Questions and Answers

One of the questions the Family Steering Committee of the 9/11 Independent Commission has been trying to get Pres. Bush to answer is:

Beginning with the transition period between the Clinton administration and your own, and ending on 9/11/01, specifically what information (either verbal or written) about terrorists, possible attacks and targets, did you receive from any source? This would include briefings or communications from: Out-going Clinton officials; CIA, FBI, NSA, DoD and other intelligence agencies; Foreign intelligence, governments, dignitaries or envoys; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar.

That last one, Richard Clarke, has been a key White House antiterrorism aide since the Reagan administration. He's got a book coming out this week — Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror–What Really Happened. Clarke's book — like the newly released Disarming Iraq, from Hans Blix, and Joseph Wilson's soon-to-be-released The Politics of Truth — seems likely to provide plenty of headaches for White House spinmeisters trying to portray the president as "tough on terror" and "a man of integrity."

Clarke will also be on CBS' 60 Minutes tonight. Here (via Buzzflash) is CBS News' accompanying report.

Here are some of the choice bits that illustrate how Clarke might answer the FSC's question:

"Frankly," he said, "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."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

… Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says, prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously.

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al-Qaida. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently — underlined urgently — a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaida 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 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."

… By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president — 'cause he briefed him every morning — a major al-Qaida attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August.

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations — meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al-Qaida operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11.

Clarke also describes — in details that 60 Minutes confirms from other sources — the president's stubborn insistence that retaliation for 9/11 focus on Iraq, not on al-Qaida.

Read the whole thing. Twice.