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Richard A. Clarke

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Richard Clarke

Richard A. Clarke (born 1951) provided national security advice to four U.S. presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, consulting on issues of intelligence and terrorism, from 1973 to 2003. Until his retirement in 2003, Mr. Clarke was a member of the Senior Executive Service.

Clarke's specialties are computer security, counterterrorism and homeland security. He was the counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council when the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred.

He resigned in January of 2003 to work on his book, Against All Enemies, which came out in early 2004. He testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on March 24, 2004.

Life

Richard Clarke was born in 1951, the son of a Boston factory worker. He studied at the Boston Latin School and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. In 1973, he began work in the Federal Government as an employee in the Department of Defense.

Starting in 1985, Clarke served in the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. During the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush, he coordinated diplomatic efforts to support the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the subsequent security arrangements. He also advised Madeleine Albright during the Genocide in Rwanda . His positions inside the government have included:

Since leaving government, Clarke has been an on-air consultant for ABC News and Chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, LLC.

Clarke and his communications with the Bush administration regarding bin Laden and associated terrorist plots targeting the United States were mentioned frequently in National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's public interview by the 9/11 investigatory commission on April 8, 2004. Of particular significance was a memo from January 25, 2001 that Clarke had authored and sent to Rice. [1]

Along with making an urgent request for a meeting of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss the growing al-Qaeda threat in the greater Middle East, the memo also suggests strategies for combating al-Qaeda that might be adopted by the new Bush Administration.

According to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Clarke gave the final okay for the members of the bin Laden family living in the United States to fly to Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2001. Clarke had initially claimed, under oath, someone in the Bush Administration had asked for the flight and he consulted with the FBI [2]; later he claimed that he alone authorized the flight. He told reporters, "I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again." [3]

After Clarke appeared before the 911 Commission, his detractors attacked his credibility, suggesting that he was too partisan a figure and charging that he exaggerated perceived failures in the Bush Administration' counterterrorism policies while exculpating the former Clinton administration from its perceived shortcomings.[4] According to Knight-Ridder, the White House tried to discredit Clarke in a move described as "shooting the messenger."[5] New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was more blunt; calling the attacks on Clarke "a campaign of character assassination."[6]

Clarke has also exchanged criticism with Michael Scheuer, former chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA. When asked to respond to Clarke's claim that Scheuer was "a hothead, a middle manager who really didn't go to any of the cabinet meetings," Scheuer returned the criticism as follows: "I certainly agree with the fact that I didn't go to the cabinet meetings. But I'm certainly also aware that I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available against Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet."[7] Matthew Continetti writes: "Scheuer believes that Clarke’s risk aversion and politicking negatively impacted the hunt for Bin Laden prior to September 11, 2001. Scheuer stated that his unit, codename 'Alec,' had provided information that could have led to the capture and or killing of Osama bin Laden on ten different occasions, only to have his recommendations for action turned down by senior intelligence officials, including Clarke."[8] Despite this heated exchange, Scheuer agrees with Clarke's main thesis that the invasion of Iraq was a serious diversion from the war against al Qaeda.

At a security conference in 2002, after citing statistics that indicate that less than 0.0025 percent of corporate revenue on average is spent on information-technology security, Clarke was famously heard to say, "If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked".

Book: Against All Enemies

Main article: Against All Enemies

In March 2004, Clarke's published, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror--What Really Happened (ISBN 0-7432-6024-4). The book was critical of past and present presidential administrations for the way they handled the war on terror both before and after September 11, but focused much of its criticism on Bush for failing to take sufficient action to protect the country in the elevated-threat period before the September 11, 2001 attacks and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Clarke feels greatly hampered the war on terror, and was a distraction from the real terrorists.

Many of the events described in the book were also described by Clarke in his almost 20 hours of testimony under oath before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), a portion in its public hearings.

Clarke's testimony and tenor were vigorously attacked by conservatives and the Bush Administration. Some families of the victims of September 11 attacks were very supportive of him, while others felt he was self-aggrandizing and that his criticisms were misplaced. Some 36 family members critical of Clarke signed a letter written by Jim Boyle that stated, "few of the voices of September 11th have been critical of President Bush's campaign advertisements that, in a respectful way, recall the incredible challenges we all faced. These few voices do not speak for us."

Clarke has been criticized by conservatives for suggesting the possibility of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda but then, after investigation, concluding that no link had been established. Regarding Saddam's offer of safehaven in Iraq, Clarke wrote in a January 1999 memo to Sandy Berger that he was concerned that “old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad.” (p. 134)[9] Clarke also made statements that year to the press linking Saddam and al-Qaeda and an alleged joint chemical weapons development effort at the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.[10]

Since 1999, however, the United States government has admitted that its evidence regarding Al Shifa is inconclusive, and Clarke has changed his view about an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. In Against All Enemies he writes that "[i]t is certainly possible that Iraqi agents dangled the possibility of asylum in Iraq before bin Laden at some point when everyone knew that the U.S. was pressuring the Taliban to arrest him. If that dangle happened, bin Laden's accepting asylum clearly did not," (p. 270). In an interview on March 21, 2004, Clarke made the statement: "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." This change in point of view has brought Clarke criticism from Christopher Hitchens [11] and the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes.[12] Clarke makes clear in his book that he came to his more recent conclusion as a result of several investigations, prompted by the Bush Administration, specifically into the possibility of an Iraqi connection to September 11th.

Critics say errors can be found in Clarke's book Against All Enemies. Most notably, they point to a passage on page 237 in which Clarke describes a September 4, 2001 meeting of national security principals in which he states Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "who looked distracted throughout the session, took the (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul) Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorists concerns, like Iraq." Rumsfeld has publicly stated he was not at the September 4, 2001 meeting, and Defense Department officials have confirmed he was not in attendance.[13]

Additional works

  • In 2004, Richard Clarke published the edited collection, Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action, a book showing a more effective counterterrorism policy for America. (ISBN 0-87078-491-9)
  • In 2005, Richard Clarke published his first novel, The Scorpion's Gate. (ISBN 0-399-15294-6)

Affiliations

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