The Bush administration could best rebut charges made by its former terrorism expert by cooperating fully with the panel investigating the 9/11 attacks.
Published March 23, 2004
Richard Clarke, a terrorism expert in Republican and Democratic administrations dating to the Reagan years, makes two damning criticisms of the current Bush administration: First, Clarke says, the president and his national security team ignored dire warnings about al-Qaida several months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Second, he says, the president and other administration officials began pressuring him as early as Sept. 12, 2001 to produce evidence linking Iraq to the attacks.
For an administration that is basing much of its re-election campaign on its stewardship of national security, these are grave charges that go to the heart of this White House's competence and credibility. Moreover, Clarke cannot be plausibly accused of partisan motives. Aside from giving loyal service to Republican and Democratic presidents, his criticism is bipartisan. He decries what he views as the Clinton administration's inadequate response to earlier al-Qaida attacks.
Clarke's allegations deserve a detailed response from the highest levels of the Bush national security team. But the administration's first reaction was to send out its communications director, Dan Bartlett, to issue what amounted to a campaign retort. The charges made by Clarke and other terrorism experts are far too important to be treated as politics as usual.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice later issued a rebuttal of Clarke's charges, and she and other White House officials have lately been writing columns and making the rounds of television talk shows to make a broader defense of the administration's national security record. Yet Rice stubbornly refuses to cooperate fully with the commission charged with investigating intelligence failures prior to Sept. 11 and recommending policies to prevent another such disaster.
The administration has refused the commission's repeated request for Rice to testify in public hearings that begin today. White House officials have been uncooperative in other ways, balking at the release of many documents requested by the commission and attempting to cut the panel's work short. President Bush originally agreed to spend only an hour answering questions in private from two commission members. White House spokesman Scott McClellan later said the president would "answer all the questions they want to raise."
That should be the policy for all Clinton and Bush officials whose cooperation is requested. Top Clinton officials, including former national security adviser Sandy Berger, will publicly testify. Top Bush officials have no valid reason for failing to do so.
For now, we have no way of knowing whether the charges made by Clarke - and largely corroborated by other accounts - are true. But we do know that the Bush administration's unwillingness to cooperate fully with the commission investigating our government's national security policies prior to Sept. 11, 2001, leaves the impression that some people in high places would prefer to keep the truth from the American public.
