May 22, 2005

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Interview - May 22nd, 2005 - CNN- American Morning

O'BRIEN: Well, now to the war of words between the Bush administration and its former counterterrorism coordinator. In his new book, Richard Clarke says President Bush ignored warnings about al Qaeda before 9/11 and pressed him to find a link to Saddam Hussein after the attacks. The White House calls the charges categorically false and politically motivated.

Joining us this morning from the White House with a response is National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

Nice to see you, Dr. Rice. Thanks for being with us.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Good morning. Nice to be with you.

O'BRIEN: Thank you very much.

Richard Clarke is claiming that prior to September 11, the administration essentially ignored warnings from al Qaeda. Let's listen first to a little bit of what he had to say last night on "60 Minutes."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD CLARKE, AUTHOR, "AGAINST ALL ENEMIES": Well, there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack, and that urgent memo wasn't acted on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: In addition to that urgent memo, he talks about requesting cabinet-level meetings over eight months, denied each and every time until a week before 9/11. Are those charges true?

RICE: Dick Clarke in that memo responded to my request for initiatives that we ought to be undertaking. And what he did was after we had all been briefed on the al Qaeda threat and understood what the Clinton administration had been doing, he wanted another meeting. I didn't think another meeting was necessary. The principals knew what the threat was. What we needed was a strategy.

And what Dick Clarke gave me in that memorandum was a series of ideas, a series of steps, most of which, by the way, we did within a matter of months -- steps like trying to accelerate the arming of the Predator, steps like increasing counterterrorism funding, increasing counterterrorism support to Uzbekistan. These were steps that he said would bring -- would roll back al Qaeda over a three to five-year period. This was not going to address the -- quote -- "urgent threat" of September 11.

We did ask Dick Clarke for a more comprehensive strategy, one that would not just seek to roll back al Qaeda, but would seek to eliminate al Qaeda that would have real military options, not just options of pinprick strikes against training camps that had already been abandoned. We asked for a strategy that could be effectively funded. We increased intelligence activities by a factor of three in the strategy that was developed.

So, that's what Dick Clarke was supposed to be doing. At the same time, he was to continue the Clinton administration strategy until we got a new strategy in place.

But what's very interesting is that, of course, Dick Clarke was the counterterrorism czar in 1998 when the embassies were bombed. He was the counterterrorism czar in 2000 when the Cole was bombed. He was the counterterrorism czar for a period of the '90s when al Qaeda was strengthening and when the plots that ended up in September 11 were being hatched.

The fact is, we needed a new strategy, and that's what we asked Dick Clarke to give us.

O'BRIEN: He...

RICE: Dick Clarke, by the way, Soledad, did ask to brief the president once, to my recollection, and that was...

O'BRIEN: And he...

RICE: That was in June of 2001. It was during a high spike period of threats. And he asked to brief the president on cyber security.

O'BRIEN: Much of his indictment against the administration seems to be that he felt or feels that President Bush was wrongly focused on Iraq. He says that he had a conversation with President Bush, told him there is no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. The president, he describes him as being very single-minded in his purpose, and told him, go find out if there is a connection. Did that conversation ever happen?

RICE: Well, I didn't -- I can't recollect such a conversation, but it's not surprising that the president wanted to know if we were going to retaliate, against whom are we going to retaliate? And, of course, Iraq, given our history, given the fact that they tried to kill a former president, was a likely suspect.

But let me tell you what the president was really worried about in those few days after September 11, the first few days. He was concerned about a follow-on attack. And so, we were doing everything that we could to try and harden the country to deal with borders. He was concerned to reassure the American people. He was talking to his economic advisers about how to get Wall Street back up and running so that the terrorists couldn't collapse the economy. He was concerned about how to get aviation flying again safely and, in particular, how to deal with Reagan National Airport. He was concerned about against whom we would retaliate.

But the meeting that Dick Clarke, of course, missed -- or was not invited to -- was at Camp David, when I can tell you that we rolled out a map, not of Iraq, but a map of Afghanistan. And we looked at what we might do to incent (ph) Pakistan to change its strategic direction and support us in Afghanistan. We looked at what this meant for Iran. We looked at ways to avoid what the Soviet Union had experienced in putting 100,000-plus ground forces on the ground in Afghanistan. We looked at what we were going to do to get real military options that would not still turn the Afghan population against us.

Iraq was discussed, because the question was raised in a global war on terrorism: Should you also take care of the threat from Iraq? But not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side. We're going after Afghanistan, and we're going to eliminate the Taliban and the al Qaeda base in Afghanistan.

