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From Powerlineblog:

The press is abuzz with reports that former Clinton staffers are set to testify before the September 11 commission next week that "they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act." The Clinton officials expected to so testify include Sandy Berger, Madeline Albright and Richard Clarke.

Where to begin: the mind boggles at such shamelessness. To state the obvious, in late 2000 the Clinton administration was STILL IN OFFICE. If there were steps that needed to be taken immediately to counter the al Qaeda threat, as they "bluntly" told President Bush's transition team, why didn't they take those steps themselves?

More broadly, of course, the Clinton administration was in power for eight years, while al Qaeda grew, prospered, and repeatedly attacked American interests:

*1993: Shot down US helicopters and killed US servicemen in Somalia

*1994: Plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila

*1995: Plotted to kill President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines

*1995: Plot to to bomb simultaneously, in midair, a dozen US trans-Pacific flights was discovered and thwarted at the last moment

*1998: Conducted the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed at least 301 individuals and injured more than 5,000 others

*1999: Attempt to carry out terrorist operations against US and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations was discovered just in time by Jordanian authorities

*1999: In another millenium plot, bomber was caught en route to Los Angeles International Airport

*2000: Bombed the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 US Navy members, and injuring another 39

So what, when they had the power to act effectively against al Qaeda, did these Clinton administration officials do? Little or nothing. Their most effective action was to bomb what turned out to be an aspirin factory in Sudan. They had the opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden, but decided not to do it because they were not sure their lawyers would approve.

For these people to criticize the Bush administration's efforts to protect Americans against terrorism, long after their own ineptitute had allowed al Qaeda to grow bold and powerful, is contemptible.

Of these Clintonite critics, the most important appears to be Richard Clarke. Clarke has written a book called Against All Enemies which will appear tomorrow--coincidentally, just in time for the 2004 election campaign. Clarke is being interviewed on 60 Minutes as I write this--a cozy corporate tie-in, as Viacom owns both CBS and the publisher of Clarke's book.

Clarke's charges against the Bush administration have already been widely published. Like his former boss Sandy Berger, he decries the Bush administration's failure to heed his "warnings" while Clarke and his fellow Clintonites were still in power. And he claims that Bush ignored terrorism "for months"--unlike his former boss, Bill Clinton, who ignored it for years.

But most of the attention flowing Clarke's way has centered on his claims about what happened when he was working inside the Bush administration after January 2001. Clarke was President Clinton's counter-terrorism coordinator; he was demoted by the Bush administration to director of cybersecurity. But before that demotion, he says that Bush's foreign policy advisers paid too much attention to Iraq. Then, after September 11, Clarke says that President Bush asked him to try to find out whether Iraq had been involved in the attack:

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.'' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection," and in a very intimidating way.

Clarke seems to view this request as a manifestation of a weird obsession. But Clarke must know that Iraq was involved in the Islamofascists' 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center. So it was hardly unreasonable for President Bush to want to know whether Saddam was behind the successful effort in 2001 as well.

Assuming, of course, that the conversation ever took place. Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy, says that: "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

More generally, Clarke accuses the administration of spoiling for a fight with Iraq and claims that Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, was talking about Iraq immediately after the September 11 attacks. This is exactly the same claim that was made by the rather pathetic Paul O'Neill. The most basic problem with this claim is that while the administration endorsed the act of Congress that made regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States, it didn't attack Iraq for a year and a half after September 11, and then only after Saddam had definitively thumbed his nose at a series of U.N. resolutions.

So, Richard Clarke's criticism of President Bush comes down to this: before September 11, like everyone else in the United States (including Clarke), he did not make al Qaeda terrorism his number one priority. Everything else he says is self-serving nonsense.

But let's pursue a little further the question, who exactly is Richard Clarke? What do we know about him?

First, we know that before September 11, he was professionally committed to the idea that al Qaeda represented a new form of "stateless terrorism" that could never cooperate with a country like Iraq:

Prior to 9/11, the dominant view within the IC was that al Qaida represented a new form of stateless terrorism. That was also the view promoted by the Clinton White House, above all terrorism czar, Richard Clarke. To acknowledge that Iraqi intelligence worked with al Qaida is tantamount to acknowledging that all these people made a tremendous blunder--and they are just not going to do it. We now know that this dogma was false, and Iraq did in fact support and collaborate with al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. But there is no one as resistant to new information as a bureaucrat who has staked his career on a theory.

