Longtime national security official Richard Clarke has gotten a lot of media attention for his charge that the Bush administration negligently ignored the terrorist threat before the attacks of September 11. He stakes the credibility of his claims on the fact that he was the enthusiastic counter-terrorism expert under Presidents Clinton and Bush. He portrays himself as working tirelessly to vanquish the al Qaeda threat, despite being ignored by callous political appointees at every turn. His spin doesn’t live up to reality. In fact, Mr. Clarke himself took his eye off the ball.
Instead of concentrating solely on al Qaeda, Mr. Clarke was distracted by his attempts to institute a $1.5 billion government computer system to monitor computer traffic. Originally conceptualized when he was on Mr. Clinton’s National Security Council, the proposed Federal Intrusion Detection Network (Fidnet) was designed to track all computer action at every government agency and key private industries, and then collect it at a central clearinghouse for analysis. The alleged goal was to create a dragnet that could detect and thwart attempts to sabotage the federal government’s computer networks. While there may have been valuable components to the plan, it was rejected when civil liberties groups and Republican congressmen protested that the tracking system gave bureaucrats the ability to read the e-mail of private citizens.
Mr. Clarke did not accept the rejection of his super-surveillance system. Like any dedicated lifetime policy staffer, he knew that many spurned policy ideas live for another day —and Mr. Clarke would repeatedly try to give new life to Fidnet. In fact, shortly after the 2001 attacks, Mr. Clarke again was pushing his computer monitoring system. Instead of dedicating all his time to al Qaeda, the government’s counter-terrorism czar was preoccupied with hypothetical computer hackers. The Bush White House, which had retained Mr. Clarke from the previous administration, was not impressed with the proposal and killed it.
Mr. Clarke’s integrity already has been compromised by the fact that his now-contradicted claims against President Bush were made while he was trying to hawk his new book. His flip-flop on Mr. Clinton casts further doubt on his reliability. While Mr. Clarke was the most critical source denouncing Mr. Clinton’s national security neglect in Richard Miniter’s bestseller “Losing bin Laden,” he now praises Mr. Clinton while attacking Mr. Bush. It is well-known that Mr. Clarke’s career was sidelined in the Bush administration and that he was denied an important Homeland Security post he wanted. That his pet policy proposal was rejected as well makes it understandable that he is a very disgruntled former employee. No one should deny the decades of dedicated work Mr. Clarke has provided in the cause of fighting terrorism. But these newly revealed facts make it clear that Mr. Clarke’s charges against the Bush administration are based measurably on sour grapes.
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