WASHINGTON - Tuesday's White House decision to
permit National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to
testify publicly under oath before the so-called 9-11
Commission marks an unusual reversal by an
administration that has fiercely resisted any moves that
suggest it is capable of making mistakes.
It also signals recognition by President George
W Bush's political handlers that last week's testimony
before the commission by the administration's
former senior counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke,
and even more, its own ferocious efforts to
discredit Clarke, have inflicted some damage on
Bush's re-election campaign - though not enough to prevent Bush
taking a 4-percentage-point lead over presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee Senator John Kerry, according to
the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
So
ferocious were the administration's attacks on Clarke
that more than one commentator was moved by the end of
last week to compare the tactics to those of former
president Richard Nixon, whose downfall 30 years ago in
the Watergate scandal was prompted by "dirty tricks"
against his real or suspected foes.
"This
administration's reliance on smear tactics is
unprecedented in modern US politics - even compared with
Nixon's," noted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on
Tuesday in an article that quoted John Dean, Nixon's
White House counsel, who himself has just published a
book on the Bush administration titled Worse Than
Watergate.
Clarke, whose own book,
Against All Enemies, elaborates on the 15 hours
of testimony he has delivered to the commission that was
set up to investigate the September 11, 2001, attacks on
New York and the Pentagon, has come to be regarded by
the administration as a particularly dangerous enemy.
A career civil servant who coordinated
counter-terrorism on the White House National Security
Council (NSC) staff from 1992, when Bush's father was in
power, until the eve of the Iraq war in February 2003,
Clarke is the first high-level insider to attack Bush's
campaign pose as the leader in the "war on terror" as
hollow.
On the CBS show 60 Minutes, the most
watched public-affairs network television program in
the United States, he said Bush did ''a terrible job''
pursuing terrorists. Specifically, and of special
interest to the 9-11 Commission, Clarke said the Bush
administration completely failed to respond to
intelligence and his own urgings through the summer of
2001 that the al-Qaeda terrorist group of Osama bin
Laden was planning a major attack on US targets.
This was a marked contrast to the Bill Clinton
administration, Clarke added, when he had the authority
to spur key agency chiefs to heighten their vigilance
whenever intelligence "chatter'" indicated an imminent
attack, as in the December 1999 "'Millennium Plot" to
attack the Los Angeles Airport and other targets. That
scheme was successfully broken up when border agents in
Washington state arrested an Algerian trying to enter
the United States from Canada.
And, instead of
pursuing al-Qaeda after the ouster of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan in November 2001, according to Clarke,
the administration began preparing its attack on Iraq,
which he insisted had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. In
doing so, the administration diverted key intelligence
and military resources, including highly specialized
intelligence officers, from Afghanistan to the Iraq
theater.
"By invading
Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly
undermined the war on terrorism," Clarke told
the commission last week, arguing that it not only made the
pursuit of al-Qaeda more difficult, but also made
the group's anti-US propaganda more credible to the
Islamic world. Clarke also said Bush had personally pressed him
to find a connection between then Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein and September 11 shortly after the attacks, even
though Clarke assured him there was none.
The
major points of Clarke's critique have been made before
and, indeed, little of what he said was surprising for
the policy cognoscenti who have followed the debate over
the "war on terror".
But the combination of
Clarke himself as a 30-year veteran hardliner of the
national-security bureaucracy who had served in high
positions in Republican and Democratic administrations
alike, the 60 Minutes forum in which he appeared
and the timing of his appearance in the opening stages
of a political campaign in which Bush is running
primarily as a "wartime president" guaranteed a major
impact.
The White House and its allies in
the media responded with all guns blazing. Vice
President Dick Cheney, for example, depicted Clarke as
a disgruntled staffer who had been passed over
for promotion and was in any case "out of the loop",
while White House spokesman Scott McClellan charged
that Clarke was "grandstand[ing]" to sell his book
and/or gain a post in a future administration headed by
Kerry. Clarke's "best buddy", noted McClellan, was
Rand Beers, Kerry's coordinator for national-security issues,
who had succeeded Clarke in the NSC post only to resign
in March 2003 to protest the Iraq war's impact on the
anti-al-Qaeda campaign.
On Friday, Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist unleashed a furious attack on
the floor of the Senate, accusing Clarke of
"profiteering" and suggesting he had committed perjury
in his commission testimony which, according to Frist,
was at odds with the praise he had heaped on the
administration in classified testimony to Congress two
years before.
But the administration's most
ubiquitous assailant was Rice, Clarke's former boss, who
not only produced a column in the Washington Post just a
few hours after 60 Minutes was broadcast,
defending the administration's pre-September 11
performance, but who was also interviewed on 60
Minutes to rebut Clarke the following Sunday. In
between, she appeared on virtually every other major
national news program, making her omnipresence a
required joke on late-night talk shows.
The
campaign to discredit Clarke, which was widely decried
by major newspapers and even some prominent Republicans,
was partly successful - the latest polls indicate that
some 50 percent of respondents believe his disclosures
were motivated by personal or political reasons. But at
the same time, they also made the book an instant
best-seller and Clarke, who had long kept to the
bureaucratic shadows, a very prominent figure. By the
end of last week, a whopping 89 percent of the public
said they had heard of him; 42 percent said they had
heard "a lot" about him.
Moreover, his charges
appear to have tarnished Bush's campaign image. A
Newsweek poll found a decline in the percentage of
voters who approve of the president's handling of
terrorism, from 65 percent just five weeks ago to 57
percent last weekend, and a rise in those who
disapprove, from 28 percent to 38 percent. It also found
a rise in the same period in the percentage of voters
who believe Iraq was a "distraction" from the "war on
terror", from 42 percent to 47 percent. Still, the
Bush-Kerry race remains tight, and a CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll this week suggests that the Bush
campaign's portrayal of Kerry as a tax-raising liberal
who is soft on economic issues has damaged Kerry more
than Clarke's testimony hurt Bush: according to that
poll, 51 percent said they would choose Bush for
president, while 47 percent said they would vote for
Kerry, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4
percentage points. Three weeks ago, Kerry led Bush by 8
points, 52 percent to 44 percent.
Rice's
accessibility to the media made a mockery of the White
House's insistence that she should not testify publicly
and under oath before the 9-11 Commission itself. (She
has voluntarily given four hours of unsworn testimony to
specific commission members to date.)
Traditionally, national security advisers have
not been required to testify before Congress - although
her predecessor Sandy Berger did so twice - under a
doctrine of "executive privilege", the notion that the
president should have some close advisers who can give
policy advice on an entirely confidential basis. The
administration has insisted that the exemption should
apply to the commission as well because it was created
by an act of Congress.
But with Rice appearing
almost everywhere except before the commission, that
position became increasingly politically untenable, and
on Tuesday the White House relented, saying Rice could
testify on the understanding that she could not be
recalled later in case she left unresolved key
discrepancies between her testimony and Clarke's.
Rice now faces a difficult task, because
previous unsworn public statements about Clarke's
charges, including his encounter with Bush after
September 11 and even his actual status within the White
House, have subsequently been contradicted by other
senior administration officials.
During her
private testimony to the commission last month, she even
asked to revise a statement she made publicly on several
occasions during 2002 and 2003.