Second, we know that Richard Clarke was very willing to justify pre-emptive attack, on the basis of imperfect intelligence, when the attacker was Bill Clinton:

I would like to speak about a specific case that has been the object of some controversy in the last month -- the U.S. bombing of the chemical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger wrote an article for the op-ed page of today's Washington Times about that bombing, providing the clearest rationale to date for what the United States did. He asks the following questions: What if you were the president of the United States and you were told four facts based on reliable intelligence. The facts were: Usama bin Ladin had attacked the United States and blown up two of its embassies; he was seeking chemical weapons; he had invested in Sudan's military-industrial complex; and Sudan's military-industrial complex was making VX nerve gas at a chemical plant called al-Shifa? Sandy Berger asks: What would you have done? What would Congress and the American people have said to the president if the United States had not blown up the factory, knowing those four facts?

Is it really a crazy idea that terrorists could get chemical or biological weapons?

Well, no, it's anything but a crazy idea. But Clarke seems to have gotten a very different attitude toward that possibility once a Republican became President.

Third, we know that Clarke bought into the now-discredited "law enforcement" approach to counter-terrorism: if people are making war on us, arrest them!

Long before our embassies in Africa were attacked on August 7, 1998, the United States began implementing this presidential directive. Since the embassies were attacked, we have disrupted bin Ladin terrorist groups, or cells. Where possible and appropriate, the United States will bring the terrorists back to this country and put them on trial. That statement is not an empty promise. No, it wasn't an empty promise. Clinton's promise of due process for terrorists explains why bin Laden is alive today, along with many of his confederates.

So it is not hard to see why Richard Clarke, a discredited and demoted bureaucrat, would be bitter toward President Bush and the members of his administration who have carried out a successful anti-terrorism campaign, far different from the one endorsed by Clarke and the Clinton administration.

But is Clarke only a bitter ex-bureaucrat, or is there more to his attack on President Bush? Let's consider both Clarke's personal history and his current employment. Clarke now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; here is his Kennedy School bio, which notes that the capstone of his career in the State Department was his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs.

Another professor at the Kennedy School is Rand Beers, who is evidently an old friend and colleague of Clarke's, as Beers' Kennedy School bio says that "[d]uring most of his career he served in the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs."

So Clarke and Beers, old friends and colleagues, have continued their association at the Kennedy School. Indeed, they even teach a course together. And, by the most astonishing coincidence, their course relates directly to the subject matter of Clarke's attack on the Bush administration: "Post-Cold War Security: Terrorism, Security, and Failed States" is the name of the course. Here is its syllabus:

Between them Rand Beers and Richard Clarke spent over 20 years in the White House on the National Security Council and over 60 years in national security departments and agencies. They helped to shape the transition from Cold War security issues to the challenges of terrorism, international crime, and failed states...Case studies will include Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Colombia, and Afghanistan. Challenges of counter-terrorism and homeland security will also be addressed.

Why do we find this particularly significant? Because Rand Beers' bio says:

He resigned [his State Department position] in March 2003 and retired in April. He began work on John Kerry's Presidential campaign in May 2003 as National Security/Homeland Security Issue Coordinator. There you have it: Richard Clarke is a bitter, discredited bureaucrat who was an integral part of the Clinton administration's failed approach to terrorism, was demoted by President Bush, and is now an adjunct to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Thanks to the indefatigable Dafydd ab Hugh for noting the connections between Clarke and Beers.

Posted by Hindrocket at 08:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (5)

State's Saddamists
By Kenneth R. Timmerman

State Department holdovers appointed during the Clinton administration have been sabotaging efforts to build an Iraqi opposition force capable of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, according to top Iraqi opposition leaders, current and former State Department officials and congressional staff. Led by Frank Ricciardone, the State Department special coordinator for transition in Iraq, the Clinton officials have blocked more than $40 million in direct aid to the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) since October 1998, when a broad bipartisan coalition in Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act aimed at toppling Saddam.

After President Bush took office, Ricciardone and his supporters at State tried to ingratiate themselves with Republican decisionmakers during long lunches and in private meetings, say informed critics, all the while continuing to undermine the INC.

Ricciardone's efforts were all the more troubling to diplomats in the region, given outspoken support for the Iraqi opposition during the last two years from Ambassadors Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, who now have been nominated for the No. 2 posts at Defense and State, respectively.

"It's absolutely critical to straighten this out quickly because people inside Iraq think we have tremendous support from the Bush administration, and this has raised their expectations," says Francis Brooke, an INC adviser in Washington. "In fact, what's happening is that three or four low-level Clinton holdovers have been blocking everything we're trying to do."

