Fact check explains Bush Bombs on Anti-Terror Efforts

American Family Voices Daily Reality Check
Bush Bombs on Anti-Terror Efforts
3/22/2004

President Bush has based his re-election campaign on two main strategies: shrill partisan attacks, and scaring the American public about the war on terror. The Bush Team has adopted the slogan "Steady Leadership in Times of Change," in an attempt to convince the voters that a Bush defeat is a victory for our enemies. Now Richard Clarke, the president's former top anti-terrorism adviser says that we should be afraid. But he's not just toeing the administration's line. On the contrary, Clarke says that Bush's anti-terror record is weak enough to put us all on Code Red.

Last night on "60 Minutes," Clarke shattered the administration's carefully constructed myth that President Bush is strong on terror, and no one can duplicate his strong leadership. "Frankly, 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 said. He went on to criticize the president's handling of terrorism in the post 9/11 era as well.

Clarke said that he issued an urgent memo on the topic of impending al Qaeda terrorist attacks back in January 2001, but that it wasn't acted upon until April. And, once the meeting was scheduled, Clarke was denied access to top level officials like Condoleezza Rice. Here's how Clarke recounts his meeting:

"I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States."'

Clarke says that by the summer of 2001, US intelligence was picking up an intense level of dangerous-sounding chatter. Back in December 1999, a similar situation pressed President Bill Clinton to order his Cabinet to go on high alert, which helped prevent an attack on Los Angeles International Airport.

But the chatter in 2001 did not prompt such a response from President Bush. "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject," Clarke recounts.

Shockingly, the Bush administration's focus on the War on Terrorism did not improve following the 9/11 attacks.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this," Clarke said. He says he put together a memo on the attacks correctly blaming al Qaeda, but that it got bounced back to him twice by the president's close staff.

"I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't - wouldn't like the answer," Clarke said.

Clarke has written a book detailing his experiences in the War on Terror, and he recounts some stunning examples of how the Bush administration's commitment to the effort was mainly political in nature. "The [Iraqi] crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,"' he writes.

Clarke remembers that he "realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try and take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq."

Now, new evidence regarding FBI counterterrorism funding echoes Clarke's description of the Bush administration's empty commitment to fighting terror. A document dated October 12, 2001 has been uncovered that shows an FBI funding request for $1.5 billion was slashed by the White House, which allotted only $531 million for anti-terror efforts. In doing so, the Bush White House cut the FBI's requests for items like computer networking and foreign language intercepts in half, and completely axed a request for greater "collaborative capabilities."

Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected calls for $588 million in increased funding for the FBI for fiscal year 2003, including requests for 54 new translators and 248 new counterterrorism agents. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Ashcroft failed to list fighting terrorism as one of his department's top seven goals. It received ancillary mention under the topic of gun violence and drugs.

"Despite multiple terror warnings before and after 9/11 [Bush] repeatedly rejected counterterrorism resources that his own security agencies said was desperately needed to protect America," said David Sirota of the Center for American Progress.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authored an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post in an attempt to rebut Clarke's damning charges and shift blame for 9/11 onto the Clinton administration. Her essay would be laughable if not for the serious subject matter; it strikes yet another blow to her battered credibility.

"We now know that the real threat had been in the United States since at least 1999. The plot to attack New York and Washington had been hatching for nearly two years," Rice writes. Of course, she might as well write in big red letters, "Don't blame Bush, he was still figuring out the White House light switches."

In what has become a standard Bush administration defense tactic, Rice repeats a statement that has already proven demonstrably false.

"Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to free US-held terrorists," she writes in her op-ed.

Here's what she's said on May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people…would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

Of course, this isn't true. A report issued by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) back in 1999 warned of the possibility of al Qaeda hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the Pentagon, White House, or CIA headquarters.

Now, here's the real problem with Rice's faulty spin: Her declaration that no one could have predicted this severely undercuts her other contention that "Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda," and that the extreme nature of the threat "was well understood by the president and his national security principals."

Apparently it wasn't, otherwise Rice would not continue to repeat the ludicrous statement that no one could have predicted 9/11. She is now caught in a catch-22: Either she was well-briefed on the subject and knew of the hijacking threat detailed in the NIC report, or she didn't read it and wasn't fully aware of the threat posed by al Qaeda.

Neither is an attractive option, so how will this issue be resolved? Probably with another example of Bush-style "steady leadership" - a nakedly political attack on Richard Clarke.