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August 18, 2004
Tommy Franks on Richard Clarke
I've been reading General Tommy Franks' excellent book "American Soldier", and he pulls no punches in his description of people. I like how he does it, too. He's not gratuitously mean, nor does he engage in ad hominem attacks. He lets the facts speak for themselves.
After being appointed CIC(Commander in Chief) of CENTCOM(Central Command) in 2000, Gen. Franks went to Washington for a series of meetings. One of the people he was to meet with was Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism specialist on the National Security Council(p.209-210). Franks met with Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before going to see Clarke. Gen. Shelton warns him about Clarke:
"Clarke's been over at the NSC so long that he thinks he owns counterterrorism - and knows more about the subject than anybody in government," Hugh added. "He likes to talk, drops a lot of names, and thinks highly of himself. But in many ways he's not very practical. Be careful in dealing with him."
Wise advice, as Franks would learn.
Clarke's secretary had told my staff that he would see me in his "White House office." But the Pentagon driver took me to the Old Executive Office Building, a separate facility connected to the West Wing. A small point, I thought, as I climbed the marble stairs to Clarke's office.
...
I was interested in destroying the al Qaeda threat. But my visit with Clarke had not moved me any closer to that objective. I left his office hoping that my emphasis on practical solutions to real problems would spur him to home in on some real targeting opportunities. But I suspected that Dick was better at identifying a problem than at finding a workable solution.
Some months later Franks met with Clarke again(p. 226-227). Unfortunately Clarke was not any more helpful this time:
On January 9, 2001, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, Dick Clarke called me from the NSC to discuss the government's pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He talked for a while without advancing any meaningful options. George Tenent had already briefed me on the Agency activities in Afghanistan and Central Asia, but I listened to Clarke patiently, because he said that the incoming administration was going to retain him in the counterterrorism position in the NSC.As we spoke on the STU-III, Clarke shared sensitive information regarding the Predator Plus program. He told me the operation was moving ahead well and might soon reap results. He also said our HUMINT performance was improving, but did not elaborate.
"Great," I said. "We're standing by for target coordinates."
I never received a single operational recommendation, or a single page of actionable intelligence, from Richard Clarke.
Ouch.
Richard Clarke, it will be recalled, made a big splash earlier this year with the publication of his book "Against All Enemies." From the editor's review at Amazon:
Clarke, a veteran Washington insider who had advised presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush, dissects each man's approach to terrorism but levels the harshest criticism at the latter Bush and his advisors who, Clarke asserts, failed to take terrorism and Al-Qaeda seriously. Clarke details how, in light of mounting intelligence of the danger Al-Qaeda presented, his urgent requests to move terrorism up the list of priorities in the early days of the administration were met with apathy and procrastination and how, after the attacks took place, Bush and key figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney turned their attention almost immediately to Iraq, a nation not involved in the attacks.
Since then, Clarke's own credibility has been called into question on several occasions. Condolezza Rice undercut his claims in her testimony before the 9/11 commission. Clarke's claim that "fighting terrorism in general and fighting al-Qaeda in particular were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration," turns out to be not true.
Posted by Tom at August 18, 2004 10:09 AM
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