The $40 million in State Department economic support was supposed to have been used to help the INC consolidate its political structure, expand recruitment and carry out clandestine operations inside Iraq. Instead, says Sharif Ali Hussein, an INC spokesman in Washington, "We can't even make a phone call, let alone send people into Iraq."

By admittedly blocking the State Department funds, Ricciardone and his aides also blocked INC access to a separate $97 million draw-down account at the Pentagon created to train and equip an Iraqi opposition army. Under the legislation - which was signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998 and actively supported by Wolfowitz and Armitage - the Pentagon could provide goods and services to the INC but not cash. "The State Department funds were supposed to pay the travel and living expenses for people coming from overseas for DoD [Department of Defense] training," said Brooke. "We keep putting in draw-down requests, and they keep stonewalling."

The first $8 million of economic-support funds were appropriated by Congress in the fiscal 1999 budget. Of that amount, the INC received just $267,000 - not to help it train military personnel, but to hire American consultants to polish up the grant proposals Ricciardone and his aides insisted they submit to the State Department.

A second $8 million grant in fiscal 2000 similarly was waylaid, with a scant $850,000 going to the INC. Ricciardone and his aides acknowledge having blocked $25 million in fiscal 2001 money. This despite a hailstorm of complaints from leaders of both parties in Congress. They are angry that the bulk of the money has gone to high-priced Washington consultants chosen by the State Department through an opaque process that some see as a series of insider deals.

Records obtained by Insight show some $3.2 million was paid out to Quality Support Inc. of Landover, Md., to organize conferences, set up an office in London and provide administrative services to the INC. Another $215,000 went to Burson-Marsteller for public relations. The Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank in favor with the Clinton administration, was given a grant to conduct policy seminars. Separate grants to gather evidence for potential war-crimes prosecution of Saddam Hussein was awarded to the Human Rights Alliance, a group run by Kathryn Porter, the outspoken spouse of former congressman John Porter, and to the London-based group Indict.

"The INC had problems with its bookkeeping," said a State Department official working under Ricciardone who spoke to Insight on condition of anonymity. "Until just recently, they had no legal standing. We had to get them incorporated before they could receive funds under the program. That's why the money had to be paid out through consultants," he tells Insight.

The legal nitpicking by Ricciardone and Iraq desk officers Rebecca J. King, Kathy Allegrone, Sherri G. Kraham and Filo Dibble is absurd even on its face, say critics. Just five years ago, the INC was not an exile group but a government in charge of liberated areas in northern Iraq. Between 1992 and 1996, the INC conducted two successive parliamentary elections - the first free elections since the 1958 revolution.

Then, in August 1996, the Clinton administration let the plug be pulled, allowing Saddam to invade the north under the very noses of U.S. peacekeepers and drive the INC into exile. Hundreds of INC officials and sympathizers were rounded up by Saddam's security forces and still are missing. At least 96 were executed on the spot. Another 6,000 fled to Turkey, eventually making their way to the United States.

"I was sitting there on the border, counting refugees," recalls Ricciardone, who was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Turkey at the time. "So this is a mission I believe in. I really want to see these programs go forward. But the INC has to be businesslike," he told Insight.

Ricciardone says he "can't recall" how the State Department happened to select Quality Support to run the Iraqi programs. Others were not so cautious. "This was a no-compete contract hot-wired to a minority business that was a recognized State Department vendor," said one official who worked on the project.

According to Ricciardone and others in his office interviewed by Insight, it was the fact that the INC was not incorporated that led them to ask Quality Support in early 1998 to set up an office for the INC in London, the heart of the Iraqi exile community. But documents obtained by Insight show that Quality Support didn't file its own incorporation documents in London until June 29, 1999, and used the office it had just rented for the INC as its legal address.

The INC already had an office in London and didn't need big-dollar U.S. consultants to rent another one. But Quality Support found the INC's warehouse on the outskirts of London unsuitable and quickly moved to an 18th-century town house at 17 Cavendish Square, a swank neighborhood within spitting distance of the U.S. Embassy and Hyde Park.

Quality Support brought over Americans to staff the office - travel agents, computer programmers, even an Iraqi Kurd from Montana ("as if there weren't enough Iraqis in London," quipped an INC activist). They paid $200 per square foot for the cushy digs at Cavendish Square, more than double the going rate in central London. The bill to U.S. taxpayers: $114,000 for just the eight months from May through December 1999, according to contract documents obtained by Insight. The benefit to the INC and to U.S. policy goals: zero.