O'BRIEN: What Richard Clarke has had to say many people are, of course, reading into the president's re-election bid. I want to play you another small chunk of what he said last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLARKE: I find it outrageous what the president is running for re-election on, the grounds that he has 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.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: Richard Clarke says he was a registered Republican back in 2000. We heard from Dan Bartlett at the White House that this is politically-motivated. But, again, this is a man who worked for the first President Bush, who worked for President Reagan as well. What do you think Richard Clarke's motivations are?

RICE: I really don't know what Richard Clarke's motivations are, but I'll tell you this: Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction, and he chose not to. In fact, when he came to me and asked if I would support him with Tom Ridge to become the deputy secretary of Homeland Security -- the department which he now says should never have been created -- when he asked me to support him in that job, he said he supported the president. So, frankly, I'm flabbergasted.

I will say this: Dick Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when attacks took place in '98 from al Qaeda and in 2000 from al Qaeda, when plots were hatched against the United States by al Qaeda. He has a different view of how to fight the war on terrorism. It is a narrow view that it has to do with killing bin Laden and dealing with Afghanistan. The president has a broader view, which is that you have to take the fight to the terrorists. We have eliminated their base in Afghanistan. We have freed 25 million Afghans.

In addition, the president believes that you have to go to the center of the Middle East and deal with the threats there. And you have to have a different kind of Middle East that won't spawn the ideologies of hatred. And that's why Iraq, a terrible regime that was the most dangerous regime in the region, has now been eliminated, and why we are helping the Iraqi people to build a democracy as a model to those in the Middle East who want a different kind of Middle East. I understand that Dick Clarke thinks this is a narrow war. We think it's a broader war.

O'BRIEN: If I understand correctly, you were actually the one who encouraged him to stay on after the Clinton administration. He says that he warned you in early 2001, in January 2001, about al Qaeda. And he writes and says in interviews that you seemed skeptical about it. And also, he says you gave him the impression that you had never even heard of al Qaeda. I wonder if you view any of that as a personal attack.

RICE: No, I just think it's ridiculous. And the fact is, you know, I wasn't born yesterday when Dick Clarke briefed me. I knew that in 1998 we suspected that al Qaeda had done the bombings of the embassy. I knew about Osama bin Laden. We all knew that in 2000 they were suspected of doing the Cole. No, this wasn't an issue of who knew about al Qaeda. This was an issue of what we were going to do about al Qaeda.

And it was Dick Clarke's job to develop for this president a broad, comprehensive strategy for dealing with the al Qaeda threat, and he eventually did that, and I think did a very good job. But this retrospective rewriting of the history of the first several months of the administration is not helpful. And what's particularly not helpful, Soledad, is to somehow suggest that the attack on 9/11 could have been prevented by a series of meetings.

I have to tell you that during that period of time, we were at battle stations. The president in June and July when the threat spikes were so high was hearing from George Tenet every day about what we were doing about the threats in the Persian Gulf, what we were doing about the potential attack against the G-8 leaders in Genoa. The president knew that I was on the phone with Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld every day at 7:15 a.m., where they were providing force protection for American forces abroad, where Colin was buttoning down embassies abroad. Because the fact is, the intelligence pointed to abroad.

Now, because just on the basis of analysis, not any threat reporting, I myself and the president were worried about whether there might be some problem at home. There was no threat reporting at home. I called -- with Andy Card, I called Dick Clarke into my office on July 5, and I said, 'Dick, have you had your meeting of the counterterrorism strategy group?' He said, yes, that he'd had the so- called core agencies together. Those are mostly foreign policy agencies. I said, 'Dick, I want you to get the domestic agencies together, because who knows?' He did then get them together, and an FAA -- more FAA alerts were issued. FBI alerts were issued. We were trying to pay attention to all of these threats.

But the fact of the matter is not only was the administration focused on this before 9/11, but the president launched an aggressive response after 9/11 that has put us well on the road to winning the war on terrorism. We haven't won it yet. It's going to take time, but we are well on the road to winning the war on terrorism.

O'BRIEN: Dr. Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, joining us this morning. Thank you very much. Nice to see you, as always.

RICE: Thank you. Thank you very much.

O'BRIEN: We also want to remind you that Richard Clarke is going to be our guest tomorrow on AMERICAN MORNING -- Bill.

HELPFUL LINKS:

NewsMax.com

FOXNews.com

National Review

The Washington Times

National Catholic Register

Christian Science Monitor

The Washington Weekly

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