Richard Clarke's new offensive

[JoFerret]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19314-2004Jun6.html


After his blistering book and congressional testimony alleging Bush administration failures to heed the threat of al Qaeda, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke takes another shot in the July issue of Vanity Fair.

"I'm not sure everybody has grasped this," he says, pointing out that CIA Director George Tenet mentioned al Qaeda to the president "on 40 occasions" in morning briefings before Sept. 11, 2001. "Forty times, many of them in a very alarmed way, about a pending attack," Clarke declares. (The emphasis appears in the article.) "And, as far as I can tell from what has been said at the <9/11> commission, on one of these occasions, one out of 40, the president must have said something like, 'Well, what are we going to do about it?' "

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow was quick to blast back: "Richard Clarke was not present during those daily briefings and therefore could not know what was said," he told us. "While we never discuss what we say to a president or what a president's reaction is, the notion that President Bush was not concerned or engaged on counterterrorism is ridiculous."

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