Where is Richard A Clarke today, author of the famous 8/6/01 PDB memo, 'Bin Ladin Determined to Stri
Because Clarke was a holdover from the Clinton Administration, Condi Rice put many new communication barriers between him and President GW Bush. Not only did almost all al Qaeda warnings from Clarke get blocked from WH action, but Condi Rice apparently lied to the 9/11 Commission about him and tried to make him the "fall guy" for the tragedy.
Is Condi taking a "victory lap" today, the 11th anniversary of 9/11?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke :
"Early warnings about Al-Qaeda threat
Clarke's role as a counter-terrorism advisor in the months and years prior to 9/11 would lead to the central role he played in deconstructing what went wrong in the years that followed. ... Of particular significance was a memo(8) from January 25, 2001, that Clarke had authored and sent to Rice. 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.(9)
In his memoir, 'Against All Enemies', Clarke wrote that when he first briefed Rice on Al-Qaeda, in a January 2001 meeting, 'her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.' He also stated that Rice made a decision that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism should be downgraded. By demoting the office, the Administration sent a signal through the national security bureaucracy about the salience they assigned to terrorism. No longer would Clarke's memos go to the President; instead they had to pass though a chain of command of National Security Advisor Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, who bounced every one of them back. ...
At a July 5, 2001, White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret Service and INS, Clarke stated that 'something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon.' ... Among his highly critical statements regarding the Bush administration, Clarke charged that before and during the 9/11 crisis, many in the Administration were distracted from efforts against Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organization by a pre-occupation with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. ...
Prior to the 9/11 Commission, portions of Clarke's August 6 Daily Briefing Memo, entitled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" to President Bush were subsequently redacted by The White House for national security reasons. Despite the title of the memo, in response to aggressive questioning from Richard Ben-Veniste – a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission – Rice stated that the document 'did not warn of attacks inside the United States.(15)"
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