Panel to reconsider Clarke statements

The September 11 commission will look at the discrepancy between the testimony of Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered the threat of al Qaeda “urgent” and its final national-security report to Congress, which gave the terror organization scant mention.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, said commission members are familiar with an article in yesterday’s editions of The Washington Times, which showed that President Clinton’s final public document on national security never referred to al Qaeda by name and mentioned Osama bin Laden just four times.

“We’re still taking evidence. We know that certain people say many things,” Mr. Felzenberg said. “It’s not at the point yet where we can resolve apparent contradictions … but we read all these reports with great interest.

“The commission has Clinton and Bush administration documents and will try to make a definitive conclusion when the time comes for that,” he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had seen The Times report and hoped that the September 11 panel would look at the entire decade in context.

“I saw the story today,” he said on Air Force One yesterday. “Obviously a lot of these are issues that the 9-11 commission is looking at now as they work to complete their report. And they’re looking not only at the eight months when this administration was in office prior to September 11, but the eight years prior to that as well, when these threats were building and emerging.”

The Clinton administration’s final document was 45,000 words long and titled “A National Security Strategy for a Global Age,” but it hardly mentioned bin Laden and his terrorist network.

Mr. Clinton wrote in the preface, “We are blessed to be citizens of a country enjoying record prosperity with no deep divisions at home, no overriding external threats abroad, and history’s most powerful military ready to defend our interests around the world.”

Mr. Clarke has testified to the commission — and has written in his best-selling book — that as the top terrorism analyst for Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton, he repeatedly warned that al Qaeda posed a significant and dangerous threat to the United States and urged strong military action.

The Clinton document consistently characterized terrorist attacks against Americans and U.S. interests as “crimes” and outlined how it was using diplomatic and economic pressure to bring the “perpetrators to justice.”

The use of military force “should be selective and limited, reflecting the importance of the interests at stake,” the document said.

Although the Clinton administration pledged in the report to retaliate militarily for the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, no operation was carried out.

The only two military operations in which the Clinton administration committed a significant troop presence on the ground were in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, which were undertaken to “support our humanitarian and other interests,” the document says.

A senior Bush administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said yesterday that the report “invalidates the line of argument,” pushed by Mr. Clarke, that the Clinton administration took the threat more seriously than Mr. Bush.

“We were seeking to implement a more aggressive strategy,” the official said. “Our policy was to roll back the threat as opposed to just pick at al Qaeda.”

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