The AP has put together some useful background information on the 9-11 Commission.
Most people have heard by now the Bush administration's deplorable attempt to deny the 9-11 commission access to former President Clinton's presidential papers on terrorism. Throughout the month of March, while the administration was throwing spokespeople at every talk show, uniformly blaming Clinton for 9-11, they were stealthily hiding Clinton's actual, documentary record from the 9-11 commission.
Apparently Clinton authorized the release of some 11,000 papers, and the White House blocked the release of over a three quarters of them, an attempt at stonewalling only discovered when one of Clinton's attorneys, Bruce Lindsey, publicly protested. The White House said the Clinton documents were withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," "highly sensitive" and "the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways." [NYT 4/2/04] The Commission objected, and the administration caved (or flip flopped), agreeing to give the commission access to the records.
Of course, the White House's stonewalling is entirely within character. In November 2001, Bush issued an executive order eviscerating the Presidential Records Act, overruling by executive fiat a valid Federal Law.
John Dean has a good section on this Executive Order in his new book, Worse than Watergate:
When Bush entered office, it was time to release the 68,000 Reagan pages. But Bush's White House lawyers asked for an extension so they could review the "many constitutional and legal questions" relating to these documents. Then they asked for another, and then another. (One can only presume Bush's wariness may have something to do with what those papers say about his father or members of his administration.) Finally, they release most of those pages but refused to release the rest. Bush then issued an executive order on November 1, 2001, virtually gutting the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Bush's in-your-face Executive Order No. 13223 created an entirely new set of procedures for handling presidential papers and imposed new access standards never fathomed by Congress for obtaining the information about former presidents. In essence, Bush was repealing an act of Congress and imposing new law by executive fiat. [90]
The Executive Order gave both former and current Presidents veto power over the release of documents for pretextual reasons. It lets "representatives" of former presidents veto the release of papers. It requires researchers to provide "justification" for seeking Presidential documents. It authorizes Vice Presidents to claim executive privilege, an unprecedented power.
Presidential historians Robert Dallek, Joan Hoff and others, none of them partisans, attacked the executive order as being evidence of a "secrecy fetish," of being motivated by a desire to protect his father, his friends, and himself from the judgment of history.
The Commission has set the date for Rice's public testimony: April 8, 2004. It will truly be must see TV. Rice will have a tough time defending both her inexcusable attacks on Richard Clarke and the administration's lackadaisical approach to terrorism prior to 9-11.
The acronyms, the weird, counter-intuitive relationships, even the revolving door of personnel really complicate the story Richard Clarke is trying to tell, the story of how the Bush administration ignored terrorism before 9-11 and used it as a pretext to invade Iraq afterward. Fortunately, the 9-11 commission staff has put together an incredibly useful document explaining how the government coordinated its anti-terrorism policies in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses. I read about this stuff almost 24-7, and the staff report still was a huge help.
The Bush administration claims that one of its main goals was to increase the powers of the presidency relative to Congress. Its sole purpose for these increased powers, though, is to deceive Congress, craft bad policy, and deny the public accountability. You can't have strong presidential privilege without trust, and Bush has done nothing to earn even a modicum of trust from Congress or the people. It has consistently stonewalled investigations by the Republican Congress and refused information necessary for the public to hold the administration accountable.
Moreover, it has demonstrated that it's "principles" serve one purpose: getting Bush re-elected and ramming Bush's extreme agenda through Congress. How else can you explain its willingness to waive its privilege whenever political pressure mounts, or its willingness to declassify nothing but that which helps it politically? Actually, it appears willing to declassify anything that helps it politically, including Richard Clarke's extremely sensitive 2002 testimony.
Just three days ago Condoleezza Rice stated:
Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there's an important principle involved here. We have separate branches of government - the legislative branch and the executive branch. This commission, it takes its authority, derives its authority from the Congress, and it is a long-standing principle that sitting National Security Advisors do not testify before the Congress.Apparently, though, the president is willing to sacrifice his principles for political gain.
It's easy for news of administration corruption to get lost in the labrynthine conservative machine. Yesterday, on the same day that President Bush gave up his "principled" position on executive privilege for Condoleezza Rice, he asserted it for his Health Policy Adviser, Doug Badger.
According to Medicare actuary Richard Foster, Mr. Badger told former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully to threaten Foster into misleading Congress about the costs of the administration's 2003 Medicare program.
