Bush's Brand New Enemy is the Truth: "One of the first official acts of the current Bush administration was to downgrade the office of national coordinator for counter terrorism on the National Security Council - a position held by Richard Clarke. Clarke had served in the Pentagon and State Department under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, and was the first person to hold the counter terrorism job created by President Clinton. Under Clinton, he was elevated to cabinet rank, which gave him a seat at the principals' meeting, the highest decision-making group for national security.
By removing Clarke from the table, Bush put him in a box where he could speak only when spoken to. No longer would his memos go to the president; instead, they had to pass though a chain of command of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who bounced each of them back.
... Bush protests now: "And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11, we would have acted." But he had plenty of information. The former deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, the only member of the 9/11 commission to read the president's daily brief, revealed in the hearings that the documents "would set your hair on fire" and that the intelligence warnings of al-Qaida attacks "plateaued at a spike level for months" before September 11. Bush is fighting public release of these PDBs, which would show whether he had marked them up and demanded action.
The administration's furious response to Clarke only underscores his book. Rice is vague, forgetful and dissembling. Cheney is belligerent, certain and bluffing. In Clarke's account, as in the memoir of former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neill, Bush is disengaged, incurious, manipulated by those in the circle around him; he adopts ill-conceived strategies that he has played little or no part in preparing. Bush is the Oz behind the curtain, but unlike the wizard, the special effects are performed by others. Especially on terrorism and September 11, his White House is at "battle stations" to prevent the curtain from being pulled open."
- posted by geoff @ #