Storm Warnings

Bin Laden was a threat, but Clinton never pushed it and Bush seemed more interested in Saddam. What went wrong?

By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas

Newsweek

March 29 issue - It was the day after 9/11, and President Bush, like many Americans, was looking for someone to bomb. Wandering into the White House Situation Room, the president pulled aside Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff who had been held over from the Clinton years. According to Clarke, Bush asked: was Iraq responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged.

Clarke was skeptical in the extreme. Six days after the president's request, Clarke says, he turned in a classified memo concluding that there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity in 9/11—nor any relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The memo, says Clarke, was buried by an administration that was determined to get Iraq, sooner or later.

Clarke, who was interviewed by NEWSWEEK last week, is telling his story to the world: to "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, in testimony this week to the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks and in his new book, "Against All Enemies," just out. Clarke portrays the Bush White House as indifferent to the Qaeda threat before 9/11, then obsessed with punishing Iraq, regardless of what the evidence showed about Saddam's Qaeda ties, or lack of them.

The Bush administration is already pushing back. A White House official told NEWSWEEK that Bush has "no specific recollection" of the post 9/11 conversation described by Clarke, and that records show the president was not in the Situation Room at the time Clarke recalls. "His book might be called 'If Only They Had Listened to Dick Clarke'," said an administration official.

John Kerry wants everyone to listen to Clarke now. As soon as Clarke's charges began appearing in print, the Democrats' presumptive nominee put them on his campaign Web site. After a rough week when he was mocked by the Bush-Cheney campaign for flip-flopping on the Iraq war, Kerry is glad to turn the tables on Bush. The Bush campaign has been eager to make the election center on Bush's resolve to strike back after 9/11. But Kerry wants to bring the focus back to the nine months before 9/11, when the new president was paying only erratic attention to Al Qaeda.

For Kerry and the Democrats, the catch is that Bill Clinton did no better to tame the terrorist threat during his last years in office. As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll recently showed in his book "Ghost Wars," those in the national-security bureaucracy under Clinton spent more time wringing their hands and squabbling with each other than going after Osama bin Laden. And Clinton never stepped in and ordered his troops to stop dickering and do the job.

The White House counterterror chief during the late ' 90s and through 9/11 was Dick Clarke. A career civil servant, Clarke was known for pounding the table to urge his counterparts at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to do more about Al Qaeda. But he did not have much luck, in part because in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, the top leadership did not back up Clarke and demand results.

Clarke does not absolve Clinton (or himself) of responsibility—the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa happened on Clinton's watch—but he saves his harshest criticism for Bush and his national-security team. In his new book, Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "What does that tell you?" Clarke remarked to NEWSWEEK. "They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [Al Qaeda] was not on it."

A White House official countered that the true fault lay with Clarke for failing to propose an effective plan to go after Al Qaeda. On Jan. 25, this official told NEWSWEEK, Clarke submitted proposals to "roll back" Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by boosting military aid to neighboring Uzbekistan, getting the CIA to arm its Predator spy planes and increasing funding for guerrillas fighting the Taliban. There was no need for a high-level meeting on terrorism until Clarke came up with a better plan, this official told NEWSWEEK. The official quoted President Bush as telling Condi Rice, "I'm tired of swatting flies." Bush, this official says, wanted an aggressive scheme to take bin Laden out.

Clarke sharply whacks Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the leader of the Get Saddam squad. When the White House finally did convene a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, in April 2001, Wolfowitz rebuffed Clarke's effort to focus on Al Qaeda. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said, "Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?" The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz described Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," said this official.

If the Bush administration was sounding the alarm about Al Qaeda in its first few months in office, the national-security bureaucracy was not listening. At the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft downgraded terrorism as a priority, choosing to place more emphasis on drug trafficking and gun violence. That summer, a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists; as a result, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Qaeda suspects in the United States. The CIA and Air Force were caught up in an endless wrangle over who would arm and fly the Predator spy plane (and pay for it, as well as take responsibility for shooting at terrorist targets).

By early July 2001, Clarke and others in the intelligence community were truly alarmed by a sharp spike in the chatter of terrorist operatives. A "spectacular" seemed to be in the offing, although the CIA guessed that it was more likely to occur in the Middle East than in the United States. At his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush was given a briefing. Contrary to some media reports, Bush was not specifically warned that Al Qaeda might be planning on hijacking airplanes to crash into buildings inside the United States. Rather, the CIA had picked up a report that the son of the "Blind Sheik," Omar Abdel Rahman—imprisoned in New York for plotting to blow up the subways and city monuments—had been in Afghan terror camps proposing to hijack and hold hostage an airliner to demand the release of his father.

While casting doubt on Clarke's account of a conversation with Bush in the Situation Room on Sept. 12, White House aides do acknowledge that Bush wanted to know of any links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Clarke claims that the White House didn't want to know the true answer, and stalled him. Not true, says a White House official, who adds that in any case the argument was irrelevant by late September, since Bush had already decided to put off a decision on attacking Iraq to concentrate on Afghanistan.

All of this wrangling is sure to provide fodder for the presidential campaign. Clarke is perhaps not the most neutral source. Last year Clarke's best friend, Rand Beers, quit as the White House's counterterrorism chief after complaining—over glasses of wine on Clarke's front porch—about the wrong-headedness of Bush's plan to invade Iraq. Beers is now a principal foreign-policy adviser to Kerry. In the days and months ahead, Kerry will attack Bush for aiming at the wrong enemy; Bush will attack Kerry for waffling on the war on Iraq. Meanwhile, as we learn more about what the U.S. government did, and did not do, before 9/11, there is plenty of blame to go around for everyone.

With Mark Hosenball

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4571338/