March 29, 2004, 9:50 a.m.
Clarke Is Right
Below the grandstanding is some solid expertise.

It has been widely remarked by now that Richard Clarke was the most aggressive counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration, privately frustrated by his inability to get the Clinton team to take up his most important ideas. The fact that Clarke is quite sound on terrorism issues — at least those not touching on the Iraq war — has now been obscured by his star turn as an anti-Bush partisan. But if you focus on what Clarke said in his testimony before the 9/11 commission when he wasn't beating up on Condi Rice et al, you hear a quite reasonable analysis of the U.S. response to terrorism.

First, Clarke agrees with the assessment of the Bush team that his proposals for action in Afghanistan — aiding the Northern Alliance, flying the Predator, etc. — would not have prevented 9/11. Asked of his proposals at the commission hearing, "assuming that [they] had all been adopted, say, on January 26, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" Clarke's answer: "No."

Clarke agrees with the argument — made repeatedly by conservatives over the years — that the CIA had been beaten into a defensive crouch by its critics. As Clarke explained to the 9/11 commission, "our HUMINT program, our spy capability, had been eviscerated in the mid-1980s and early-1990s, and there was no such capability either to know that al-Qaeda existed, let alone to destroy it. And there's something else that I think we have to understand about the CIA's covert action capabilities. For many years they were roundly criticized by the Congress and the media for various covert actions that they carried out at the request of people like me in the White House — not me, but people like me. And many CIA senor managers were dragged up into this room and others and berated for failed covert action activities. And they became great political footballs."

Clarke seems to agree with a point often made by Clinton critics: that it was foolish in the 1990s to make the FBI the lead agency in the fight against terrorism since, as an after-the-fact domestic law enforcement agency, it was manifestly not up to the task. He explained to the commission, "the fact that we didn't have intelligence that we could point to that said [an attack] would take place in the United States wasn't significant in my view because, frankly, sir — I know how this is going to sound, but I have to say it — I didn't think the FBI would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States by al-Qaeda." A commissioner asked, "Well, the FBI was the principal agency upon which you had to rely — is that not the case?" Clarke replied, pregnantly, "It is."

Clarke emphasizes the need for preemption. He explained, "One of the things I would hope comes out of your commission report is a change — a recommendation for a change in the attitude of government about threats; that we be able to act on threats that we foresee, even if acting requires boldness and requires money and requires changing the way we do business, that we act on threats in the future before they happen. The problem is that when you make that recommendation before they happen, when you recommend an air defense system for Washington before there's been a 9/11, people tend to think you're nuts."

Clarke apparently sees the need for more domestic surveillance in the U.S., advocating doing the Patriot Act one better and creating a domestic intelligence agency. Just imagine the howls from the ACLU. Clarke acknowledged this, but said it was worth it, "I am very fearful that such an agency would have potential to infringe on our civil liberties, and therefore I think we would have to take extraordinary steps to have active oversight of such an agency. And we'd have to explain to the American people in a very compelling way why they needed a domestic intelligence service, because I think most Americans would be fearful of a secret police in the United States. But frankly, the FBI culture, the FBI organization, the FBI personnel are not the best we could do in this country for a domestic intelligence service."

Clarke apparently agrees that law enforcement is an inappropriate paradigm for fighting. He noted the problem with accepting the rules of evidence that apply to criminal cases when it comes to terrorism. He was, for instance, frustrated when the Clinton administration called in the FBI to confirm Iraqi involvement in the attempted assassination of the first President Bush in early 1993, creating an unnecessary delay. He explained, "And that took from February of '93 through the end of May. And it was done in a way that was reminiscent of a criminal process. At least the FBI case was. The CIA case was an intelligence case and had different sources of information, different standards for what was admissible, and a more lenient standard for making a determination. But I think beginning then, I was frustrated by that kind of evidentiary process."

Clarke defends the idea of acting even when the intelligence is uncertain, especially when WMDs are potentially involved. He defended the Clinton administration's controversial 1998 attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, which many observers think was based on flimsy intelligence at best. Clarke said, "To this day, there are a lot of people who believe that it was not related to a terrorist group, not related to chemical weapons. They're wrong, by the way. But the president [Clinton] had decided in PDD-39 that there should be a low threshold of evidence when it comes to the possibility of terrorists getting their access — getting their hands on chemical weapons."

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.