Ithaca 37
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So you don't have to register to read this I'll post it all. Please register, though. They have lots of good articles. I noticed in the "UN Scandel" topic there weren't any objections to the NY Times when the usual bashers agreed with the article. It only seems to get called "a liberal, starry eyed, birkenstock wearing, socialist rag" when they disagree with it! 
'Go-to Guy' Sheds Bureaucrat's Anonymity
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 24, 2004
ASHINGTON, March 23 — With a parade of cabinet secretaries, the Tuesday meeting of the commission that is investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks hardly lacked star power. But the real star of the show was not even in the room — Richard A. Clarke, the Bush and Clinton administrations' former counterterrorism chief.
`I'd like to turn to a subject that everybody else in Washington is talking about," said James R. Thompson, a commissioner who is a former Republican governor of Illinois, as he started questioning of Madeleine K. Albright, President Bill Clinton's secretary of state. "We might as well recognize the elephant in the room."
He was, of course, referring to Mr. Clarke, who has created a furor in the White House and the Capitol with a new book that accuses President Bush of failing to take the threat of Al Qaeda seriously enough. Mr. Clarke is to testify on Wednesday.
To colleagues in four administrations, Mr. Clarke was the go-to guy, the senior official who knew the often-arcane workings of budgets and could make the creaky bureaucracy move. Obsessed with averting terrorist attacks on his watch, he was quick to identify threats — and bully people into addressing them.
"He has a certain brilliance," said Steven Simon, a counterterrorism expert at the RAND Corporation who worked with Mr. Clarke in the Clinton White House. "He's the Mozart of bureaucrats."
But, Mr. Simon added, Mr. Clarke alienated people who did not always see things his way. "You know the old saying?" he said. "His good points were his bad points."
Bush administration officials, stung by Mr. Clarke's criticism that President Bush and his aides were slow to move against the Qaeda network and too eager to see the fingerprints of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq on the 9/11 attacks, have sought to discredit him. They have depicted him as a self-promoter, out of the loop and an ally of Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
Mr. Clarke, who says he helped save Americans from state-sponsored attacks from Iraq and Iran and foiled attempts by Al Qaeda to stage attacks, was unbowed. He had anticipated the Bush administration onslaught, saying in his book that its officials are "adept at revenge."
"They've got lots of people, on taxpayers' dollars by the way, out refuting these charges," Mr. Clarke said on Tuesday on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "But they're not really going after the main charge. They're throwing lots of things up in the air, flak, to divert me."
The man at the center of the maelstrom is a ghostly pale balding bureaucrat who has spent the greater part of a three-decade career in government unknown to most Americans. The son of a chocolate factory worker from Pennsylvania, Mr. Clarke, 53, earned degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is single, and known for keeping long hours, and he was one of a handful of White House officials allowed to carry a gun for protection.
His career and his personal profile have been anything but ordinary. Mr. Clarke, who worked prominently under Republicans and Democrats alike, has had roles in some of the most sensitive foreign policy initiatives of the past generation.
His bland official titles, most recently national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, followed by special assistant to the president for cyberspace security, belie considerable intrigue. According to biographical accounts and interviews, he drew up plans in 1986 that were never put into effect to "destabilize" Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader; coordinated the disastrous American intervention in Somalia and a smoother one in Haiti; and detected Iranian complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
For a time, he occupied the office used by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the Marines, the Reagan aide whose activities with Iran and Nicaraguan rebels led to the Iran-contra scandal.
Mr. Clarke is no stranger to scandal. In 1992, he was forced out of a senior position at the Bush administration's State Department and moved to the White House after the inspector general of the department had accused him of looking the other way when Israel transferred sophisticated American military technology to China.
In an interview in 1999 with The New York Times, Mr. Clarke justified his action, saying the pressure to punish Israel was part of a ploy. "The bottom line," he said, "was I wasn't going to lie. I wasn't going to go along with an administration strategy to pressure the Israeli government."