The administration's deception of Congress is an egregious violation of the separation of powers. It was a deliberate attempt to deceive Congress. Nothing could serve to protect the relationship between executive and legislative powers more than getting to the bottom of this deception (much like determining how the administration politicized pre-Iraq war inelligence).
Unfortunately, determining how the administration suppressed this information would probably hurt Bush's campaign. Accordingly, they blame the departed Scully and stonewall any further investigation:
Administration officials have said former Medicare administrator Thomas A. Scully was solely at fault for suppressing information from Congress and threatening to fire the government's chief Medicare actuary if he disclosed too much. Scully, who left the government last December, said yesterday he was out of town and did not know if he would testify.
President Bush has flip-flopped on National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's availability for public, under-oath, testimony before the 9-11 commission. This is an important victory for everyone that really wants to examine the policy failures that led to September 11th.
The victory was not total, though. President Bush has required the 9-11 Commission to accede to a bizarre condition for Rice's testimony: the Commission "must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice." This prior-restraint on the Commission could only have one purpose: to prevent the Commission from asking questions that could embarass the administration. Why would it bother asking questions if it has already agreed not to talk to anyone that can answer them?
Bush claims that he "ordered this level of cooperation because I consider it necessary to gaining a complete picture of the months and years that preceded the murder of our fellow citizens on September the 11th, 2001." Again, he has chosen the "big lie" approach. Pretend that this is "extraordinary cooperation," instead of the bare minimum (or below it). For a more accurate depiction of Bush's cooperation with the 9-11 commission, see our 5 minute guide.
Greg Thielmann was "director of the Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the US State Department until his retirement last year."
"[T]he credibility of the intelligence community has taken a real hit because of the way the information has been used by senior officials." [PBS 6/13/02]
One analyst, Greg Thielmann, told Correspondent Scott Pelley last fall that key evidence cited by the administration was misrepresented to the public.Thielmann should know. He had been in charge of analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Powell's own intelligence bureau.
“I had a couple of initial reactions. Then I had a more mature reaction,” says Thielmann, commenting on Powell's presentation to the United Nations last February.
“I think my conclusion now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long, distinguished service to the nation."[CBS News 2/4/04]
"Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated."[National Journal 8/8/03]
A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government, "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn't think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers." [Newsweek 6/4/03]
Thielmann also tells Pelley that he believes the decision to go to war was made first and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion. “…The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,” says Thielmann.
“They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”[CBS News 10/15/03
This administration is noted for its reluctance to fire people who fail. Perhaps that reluctance is based on experience: I have yet to find a "former administration official" that worked on national security issues and thinks this administration is doing a good job.
For example, look at former National Security Council member and expert on terrorism in both the Clinton and GWB White Houses, Roger Cressey:
One ally, Clarke's former deputy, Roger Cressey, backed the thrust of one of the most incendiary allegations in the book, about a conversation that Clarke said he had with Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Clarke said Bush pressed him three times to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The charge is explosive because no such link has ever been proved.
"'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything,'" Clarke writes that Bush told him. "'See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.'"
When Clarke protested that the culprit was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, Bush testily ordered him, he writes, to "'look into Iraq, Saddam,'" then left the room.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded at a White House briefing on Monday by saying that Bush did not remember having the conversation and that there were no records that placed the president in the Situation Room at the time.IHT
And this MSNBC article from just before Clarke came out of the closet:
Now Cressey is speaking out for the first time. He says in the early days of the Bush administration, al-Qaida simply was not a top priority, “There was not this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you will, to get it done sooner rather than later.”Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11 commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China, missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaida.
For example: One document shows a key high-level National Security Council meeting on Iraq on Feb. 1, 2001. Yet, there was no comparable meeting on al-Qaida until September.
Is Cressey saying that some senior members of the Bush administration viewed Saddam Hussein as a greater threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden? “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It was inconceivable to them that al-Qaida could be this talented, this capable without Iraq, in this case, providing them real support."
Cressey has made, if possible, even more incendiary comments than Clarke. He maintains that the US had the intelligence and a plan to strike terrorst Abu Musab Zarqawi and his training camps in the Kurdish controlled Northern Iraq area long before the Iraq war. We didn't execute those plans because George W. Bush was "more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists," according to Cressey.
From the Center for America Progress
"President Bush yesterday once again tried to fend off charges of gross negligence before 9/11, saying, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people." But with more evidence emerging this week that the White House received repeated warnings before 9/11 of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, the President's "had I known" defense raises two disturbing scenarios: Either a) the Administration is telling the truth, actually did not know of the threat despite receiving repeated warnings and was totally oblivious to a brewing national security crisis. Or b) the Administration is not telling the truth, actually knew about the threat from the warnings it received, and yet still failed to act with adequate urgency."
