He's no mild-mannered reporter -- more like a human bulldozer -- but Richard Clarke also appears to have ducked into a phone both and come out a changed man. The former career securocrat has ripped off his suit and tie and put on his tights and cape. And he's going after Shrub like Superman going after one of his many imposters:
"I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
That's what's going out on 60 Minutes tomorrow night, when Clarke's interview with Leslie Stahl is aired. What effect it will have on Bush's entirely undeserved public reputation as an anti-terrorism gunslinger is anybody's guess. Ditto for Clarke's book, due for release on Monday. But there's no question Clarke is giving the White House the Lex Luthor treatment.
Now maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I find this rather remarkable. Clarke is a SES man -- Senior Executive Service, the top tier of the career civil service -- and one who has served seven presidents, five of them Republicans. I can't recall any previous examples of a career executive of Clarke's rank and caliber going so publicly ballistic on a sitting president.
True, there was a right-wing FBI man seconded to the White House who wrote a smear job on Clinton, but my recollection is that the guy was just a field agent, and a G. Gordon Liddy wannabe to boot. But for a senior career guy like Clarke -- one who has worked directly under some of the most important appointed policymakers in the government -- to make such blunt, damning statements about his former superiors, while they're still in office, and on a critical national security issue ... well, maybe there's precedent, somewhere back in the Nixon or Johnson administrations, but I can't think of it.
Actually, the only comparable incident I can recall involved a military man, Gen. John Singlaub, an ultraconservative and deeply politicized general who blasted Jimmy Carter in a 1977 interview with the Washington Post for his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea. Singlaub, the chief of staff of the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, was relieved of his command. Carter, however, eventually cancelled the troop withdrawal.
Hawk vs. "Hawk"
The Clarke case isn't comparable, although I'm sure the GOP propaganda mill won't waste much time trying to "redefine" him as a wimpy liberal Democrat on the Kerry payroll. (In fact it's already started.) But Singlaub was a national security ultrahawk taking aim at a dovish president. Clarke is a national security ultrahawk taking aim at a hawkish president.
As a journalist, I never dealt with Clarke personally (anti-terrorism was never one of my beats) but a fellow reporter who did, on a number of occasions, describes him as a ferocious national security hardliner, openly contemptuous of most Democrats on the Hill, and critical, to the point of being abusive, of the FBI and the CIA:
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, said people at the agency "resented" Clarke "because he was a hands-on bureaucratic guerrilla who rode roughshod over the bureaucracies." Cannistraro acknowledged, however, that such an approach is sometimes useful.
Cannistraro knew Clarke during his tenure as deputy chief of intelligence and research at the National Security Council, where Clarke "often came up with questionable proposals for covert action," Cannistraro said. "He was contemptuous of the bureaucracy, and this attitude earned him few friends.
Clarke was (is?) also close to Steven Emerson, a former CNN reporter turned terrorism "expert," who in the years leading up to 9/11 made a cottage industry out of his "American jihad" investigations, which at times came dangerously close to labeling all Arab-Americans as members of a terrorist Fifth Column. Emerson, in turn, has ties to the Likud Party, the Project for a New American Century, right-wing security extremists like Frank Gaffney and James Woolsey, etc.
Birds of a Feather
In other words, up until the time he left the Bush administration, Clarke appeared to have a personal and policy profile not so very different from the neocons in and around the Bush Administration. And like them, he's never shown much reluctance about the use of U.S. military power -- even when the intelligence backing that use is dubious. Clarke is widely credited, for example, with persuading Clinton to retaliate for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa by demolishing a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory -- a factory, it turned out later, that was engaged in the nefarious business of producing anti-malarial drugs. The Clintonites later tried to block a U.N. investigation of the site.
Following the Khartoum strike (and perhaps because of the embarrassment it created for Clinton?) Clarke focused more heavily on his duties as the federal government's designated "cyberczar," responsible for preventing a digital Pearl Harbor -- a massive attack on sensitive computer and telecommunications systems that could cripple the U.S. economy.
All very futuristic, and therefore scary, and Clarke and his team certainly knew how to make the threat sound urgent. But it appears there are more than a few computer security analysts who think Clarke hyped the threat, and kept hyping it, right up the moment he resigned from the government.
In his farewell e-mail to the troops, for example, Clarke claimed the 2003 "Sapphire Worm" had led to the cancellation of a Canadian national election, and disabled "some root servers, the heart of Internet traffic." These claims were quickly shown to be rather exaggerated.
But of course, 9/11 certainly validated the old line about even paranoids having real enemies. And, as the Clarke and his people point out, the cyberwar threat is only going to increase as the global economy becomes more wired. Worrying about cyber-terrorism now may be as smart as worrying about, oh, say, the threat of suicidal terrorist hijackers would have been in the late 1990s.
Which means my observations about Clarke's track record aren't intended to slam his credibility -- even if his reputation as a gifted counter-terrorism guru is a little exaggerated. Rather, I wanted to highlight the fact that Clarke's attack on Bush (and by extension, on the neocons) appears to be totally at odds with his ideological sympathies -- and, probably, with his old partisan loyalties as well.
Cassandra Complex
So what's going on here? Is this all about the righteous wrath of a policy Cassandra -- one who tried to warn the Mayberrys about the approach of the real threatening storm but was ignored? There's certainly been plenty of evidence presented to back that story line.
And now Clarke has added a vivid picture of Shrub the simple-minded CEO, demanding that his underlings tell him exactly what he wants to hear:
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. "I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' "He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
"I have no idea, to this day, if the President saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."
The Enron president, trying to fight an Enron war.
Now this allegation is so bad it's already thrown the White House into full-blown Watergate mode -- complete with non-denial denials from Mr. Uranium:
As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, [Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."
When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."
Why do I get the feeling that particular stand will be rendered "inoperative" before long?
Slime and Pretend
At the moment, the VRWC seems to be having a hell of a time figuring out how to try to spin Clarke. They do repeatedly refer to him as a "Clinton Administration official," and imply, if not flat out accuse him, trying to hustle a quick buck off a scandal book (something no decent Republican whistleblower would ever dream of doing). But the machine keeps breaking gear teeth on Clarke's distressing tendency to call 'em like he sees 'em -- and not just about his former masters in the Bush White House. Here's NewsMax's attempt to turn that trait into a liability:
In a "60 Minutes" interview set to air Sunday night, Clarke blasts Bush for doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism."
But just a year ago Clarke was singing a different tune, telling reporter Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," that it was the Clinton administration - not team Bush - that had dropped the ball on bin Laden.
The slimeballs really are going to have to do a lot better than that if they want to impeach Clarke's credibility, since it flatly contradicts the other main conservative attack line -- about Clarke being a Democratic weenie in disguise. In fact it gives his charges against Bush even greater non-partisan credibility.
Well, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the people who read NewsMax. But for the rest of the American population, the non-lobotimized part, Clarke's assault may finally begin to crack their stubborn will to believe that when it comes to fighting terrorism, Bush actually knows what he's doing -- as opposed to his completely clueless handling of all the other aspects of his presidency.
Which means the slime-and-defend brigade is going to have to work overtime to come up with some new Kryptonite to throw at our new superhero. They've got to figure out an alternative to the Clarke-as-the-righteous-Cassandra story line. And it's not going to be easy, since it actually seems to be the truth.
