Review of Clarke's book ''Against All Enemies''

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 16:33:58 -0800
From: Severo Ornstein <severo () poonhill com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/books/review/0411books-risen.html?ex=1081687569&ei=1&en=a58149453c4e7040 


March 29, 2004
 By JAMES RISEN

Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman,
Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free
Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really
is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't
simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President
Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud
pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make
this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A.
Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too
good to be ignored.

The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with
Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks
captured the headlines in the days after the book's
release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a
rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping
good read.

The first - and by far the best - chapter is a
heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White
House on the morning of Sept. 11, when Washington suddenly
came blinking into a bloody new world. I hope Clarke has
sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening
chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. You can
guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that
historic morning.

By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate
White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he
was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had
served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working
at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in
1998 had been named White House counterterrorism
coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on
in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he
had quickly become frustrated by the new team's
unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin
Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling
counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a
lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice,
the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis
manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized
the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to
Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not
come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave
the order triggering the Continuity of Government
procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members
and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed
locations.

With Clarke at the helm of a secure videoconference network
linking the White House with other key agencies, in quick
succession thousands of commercial aircraft were grounded;
the country's land and sea borders were closed; the
military went to Defcon 3, its highest alert level in
nearly 30 years; and the Russians were notified. ''Damn
good thing I did that,'' Clarke quotes Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage as telling him. ''Guess who was
about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear
forces?''

While Clarke and his aides were holding down the fort in
the Situation Room and the president was flying around the
country on Air Force One, Vice President Cheney, his wife
and aides were holed up in a little-known bunker in the
East Wing of the White House called the PEOC, the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center. At one point that
morning, Clarke went to the bunker to see Cheney;
navigating his way into the vault past grim, shotgun-toting
guards, he found that Lynne Cheney had turned down the
volume on the television hooked up to the secure
videoconference so she could listen to CNN.

The most controversial incident in ''Against All Enemies''
deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11
attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke
writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the
Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke
and a few aides to ''go back over everything, everything.
See if Saddam did this.''

Clarke said he was ''taken aback, incredulous.'' He told
the president, ''Al Qaeda did this.''

''I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved.
Just look. I want to know any shred. . . .'' After the
president left, one of Clarke's aides said, ''Wolfowitz got
to him.''

Within a few months of the attacks, Clarke's access clearly
did begin to dwindle; White House officials played on his
lack of firsthand knowledge of Iraq war planning to attack
the credibility of his book. But the key allegation in the
book - that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when
faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that
was attacking the United States - can't be dismissed by
assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early
days, Richard Clarke was the loop.

''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective - and terrific -
account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept.
11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering
that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.

Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has given
us what is certainly the finest historical narrative so far
on the origins of Al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of
Afghanistan. He has followed up that feat by threading
together the complex roles played by diplomats and spies
from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States into a
coherent story explaining how Afghanistan became such a
welcoming haven for Al Qaeda.

In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing
how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the
rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in
Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in
terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories
since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of
Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals
are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the
nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight
against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said
years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi
intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support
for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in
Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin
Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi
intelligence.''

Coll overlaps with Clarke in his detailed recounting of the
mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism
policy. Unlike Clarke, however, Coll doesn't have an ax to
grind, and so offers a more evenhanded view of the internal
battles between the White House, the C.I.A. and other
agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top
priority. As a reporter who struggled to cover many of the
twists and turns in counterterrorism policy that Coll
describes, I find ''Ghost Wars'' provides fresh details and
helps explain the motivations behind many crucial
decisions.

As Coll seeks to explain why the Clinton team never mounted
a serious effort to go after Al Qaeda, even after the 1998
embassy bombings in East Africa, he finds plenty of blame
to go around: ''Clinton's National Security Council aides
firmly believed that they were the aggressive ones on the
Al Qaeda case, pursuing every possible avenue to get at bin
Laden over calcified resistance or incompetence within the
C.I.A. and Pentagon bureaucracies. From the other side of
the Potomac, Clinton's White House often looked
undisciplined, unfocused and uncertain.'' ''Ghost Wars''
also corroborates many of Clarke's assertions that
counterterrorism policy was largely ignored by the new Bush
administration before Sept. 11. Coll notes, as does Clarke,
that the Bush team didn't hold its first cabinet-level
meeting on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan until Sept. 4, one week
before the twin towers fell.

Coll closes with the Sept. 9, 2001, murder of Ahmed Shah
Massoud, an Afghan rebel leader who had been cooperating
with the C.I.A. in its vain efforts to track bin Laden
around Afghanistan. As with so many other warnings before
it, the full significance of Massoud's murder was missed
until it was too late. Here and elsewhere in ''Ghost
Wars,'' Coll's riveting narrative makes the reader want to
rip the page and yell at the American counterterrorism
officials he describes - including Clarke - and tell them
to watch out.



James Risen is the author, with Milt Bearden, of ''The Main
Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.'s Final Showdown With
the K.G.B.'' He covers national security for The Times.



--
Severo M. Ornstein
Poon Hill
2200 Bear Gulch Road
Woodside, CA 94062
Tel: 650-851-4258
Fax: 650-851-9549

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