Only one word: Wow
Tom Daschle asks some probing questions that deserve an answer from the administration:
Did the Bush Administration have a strategy for defeating Al Qaeda prior to September 11?[D]id the Bush Administration's apparent focus on Saddam Hussein detract from efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and leave America less secure?
...
It is time for the Administration to honor our citizens' right to know.
Illicit Pleasure
Richard Clarke deserves thanks for showing the White House what true loyalty is all about, for showing them what it means to be a public servant, and for standing up for the American people.
I get some illicit pleasure from Clarke's revelations about the White House's miserable anti-terrorism policy. Not because the policy is bad, but because his forthrightness provides such a glaring counterpoint to the administration's habitual deception and misdirection. Richard Clarke understands that serving and protecting the people is more important than winning partisan advantage or helping one's friends.
The George W. Bush White House is famous for its emphasis on loyalty. Unfortunately, by "loyalty," it means loyalty to George W. Bush personally. Not to the American people, not to the Office of the Presidency, not even to some higher principle or being. The Richard Clarke situation, by his actions and words, and just as clearly by the reactions and attacks of the administration, has unmasked how dangerous this glorification of personal loyalty is. If it weren't for Clarke's dedication to the American people, we wouldn't know just how badly the Bush administration had bungled our security.
Clarke's revelations make two major contributions to the effort to improve America's security. The first, which is the most relevant to the 9-11 commission, concerns the treatment of terrorism prior to September 11th. The Clinton administration didn't have the power to address terrorism, while the Bush administration didn't have the will. The second allegation, which will be discussed in a later post, is that the administration failed to adequately prosecute the war on terrorism because of its preoccupation with Iraq.
Bush Administration's Neglect of Terrorism Before September 11th
Clarke spends 12 pages (227-238) explicitly detailing the Bush administration's failure to take terrorism seriously in its first eight months. First, he notes that Vice President Cheney, when briefed about al-Qaeda, "was, as ever, quiet and calm on the surface. The wheels were spinning behind the mask."[227] Cheney would meet with the CIA, and, Clarke thought, respond pragmatically to the al-Qaeda threat. Clarke even thought Cheney would push for fighting al-Qaeda in the "Principals meetings," or the meetings of Cabinet-level officials. Unfortunately, according to Clarke, "[Cheney] didn't."[228]
Clarke's initial hope, that Cheney was one of the good guys, guided by evidence rather than ideology, eerily echoes former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's first thoughts. O'Neill was similarly let down, shocked to eventually realize that Cheney stood firmly on the side of the ideologues.
Secretary of State Colin Powell had a much better reaction. Though surprised at the unanimity among the intelligence agencies of the magnitude of al-Qaeda's threat, he was willing to listen. He assigned Richard Armitage, soon to become the Deputy Secretary of State, to work closely with Clarke's counter-terrorism group. [228]
Clarke's interaction with National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice merits more attention, because the administration's allies have distorted Clarke's language here to discredit him. Here is the entire "controversial" section:
Now Condi Rice was in charge. She appeared to have a closer relationship with the second President Bush than any of her predecessors had with the presidents they reported to. That should have given her some maneuver room, some margin for shaping the agenda. The Vice President, however, had decided to be involved at the NSC Principals level. The Secretary of Defense also made clear that he didn't care about anyone else's relationship with the President; he was doing what he wanted to do. As I briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before, so I added, "Most people think of it as Usama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organizations with cells in over fifty countries, including the U.S.
Rice looked skeptical. She focused on the fact that my office staff was large by NSC standards (twelve people) and did operational things, including domestic security issues. She said, "The NSC looks just as it did when I worked here a few years ago, except for your operation. It's all new. It does domestic things and it is not just doing policy, it seems to be worrying about operational issues. I'm not sure we will want to keep all of this in the NSC.
Rice viewed the NSC as a "foreign policy" coordination mechanism and not some place where issues such as terrorism in the U.S., or domestic preparedness for weapons of mass destruction, or computer security, should be addressed. I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Steve Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC." [229-230]
Instead of refuting Clarke's claim, conservatives have latched onto Clarke's statement that Rice's "facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard [of al-Qaeda] before." Joe Scarborough "proved that Clarke was a liar" by airing an excerpt of a 2000 radio show where Rice mentioned al-Qaeda. Talk about your red herring. Clarke wasn't implying that Rice had never heard of al-Qaeda in 2001 – he was showing that she didn't consider it to be a serious national security issue.
