Richard Clarke - Classic Misdirection

A few opinions on Richard Clarke from WSJ OpinionJournal. Richard Miniter begins:

A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.

So I looked forward to reading "Against All Enemies." Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism--a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints--and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright--and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.

He goes on to eviscerate Clarke methodically and with great precision - don't read if the sight of blood makes you light-headed.

Laurie Mylroie continues the much-deserved pummelling of the Mr. Clarke, confronting him with facts he was in the position to know (and if he did not, he is incompetent). I have to love this, because I continue to be mystified by the media's persistent refusal to cover the story of Iraqi involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Clinton administration's refusal to take action on the evidence of that involvement. This story is even more topical in light of the current 9/11 commission, so why is the mainstream media silent on this issue?:

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"?

The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the facts:

• Fact No. 1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport.

• Fact No. 2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin.

• Fact No. 3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal.

• Fact No. 4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef, he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his father worked."

Ms. Mylroie concludes:

The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef's "brothers."

A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country.

When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.

On the plane back from Rome, I read a Time magazine (may have been the international edition) article wildly favorable to Clarke entitled "Can this man bring Bush down?" In it, the author blithely described a Clarke who deliberately set himself up as one-stop shopping for the President on national security matters and related that, under Clarke's encouragement, Clinton distrusted the CIA and "often skipped CIA briefings entirely". I was flabbergasted - first that Clinton would do this, secondly that Clarke would brag about it, and thirdly that the author apparently saw nothing wrong with this picture.

We've heard a lot about intel failures "causing" 9/11, and now we hear that the President of the US couldn't be bothered to attend intel briefings? The picture painted by the Time article was of an arrogant man who didn't work and play well with others and got his pantyhose in a knot when the new administration came in and wanted to play by the rules. He was "annoyed" when he was asked to actually attend NSA meetings and didn't like the idea that he "worked for" Condi Rice. This sounds to me like someone with an axe to grind.

The big question Clarke has never addressed is this: if he supposedly knew so much about al-Qaeda, why didn't he get Clinton to do something about it? If he couldn't get an administration in office for 8 years to act, how was a new administration, enduring a rough transition after a contested election, supposed to accomplish in a few short months what the previous administration had been unable to do? If there is blame to be apportioned, perhaps we are looking at the wrong administration.

And perhaps the more important question is this: instead of looking for someone to blame, why don't we concentrate on the future? Investigations are expensive, time-consuming, and rarely produce anything except partisan recriminations and lasting emnity. Why don't we give it a rest?

Blame is easy - it's fixing the problem that is the real task at hand. The people who are talking the loudest are the ones who don't seem to have any constructive suggestions about the future.

- Cassandra