Ex-aide: Terror wasn't priority

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By Thomas Frank

WASHINGTON - The government's former top counterterrorism official belittled the Bush administration's attitude toward terrorism, charging in sworn testimony Wednesday that it seemed to disregard his urgings to confront al-Qaida. He then apologized for the government's failure.

Richard Clarke, whose explosive new book has put President Bush on the defensive, told a commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the administration put off a memo he wrote days after Bush took office in January 2001, seeking urgent action to dismantle the terrorist group in Afghanistan.

Rather than getting top administration officials to address the threat personally, Clarke said he was directed to meet with second-tier officials. "It slowed it down enormously, by months," Clarke said.

Clarke, the nation's counterterrorism coordinator from 1992, became so frustrated that in May or June 2001, he sought a new job in the White House and became head of cybersecurity until he left a year ago.

"My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem," Clarke said.

Clarke's testimony drew a standing ovation from a dozen relatives of Sept. 11 victims who sat directly behind him in a packed Capitol Hill hearing room and praised his candor and contrition.

"Your government failed you," Clarke said as he started testifying. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you."

Stephen Push of Virginia, whose first wife was on the plane that hit the Pentagon, said, "It's very gratifying that someone who was involved in government counterterrorism and security has finally apologized to the families."

But three Republicans on the commission denounced Clarke, exposing a wide partisan rift in the federally appointed panel of five Democrats and five Republicans probing the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

After the hearing, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice called reporters to the White House to challenge Clarke's testimony. She denied that Clarke had written a "plan" for dealing with terrorism in January 2001, suggesting they were simply recommendations. And she said Clarke could communicate through his "daily access" to her.

Rice also produced an e-mail message Clarke wrote her on Sept. 15, 2001, recalling efforts in June to address a possible "spectacular" al-Qaida attack. The e-mail says, "The White House did insure that domestic law enforcement - knew that (counterterrorism officials) believed a major al-Qaida attack was coming and it could be in the U.S. - and did ask that special measures be taken."

Rice, who has spoken privately to the commission, refused to testify publicly Wednesday, saying presidential staffers enjoy confidentiality.

Standing in for her, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage defended the Bush administration's battle against terrorism, saying in the early days it "vigorously pursued" the policy inherited from the Clinton administration even as it fashioned its own plan to deal with Osama bin Laden.

A new report from the Sept. 11 commission's investigators notes that top administration officials did not meet on al-Qaida until Sept. 4, 2001, prompting Clarke to send a memo before the meeting to Rice.

The memo "urged policy-makers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," the report states.

The report also says Clarke "never briefed or met with President Bush on counterterrorism, which was a significant contrast from the relationship he had enjoyed with President Clinton."

In a separate report Wednesday, commission investigators portrayed CIA agents tracking bin Laden as thwarted in their efforts to capture or kill him and to get top officials to take him seriously.

CIA officers also said they felt constrained in their pursuit of bin Laden by orders stating that he should be captured, not killed. "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him," the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit told investigators.

But the CIA may have misunderstood its parameters, according to the report. Senior Clinton national security advisers said Clinton clearly wanted bin Laden dead.