Clarke asked for a Cabinet-level meeting to "review the imminent al-Qaeda threat." Rice demurred, telling Clarke to meet with deputies to "frame" the issues before presenting them to Principals (she also downgraded the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism from a Cabinet, or Principals level, to a deputy level). [230-231]
Clarke's deputy-level meeting with Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage got off to an inauspicious start. At the first meeting, Wolfowitz didn't want to bother with al-Qaeda, he wanted to talk about the phantom Iraqi-terrorism.
"You [Clarke] give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponser. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist. I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq as behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
[231-232]
For months, Clarke was bogged down in bureaucratic wrangling with the deputies. He was dealing with Armitage's "lawyerly style." He was filling out pro-forma requests from Rice, a "review of the organizational options for homeland defense and critical infrastructure protection." [234] The deputies wanted to change the focus from "eliminating" al-Qaeda to "significantly erod[ing] al Qaeda." [235]
The Principals Committee finally met on September 4, 2001. [237] George W. Bush had just gotten back from a month long vacation down at the Crawford ranch. The meeting was a "nonevent" [237], with Tenet and Powell taking solid positions, Rumsfeld ruminating about Iraq, and nothing concrete coming from it. [238]
Administration "Slimes and Defends," but Just Proves Clarke's Points.
The administration has not rebutted any of these allegations. Ironically, their attempts to discredit Mr. Clarke with arguments have actually buttressed his arguments. Brad Delong works with Robert Waldmann's original material in a long discussion of the administration's inconsistencies.
Dan Froomkin, in his valuable Washington Post column, provides an in-depth look at Fox News' efforts to help the administration discredit Richard Clarke.
It turns out that Fox News approached the administration with a transciption of an old background briefing provided by Richard Clarke. The administration then called the media and told them it was acceptable to quote Clarke's comments from that briefing. Altogether, a nice threat to future whistleblowers: stop toeing the party line and have your "morality" attacked by a Congressional committee.
Luckily, it looks like Clarke is the real deal. He was unflappable on the stand yesterday, apparently giving John Stewart of the Daily Show a new hero. Stewart said he would talk about the Clarke testimony tonight, so tune into Comedy Central if you get a chance.
In the 9-11 Commission hearings, Former Sen. Bob Kerrey just apologized to Richard Clarke for the appalling behavior of Fox News. According to Mr. Kerrey, Fox News pulled a tape of an old Richard Clarke background briefing, transcribed it, and posted it on its website.
Background briefings are supposed to remain confidential. Mr. Kerrey called this an appalling breach of trust, even for the "occasionally" fair and balanced Fox News. More from Josh Marshall.
Richard Clarke has a lot of damning things to say about the administration's anti-terrorism policy in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. Before we've even had a chance to talk about them, though, the White House attack machine has launched into personal attacks.
They have blamed Clarke for failing to stop the terrorism that took place in the nineties. They have called Clarke disgruntled over a demotion. They have accused Clarke of being "out of the loop." And, of course, they have accused him of being a liberal symp, based mostly on his association with Rand Beers, Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser. Their conservative allies in the media have joined the fun.
Clarke has started to hit back, but he shouldn't even need to yet. It is clear that none of these people have even read the book. If they had, they wouldn't be making such asinine arguments.
The easiest to discredit is the "Clarke is a liberal" argument. Clarke's actual book starts off by praising Condi Rice:
"Rice would later be criticized by unnamed participants of the meeting for 'just standing around.' From my obviously partial perspective, she had shown courage by standing back." (pg. 3)
He then praises Bush and Cheney for their decisiveness during the actual 9-11 tragedy:
"I was amazed at the speed of the decisions coming from Cheney and, through him, from Bush." (pg. 8)
He spends an entire chapter praising Reagan for having won the cold war:
"[Reagan's] efforts to push the Soviet Union to collapse worked, much to the surprise of most of official Washington." (pg. 35)
"Even with hidsight, I believe the Reagan administration was right to assist the Afghans and to drain the Soviet Union's resolve. We had sought to end the proxy wars by proving to Moscow that these conflicts could be a two-way street. Our security was directly affected by those struggles." (51)
The book is littered with praise for Republicans; he clearly doesn't harbor any irrational bias towards them. He is offering a nonpartisan evaluation of policy, and the conservatives had simply had bad policy.