Quality Support founder and President Wayne M. Gatewood refused to comment on this story despite repeated phone calls. But Ricciardone and his staff were quick to defend him. "Quality Support was audited and actually returned money to us at the end of its contract," one of Ricciardone's deputies tells Insight. The State Department declined to provide the audit.

In a conference organized at Ricciardone's behest, Quality Support brought 300 Iraqi exiles to New York for a "national assembly" in October 1999 that cost U.S. taxpayers $2.1 million, or $7,000 per head. Why did it cost so much? For one thing, Quality Support insisted on buying all the tickets through its own travel agent at well above the going rates.

A few examples: One INC member, whose name Insight agreed not to publish, offered to buy his own round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to New York for $344 to attend the conference. Quality Support refused, insisting on overnighting him a full-fare ticket that cost U.S. taxpayers $1,800. INC members in London offered to buy tickets for less than $500, but Quality Support turned them down, giving the business to its own travel agent. Those tickets cost an average of $2,000 each. The micromanaging by Ricciardone's State Department aides so alienated some members of the opposition that they stayed away, convinced that no good would come of it.

By comparison, the INC organized a successful conference in London with 60 participants who came in from all over the world for $55,000, or less than $1,000 per person.

At one point, the expenses racked up by Gatewood and his assistant, Lydia M. Miller, became so excessive even Ricciardone's State Department aides became alarmed. "Generally, we have been funding approximately 20 travelers per month" between Quality Support headquarters in the Washington area and London, the State Department's Kraham faxed her colleague Allegrone in London in September 1999. "If we want to further reduce this that would cut some expenses."

In 1999 alone, Quality Support billed U.S. taxpayers $249,412 for office space and $639,000 for staffing and nonitemized "office support," according to internal documents obtained by Insight. One bill included a $142,359 "handling charge," or commission. Another billed taxpayers $218,000 for a so-called lobbying mission at the United Nations in New York.

"Quality Support's mandate was to pile up money on the street and burn it," INC adviser Brooke tells Insight.

But why? The short answer is politics: The Clinton administration preferred the appearance of keeping Saddam Hussein "in his box" to the risk of openly confronting him. But it also was personalities, say insiders. The INC's most prominent spokesman, Ahmad Chalabi, just rubbed Ricciardone and other Clinton-administration officials the wrong way.

The Iraqi and his plans to reinsert Iraqi opposition fighters inside the country and lay the groundwork for a popular insurgency against Saddam also flamed out with the U.S. Central Command's commander, Marine Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, and with the top Middle East advisers at the Clinton White House, Kenneth Pollock and CIA analyst Ellen Laipson, who feared another Bay of Pigs fiasco. Faced with an overwhelming bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting the INC, say insiders, Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose to accept legislation funding Iraqi opposition activities while doing everything in their power to frustrate them.

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey believes his successors shifted away from supporting the opposition in 1995 in favor of a military coup against Saddam. "John Deutch came back from a White House meeting with [George] Tenet and said: `Bring me the head of Saddam,'" Woolsey tells Insight. Former CIA officer Warren Marek, who was on the ground in northern Iraq when the White House pulled the plug on the INC in 1996, agrees. "Clinton's National Security Council got this idea of an officer on a white horse capable of pulling off a coup."

But Saddam has shown an uncanny ability to sense coup plotters before they even start to move. When he crushed a CIA-backed coup plot in mid-1996, he also dealt a devastating blow to U.S. credibility.

Despite the setbacks, Chalabi remains confident: "We have officers all over the United States begging to join our military forces. I told them only 30 percent would qualify for training." Chalabi and other INC officials say they are ready to insert newly trained INC operatives into Iraq, initially on intelligence missions.

The INC plans to hold a London conference on Iraqi war crimes in the next few weeks, to step up its military training program, to launch satellite-TV broadcasts and to distribute food and medicine into areas under Saddam's control.

But none of that will happen until there's a change at the State Department. "The INC is changing its program so that it's no longer what we initially agreed to," complained a Ricciardone aide. "We have serious questions. They can't even give us a list of employees and what they do!"

Ricciardone tells Insight, "I'm disappointed in the INC." While not disputing the facts presented here, he accuses the group of shoddy bookkeeping and of going behind his back to members of Congress and the press to win support. "After this, I'm not sure I'll be able to trust them again."