What made counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke turn on George W. Bush? Listen to what he told Jane Mayer last summer for her New Yorker article, "The Search for Osama": "The point is, they were risk-averse," he said of the CIA's bungled efforts to capture bin Laden, first during the Clinton administration following the embassy and Cole bombings, and then after George W. Bush took the helm:
"They didn't want their own people killed". . . Instead of trying to mount the operation themselves, Clarke said, "the C.I.A. basically paid a bunch of local Afghans, who went in and did nothing."
He had seen such efforts fail before. Clarke, who retired from public service in February and is now a private consultant on security matters, has served every President since Ronald Reagan. He has won a reputation as a tireless advocate for action against Al Qaeda. Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan.
Now this same Richard Clarke, plugging his new "nobody-listens-to-me" book, is telling the world that it was all GW's fault for failing to recognize the al Qaeda threat before 9/11 and then manipulating America into war with Iraq. What happened?
"A giant ego in a small job," Newt Gingrich is telling Sean Hannity on FOXNews. And why are the media lapping it up? "People on the left want to beat George Bush so badly that they would embrace almost anything or anybody that they think would hurt the President," says Newt.
Perhaps Clarke has been spending too much time with his old friend and colleague, Rand Beers, with whom he co-teaches a course at Harvard's Kennedy School [via Hindrocket at Power Line]. Beers was also interviewed for Mayers' article:
Beers, who until March handled terrorism issues for the National Security Council, told me he had become so concerned about the impact that the war in Iraq was having on the war on terrorism that he quit his job -- at the height of the American invasion. Beers, who served on the N.S.C. under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush, is now an adviser for the Presidential campaign of the Democratic Senator John Kerry. He told me, "I have worried for some time that it became politically inconvenient" for the Bush Administration to "complete operations sufficiently in Afghanistan."
[via The Belgravia Dispatch via InstaPundit]
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