were they focused on? They were focused on the election, and they were focused on the Middle East peace process. I thought it was a mistake, and the very fact that I quote Mike Sheehan in the book as saying that I think is indicative of how he felt and how I felt. If I didn't think it was a mistake, that wouldn't be in the book.
The facts have come out, and the facts have come out before the 9-11 Commission that the FBI and the CIA refused to say who did it in October of 2000. And the president was, therefore, faced with the problem, "Can I go ahead and bomb somebody in retaliation for the attack on the Cole when my CIA director and my FBI director won't say who did it?"
Now, this is the same president who, when he bombed Afghanistan, when he bombed al-Qaeda camps, because George Tenet and I and Sandy Berger recommended he do it in order to get bin Laden and the leadership team, where we thought they were going to be meeting, the reaction he faced to that was the so-called wag the dog phenomenon. No one in the media, Tim, no one in the media, no one in the Congress said, "Oh, that's a great thing that you're retaliating for the attack on the United States," they said, "This is all about Monica Lewinsky, and this is all about your political problems."
So now the same president who had that experience last time he fired cruise missiles at bin Laden wants to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden, but he's got a CIA director and an FBI director who won't say, "Bin Laden did it, Mr. President." I would still have done it; I recommended doing it. Do I think it was mistake that we didn't do it? Yes. But let's understand the context.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq and this is what you told the September 11th Commission on Wednesday:
(Videotape, March 24, 2004):
MR. CLARKE: By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: And in your book, you write this. "From within the White House, a decision had been made that in 2002 congressional elections and in the 2004 re-election, the Republicans would wrap themselves in the flag, saying a vote for them was a vote against the terrorists. `Run on the war' was the direction in 2002. Then Rove meant the War on Terror, but they also had in mind another war that they would gin up." You are saying that President George W. Bush ginned up the war in Iraq for political reasons.
MR. CLARKE: Oh, no, I'm not. Oh, no, I'm not. Don't put words in my mouth or words in the book.
MR. RUSSERT: What are you saying?
MR. CLARKE: Read the book. What I'm saying is that when it was clear within the White House that the president intended to fight this war on Iraq, his political advisers sought to capitalize on it, just as his political advisers are seeking to capitalize on 9/11 by the ads that they're running.
MR. RUSSERT: Did you speak out against the war inside the government?
MR. CLARKE: I had spoken out again the notion of bombing Iraq immediately after September 11. And the Defense Department, deputy secretary, the secretary, talked to my bosses in the White House and indicated how unhappy they were with my attitude on Iraq. And as I say, I had asked to go and become cyberspace security adviser, so I did and I wasn't asked about foreign policy in that role. But when I had spoken out, when I said, "Invading Iraq after 9/11 is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor," that didn't go over well and I was very quickly sidelined as someone whose opinions were going to be taken into account.
MR. RUSSERT: Why do you think the Iraq war has undermined the war on terrorism?
MR. CLARKE: Well, I think it's obvious, but there are three major reasons. Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism? We're fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us. Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, "Wait a minute. Maybe we've gone too far here. Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed," and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we've inflamed the ideology. We've played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others. We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do.
Ninety percent of the Islamic people in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, allied countries to the United States--90 percent in polls taken last month hate the United States. It's very hard when that's the game where 90 percent of the Arab people hate us. It's very hard for us to win the battle of ideas. We can arrest them. We can kill them. But as Don Rumsfeld said in the memo that leaked from the Pentagon, I'm afraid that they're generating more ideological radicals against us than we are arresting them and killing them. They're producing more faster than we are.
The president of Egypt said, "If you invade Iraq, you will create a hundred bin Ladens." He lives in the Arab world. He knows. It's turned out to be true. It is now much more difficult for us to win the battle of ideas as well as arresting and killing them, and we're going to face a second generation of al-Qaeda. We're going to catch bin Laden. I have no doubt about that. In the next few months, he'll be found dead or alive. But it's two years too late because during those two years, al-Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization, independent cells like the organization that did the attack in Madrid.
And that's the second reason. The attack in Madrid showed the vulnerabilities of the rails in Spain. We have all sorts of vulnerabilities in our country, chemical plants, railroads. We've done a very good job on passenger aircraft now, but there are all these other vulnerabilities that require enormous amount of money to reduce those vulnerabilities, and we're not doing that.
MR. RUSSERT: And three?
MR. CLARKE: And three is that we actually diverted military resources and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and from the hunt for bin Laden to the war in Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: But Saddam is gone and that's a good thing?
MR. CLARKE: Saddam is gone is a good thing. If Fidel were gone, it would be a good thing. If Kim Il Sung were gone, it would be a good thing. And let's just make clear, our military performed admirably and they are heroes, but what price are we paying for this war on Iraq?
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Solid. He's very consistent. Anybody that doesn't believe this guy would never vote against Bush anyway.
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