Clarke’s Golden Ticket
By Gary Aldrich (03/25/04)
In a CBS “60 Minutes” exclusive interview, Richard Clarke, a 30-year professional and White House insider on terrorism policy, lambasted the Bush Administration for inadequately preventing and properly handling the 9/11 crisis.
A few short years ago, another White House insider, also a 30-year professional and expert on national security matters, quit his job and wrote a book about the failures he witnessed while on the job.
That’s where the similarities between Richard Clarke and me end.
In 1996, “Unlimited Access – An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House,” hit every major bookstore, causing a firestorm of protest from the Clinton Administration.
This was expected. My book was highly critical of Clinton’s track record on national security, and very unsympathetic to Clinton’s staff, who I found to be a crude, classless bunch of hippy leftovers from the Sixties.
President Clinton and Hillary made on-the-record comments attacking my claims, and George Stephanopoulos, then Clinton’s top advisor, labeled me a “pathological liar.” The Clinton White House meant to play hardball, and my publisher and I could only brace ourselves for their blows. They had a track record of destroying their critics’ credibility, and they set out to destroy mine.
As soon as the Clinton White House protested to major media outlets that my book should not be believed, television networks dropped me like a hot potato.
Stephanopoulos then went back to the White House and bragged, “We killed it,” meaning that if I could not promote my book on TV, the game was over.
Although the book became #1 on every bestseller’s list, the real audience I was trying to reach – the millions of Americans who receive most of their opinion-forming information from television news – was closed to me. I was never able to re-establish my credibility with these millions, because the networks prevented me any airtime to do so.
To this day, I have never appeared on any CBS programming, even after my book was largely vindicated by sworn congressional testimony, legions of witnesses, and Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment. As far as CBS is concerned, I am dead.
Contrast my experience with how the television networks treat Richard Clarke. In spite of glaring contradictions about his various positions on terrorism matters, and in spite of the fact that Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, among others, refute the more spectacular claims in Clarke’s book as simply untrue, he continues to obtain remarkable television access. Thus he can hawk his book and promote his obviously biased message that President Bush’s handling of the war on terror was seriously flawed.
When my book came out, I was falsely aligned with the Dole campaign and “Big Tobacco”, the convenient boogie man of that time. Both claims were ridiculous fabrications. But Richard Clarke and Rand Beers are openly described as “best buddies”, while Beers, who worked with Clarke at the White House, now has a lead position in Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Yet, no television talking head asks the obvious questions about Clarke’s political associations or motivations – besides selling a book.
A clue to Clarke’s attitude and credibility can be found in a sentence from his major revelations about President Bush’s “obsession” with making war with Iraq. Clarke states that two days after September 11, 2001, Bush “dragged” him into the White House Situation Room to grill him about connections between Iraq and the attack. My first reaction to this claim is to doubt that two days after 9/11, any red-blooded American patriot would have to be “dragged in” to see the president about how to respond to the attacks.
Instead, I imagine every person working in the White House was eager to make a contribution to protect this nation. Clarke’s suggestion that the president of the United States dragged him anywhere is a good indication of the size of the ego of this man. It’s also a classic tail-wagging-the-dog mentality often found in career bureaucrats.
But Clarke’s biggest fudge is obvious. He worked in the Clinton White House for eight years, closely monitoring each attack made on U.S. interests by Osama bin Laden. He was also privy to intelligence connecting Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda, long before 9/11. President Bush’s question about a connection between the two was logical, and based on prior intelligence Clarke would have reviewed.
Clarke’s convenient blindness to these facts is clear evidence of his political motivations. The television networks’ blindness to Clarke’s purposeful memory loss is nothing more than classic media bias.
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