If Richard Clarke was such a horribly inept anti-terrorism czar, who is apparently responsible for dropping the ball when we had a chance to capture Bin Laden, then why did the Bush Administration retain him?
He's a bureaucrat's bureaucrat. He knows how to curry favor with the new boss.
Meanwhile, say insiders, the administration is trying to clean up the mess left by its predecessor. Clarke, Clinton's former national infrastructure chief whom Bush kept on, now admits that his first attempt under the Clinton administration to deal with infrastructure defense was a set of policies "written by bureaucrats" and that they were wholly inadequate. He attacked a 1999 Clinton/Gore infrastructure-protection plan as one that "could not be translated into business terms that corporate boards and senior management could understand."
"Preparing for The Next Pearl Harbor Attack,: J. Michael Waller; Insight on the News, June 18, 2001, p 20.