At the White House, supporters praised his pragmatic style and critics bristled at his propensity to set his own rules. He found a staunch ally in W. Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser. In his book "Six Nightmares," Mr. Lake called Mr. Clarke "one of the smartest, most effective public servants I have known."
"He is a bulldog of a bureaucrat," Mr. Lake wrote, "notorious among his colleagues for utter devotion to those he works for, fierce loyalty and support toward those who work for him and a bluntness toward those at his level that has not earned him universal affection."
As terrorist threats began to multiply, colleagues relied on Mr. Clarke to cut red tape. In November 2000, Robert S. Gelbard, the American ambassador to Indonesia, desperately sought American agents to thwart what he believed was spying for a terrorist attack against his embassy in Jakarta. When Mr. Gelbard ran into bureaucratic roadblocks, Mr. Clarke set up a teleconference and "browbeat" officials to action, Mr. Gelbard said. Evidence later showed that the embassy was indeed in terrorists' sights, he said.
As Mr. Bush prepared to take office in January 2001, Condoleezza Rice, who became national security adviser, decided to keep Mr. Clarke as the counterterrorism expert at the National Security Council. Ms. Rice, who knew Mr. Clarke from her work with President George H. W. Bush, considered him talented, if unruly, and wanted as much continuity as possible on counterterrorism, administration officials said.
Mr. Clarke was not happy Ms. Rice downgraded him, which resulted in his exclusion from some high-level meetings, the officials said.
On March 7, 2001, a senior administration official said, Ms. Rice assigned Mr. Clarke to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda, not just roll it back. His work over the spring and summer was the basis for a strategy document for dealing with the network that won high-level White House approval on Sept. 4.
Mr. Clarke, by his own account in the book, was obsessed with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He relentlessly pressed administration officials for a more assertive policy to combat terrorism, including stronger use of the military.
The White House on Tuesday sought to blunt Mr. Clarke's assertions by releasing his resignation letter. In it, he praised Mr. Bush for his "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11.
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking on Monday on the syndicated Rush Limbaugh radio program, noted there had been several attacks on Mr. Clarke's watch, including the bombings of the Cole and the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in the Clinton years.
Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/politics/24CLAR.html?pagewanted=1
'Go-to Guy' Sheds Bureaucrat's Anonymity
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 24, 2004
ASHINGTON, March 23 — With a parade of cabinet secretaries, the Tuesday meeting of the commission that is investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks hardly lacked star power. But the real star of the show was not even in the room — Richard A. Clarke, the Bush and Clinton administrations' former counterterrorism chief.
`I'd like to turn to a subject that everybody else in Washington is talking about," said James R. Thompson, a commissioner who is a former Republican governor of Illinois, as he started questioning of Madeleine K. Albright, President Bill Clinton's secretary of state. "We might as well recognize the elephant in the room."
He was, of course, referring to Mr. Clarke, who has created a furor in the White House and the Capitol with a new book that accuses President Bush of failing to take the threat of Al Qaeda seriously enough. Mr. Clarke is to testify on Wednesday.
To colleagues in four administrations, Mr. Clarke was the go-to guy, the senior official who knew the often-arcane workings of budgets and could make the creaky bureaucracy move. Obsessed with averting terrorist attacks on his watch, he was quick to identify threats — and bully people into addressing them.
"He has a certain brilliance," said Steven Simon, a counterterrorism expert at the RAND Corporation who worked with Mr. Clarke in the Clinton White House. "He's the Mozart of bureaucrats."
But, Mr. Simon added, Mr. Clarke alienated people who did not always see things his way. "You know the old saying?" he said. "His good points were his bad points."
Bush administration officials, stung by Mr. Clarke's criticism that President Bush and his aides were slow to move against the Qaeda network and too eager to see the fingerprints of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq on the 9/11 attacks, have sought to discredit him. They have depicted him as a self-promoter, out of the loop and an ally of Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
Mr. Clarke, who says he helped save Americans from state-sponsored attacks from Iraq and Iran and foiled attempts by Al Qaeda to stage attacks, was unbowed. He had anticipated the Bush administration onslaught, saying in his book that its officials are "adept at revenge."
