Rice finally admits Bush asked Clarke about Iraq

Rice admits Bush asked about Iraq
She says Clarke was told to check for link to 9/11 on day after attacks.
By Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times
March 29, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The White House acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked his top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to find out whether Iraq was involved.

Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recounted in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Richard Clarke
Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Clarke "a perfectly logical question," she said.

The conversation -- which the White House suggested last week never took place -- centers on perhaps the most volatile charge that Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on al-Qaida's role in the terrorism.

In his new book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke recounts that the president pulled him and several other aides into the White House Situation Room on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, and instructed them "to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."

Clarke was incredulous, he said in the book. "But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," he said he responded.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred," Bush answered, according to Clarke's account.

Last week, the White House said it had no record that Bush had even been in the Situation Room that day and said the president had no recollection of such a conversation. Although administration officials stopped short of denying the account, they used it to cast doubt on Clarke's credibility, as they sought to debunk the charge that the administration downplayed the threat posed by al-Qaida in the nearly eight months before the Sept. 11 attacks and worried instead about Iraq.

The political fallout over Clarke's charges intensified on Sunday, as he and four of the president's top advisers traded jabs in separate televised appearances over the question of whether the Bush White House did enough to deter terrorism before Sept. 11.

Clarke, in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," urged the White House to make public the testimony he gave in 2002 to a joint congressional committee that was investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Clarke said declassifying his testimony -- as well as other memos and materials from Rice and the administration -- would show he had long complained that the Bush administration failed to take aggressive action against al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In particular, Clarke urged the administration to make public a memo on counterterrorism initiatives that he wrote just days after Bush took office, as well as a counterterrorism plan that the White House ultimately approved more than seven months later, a week before the attacks.

"Let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't," he said. "And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on January 25th and what they finally agreed to on September 4th is that they are basically the same thing, and they wasted months when we could have had some action."

Meanwhile, members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Rice to appear publicly before the commission to explain the events leading up to the attack.

"Dr. Rice has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission, said in an interview. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Rice met with the commission in February to discuss pre-Sept. 11 initiatives. Commissioners were allowed to take notes, but no verbatim transcript of her comments is thought to exist.