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SirVLCIV · **Larry King Live: Richard Clarke -** 03-25-04

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/24/lkl.00.html

Highlights, courtesy of me.

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RICHARD CLARKE, FMR. WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue.

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KING: Let's touch a lot of bases here. You spoke in August and praised the administration, you highlighted positive aspects that they had done, minimized negative aspects and then the book seems to counteract that. Why?

CLARKE: Well, Larry, what you're referring to is something the White House is trying out today as part of its continuing program to undermine my credibility. And, you know, for the Bush White House to be attempting to undermine my credibility is really sort of ironic and sort of the pot calling the kettle black. They're the ones who have the credibility problem, Larry. You know, they're trying to divert attention from the issues that I am raising and that other people are raising in the 9/11 Commission process.

The issue is -- could the Bush administration have done more prior to 9/11? The second issue is, what did it do after 9/11? Did it fight the war on terror well or did it not? Did it divert attention and actually hurt the war on terror by fighting an unnecessary costly diversionary war in Iraq? That's what we should be talking about and the White House, obviously, doesn't want to talk about that.

KING: But the question, Dick, was why did you praise them two years ago?

CLARKE: I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president -- here's what happened.

"TIME" magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on "TIME" and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive?

Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that. This is part of their whole attempt to get Larry King to ask Dick Clarke this kind of question. So we're not talking about the major issue.

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Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two -- if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two. Would that have stopped...

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CLARKE: Some people in the FBI knew. And if Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings, the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser, when she had information that there was a threat against the United States, that kind of information was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001, if she had been doing her job.

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CLARKE: I'd say, let's get back to the main issue. Before you went to the break, Larry, you had the president saying that George Tenet was briefing him regularly on the threat. He was. George Tenet told me that, and I saw the briefings. The president was being told on a regular basis that an al Qaeda threat was coming, an al Qaeda attack was coming.

Now, what does the president say in his own words to Bob Woodward in "Bush at War?" He says, Bush acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. "I was not on point," the president said. "I didn't feel a sense of urgency."

Well, how can you not feel a sense of urgency when George Tenet is telling you in daily briefings, day after day, that a major al Qaeda attack is coming? That's my point. That's one of my points. The other point is, which I'd like to get to, that by fighting the war in Iraq, the president has actually diminished our ability to fight the war on terrorism.

KING: What do you mean by that? Why does Iraq diminish the war on terrorism?

CLARKE: In three ways. Number one, it diverts us from reducing the vulnerabilities here at home, like protecting the rails from attacks like the one on Madrid. We're spending $180 billion in Iraq. We should be spending that money reducing our vulnerabilities to terrorism here at home, much more than we are. The railroads, the chemical plants, they are all still unprotected.

The second way it reduces the war on terrorism is by inflaming the Islamic world and helping, as Rumsfeld said in his internal memo, helping create more terrorists more rapidly than we can capture or kill them, because of the hatred in the Islamic world generated against the United States by our needless invasion of Iraq.

And the third way, of course, was it actually took troops and intelligence assets away from the hunt for bin Laden. We'll probably catch bin Laden here shortly, but it's two years too late. In those two years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, a multi-headed organization, so that by the time we catch him now, it won't matter very much, because all of these al Qaeda-like organizations have grown up around the world, like the group that attacked in Madrid.

The point is, the war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. And by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism. That's what I say in the book.

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KING: Did these problems start with Clinton?

CLARKE: Absolutely. And you know, people who haven't read the book seem to think that I only criticize the Bush administration. I criticize the Clinton administration, too. And I did so today in my testimony before the 9/11 commission. The news media did not cover that in the evening news, but I did criticize the Bush administration and the Clinton administration, I think, equally.

You know, the Clinton administration failed to bomb the camps that were in Afghanistan that we knew were there. They bombed them once, Clinton bombed them once, the public reaction was negative to that. Remember, wag the dog, everyone said Clinton is just bombing Afghanistan to divert attention from the Monica business. And so he didn't bomb them again.

And that was during a time when they were turning out thousands of terrorists, trained terrorists. It was an assembly line, those camp in Afghanistan were an assembly line, a conveyer belt that were sending terrorists out on a regular basis all over the world.

I thought they should have been blown up. I recommended it. And it didn't happen. I criticize the Clinton administration for that. I think there's a lot of blame to go around, and, as I said several times, I think I deserve some of that blame. I am willing to take that blame; I wish the president were willing to take some, too.

KING: President Clinton on this program said he was in Australia on 9/11, and he said as soon as he heard of the incident he said, bin Laden. Does that surprise you?

CLARKE: Well, no, Bill Clinton was obsessed with getting bin Laden. Bill Clinton ordered bin Laden assassinated. He ordered not only bin Laden assassinated but all of his lieutenants. The CIA failed him. The CIA couldn't do it, and now the CIA is trying to say, well, the orders were ambiguous. Let me tell you, Larry, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and myself both talked to George Tenet and talked to his chief lieutenants and said, are you very clear what this order is? This is an order to kill bin Laden. They said, yes, they were very clear.

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KING: Is somebody lying?

CLARKE: No, you know, people in this town are too smart to lie, especially under oath.

KING: So what do you call it?

CLARKE: I call it creative memory sometimes. I call it interpretation and emphasis sometimes. I think the American people need to know the truth about what happened, so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again. And I think heaven for the family members of the victims who caused this commission to come into existence over the objections of the White House and who have now been able to get it extended over the objections of the White House.

Well, there ya have it folks, in his own words.