"They've got lots of people, on taxpayers' dollars by the way, out refuting these charges," Mr. Clarke said on Tuesday on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "But they're not really going after the main charge. They're throwing lots of things up in the air, flak, to divert me."
The man at the center of the maelstrom is a ghostly pale balding bureaucrat who has spent the greater part of a three-decade career in government unknown to most Americans. The son of a chocolate factory worker from Pennsylvania, Mr. Clarke, 53, earned degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is single, and known for keeping long hours, and he was one of a handful of White House officials allowed to carry a gun for protection.
His career and his personal profile have been anything but ordinary. Mr. Clarke, who worked prominently under Republicans and Democrats alike, has had roles in some of the most sensitive foreign policy initiatives of the past generation.
His bland official titles, most recently national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, followed by special assistant to the president for cyberspace security, belie considerable intrigue. According to biographical accounts and interviews, he drew up plans in 1986 that were never put into effect to "destabilize" Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader; coordinated the disastrous American intervention in Somalia and a smoother one in Haiti; and detected Iranian complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
For a time, he occupied the office used by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the Marines, the Reagan aide whose activities with Iran and Nicaraguan rebels led to the Iran-contra scandal.
Mr. Clarke is no stranger to scandal. In 1992, he was forced out of a senior position at the Bush administration's State Department and moved to the White House after the inspector general of the department had accused him of looking the other way when Israel transferred sophisticated American military technology to China.
In an interview in 1999 with The New York Times, Mr. Clarke justified his action, saying the pressure to punish Israel was part of a ploy. "The bottom line," he said, "was I wasn't going to lie. I wasn't going to go along with an administration strategy to pressure the Israeli government."
At the White House, supporters praised his pragmatic style and critics bristled at his propensity to set his own rules. He found a staunch ally in W. Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser. In his book "Six Nightmares," Mr. Lake called Mr. Clarke "one of the smartest, most effective public servants I have known."
"He is a bulldog of a bureaucrat," Mr. Lake wrote, "notorious among his colleagues for utter devotion to those he works for, fierce loyalty and support toward those who work for him and a bluntness toward those at his level that has not earned him universal affection."
As terrorist threats began to multiply, colleagues relied on Mr. Clarke to cut red tape. In November 2000, Robert S. Gelbard, the American ambassador to Indonesia, desperately sought American agents to thwart what he believed was spying for a terrorist attack against his embassy in Jakarta. When Mr. Gelbard ran into bureaucratic roadblocks, Mr. Clarke set up a teleconference and "browbeat" officials to action, Mr. Gelbard said. Evidence later showed that the embassy was indeed in terrorists' sights, he said.
As Mr. Bush prepared to take office in January 2001, Condoleezza Rice, who became national security adviser, decided to keep Mr. Clarke as the counterterrorism expert at the National Security Council. Ms. Rice, who knew Mr. Clarke from her work with President George H. W. Bush, considered him talented, if unruly, and wanted as much continuity as possible on counterterrorism, administration officials said.
Mr. Clarke was not happy Ms. Rice downgraded him, which resulted in his exclusion from some high-level meetings, the officials said.
On March 7, 2001, a senior administration official said, Ms. Rice assigned Mr. Clarke to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda, not just roll it back. His work over the spring and summer was the basis for a strategy document for dealing with the network that won high-level White House approval on Sept. 4.
Mr. Clarke, by his own account in the book, was obsessed with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He relentlessly pressed administration officials for a more assertive policy to combat terrorism, including stronger use of the military.
The White House on Tuesday sought to blunt Mr. Clarke's assertions by releasing his resignation letter. In it, he praised Mr. Bush for his "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11.
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking on Monday on the syndicated Rush Limbaugh radio program, noted there had been several attacks on Mr. Clarke's watch, including the bombings of the Cole and the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in the Clinton years.
Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/politics/24CLAR.html?pagewanted=1
