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he should have been fired long before 9/11 occurred.

In a lot of ways he gets misquoted and made to sound critical of just the current administration, when he has been a kind of "Fox Mulder" of terrorism all these years.

Here is how the 9/11 Commission Report puts it.

213 Rice told us she took Clarke’s memo as a warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia.250 While his arguments have force, we also take Clarke’s jeremiad as something more.After nine years on the NSC staff and more than three years as the president’s national coordinator, he had often failed to persuade these agencies to adopt his views, or to persuade his superiors to set an agenda of the sort he wanted or that the whole government could support.

Or just other stuff that pops up using his name in the search box...

In his testimony,Clarke commented that he thought that warning about the possibility of a suicide hijacking would have been just one more speculative theory among many, hard to spot since the volume of warnings of “al Qaeda threats and other terrorist threats,was in the tens of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands.”18Yet the possibility was imaginable, and imagined. In early August 1999, the FAA’s Civil Aviation Security intelligence office summarized the Bin Ladin hijacking threat. After a solid recitation of all the information available on this topic, the paper identified a few principal scenarios, one of which was a “suicide hijacking operation.”The FAA analysts judged such an operation unlikely, because “it does not offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining Rahman and other key captive extremists. . . . A suicide hijacking is assessed to be an option of last resort.”19 Analysts could have shed some light on what kind of “opportunity for dialogue” al Qaeda desired.20 The CIA did not write any analytical assessments of possible hijacking scenarios.

In 1998, Clarke chaired an exercise designed to highlight the inadequacy of the solution. This paper exercise involved a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it toward a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked officials from the Pentagon, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service what they could do about the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could scramble aircraft from Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the President for rules of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so.There was no clear resolution of the problem at the exercise.16

One school of thought, Clarke wrote in this September 4 note, implicitly argued that the terrorist network was a nuisance that killed a score of Americans every 18–24 months.If that view was credited, then current policies might be proportionate. Another school saw al Qaeda as the “point of the spear of radical Islam.” But no one forced the argument into the open by calling for a national estimate or a broader discussion of the threat. The issue was never joined as a collective debate by the U.S. government, including the Congress, before 9/11.

The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats.The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there.The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets.The threat that was coming was not from sleeper cells. It was foreign—but from foreigners who had infiltrated into the United States.