Richard A. Clarke

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Richard A. Clarke
Born 1951

Richard A. Clarke (born 1951) is a former U.S. government official who specialized in intelligence, cyber security and counter-terrorism. Until his retirement in January 2003, Mr. Clarke was a member of the Senior Executive Service. He served as an advisor to four U.S. presidents from 1973 to 2003: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. During the September 11, 2001 attacks, Clarke was the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council.

Clarke resigned in January of 2003 to begin writing Against All Enemies, his memoirs about his service in government. The book was published in March 2004, around the time that Clarke was testifying before the 9/11 Commission.

Richard Clarke is currently Chairman, and contributor to GoodHarborReport.com, an online community discussing homeland security, defense, and politics.

Contents

[edit] Background

Richard Clarke was born in 1951, the son of a Boston factory worker. He studied at the Boston Latin School (graduated 1969) and received a Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.

[edit] Government career

In 1973, he began work in the federal government as an employee in the U.S. Department of Defense. Starting in 1985, Clarke served in the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. During the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush, he coordinated diplomatic efforts to support the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the subsequent security arrangements. He also advised Madeleine Albright during the Genocide in Rwanda. His positions inside the government have included:

  • United States National Security Council, 1992-2003
    • Special Advisor 2001-2003
    • National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, 1998-2000
    • Chair of the Counter-terrorism Security Group, 1992-2003
  • United States Department of State 1985-1992
    • Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, 1989-1992
    • Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, 1985-1988

At a security conference in 2002, after citing statistics that indicate that less than 0.0025 percent of corporate revenue on average is spent on information-technology security, Clarke was famously heard to say, "If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked."[citation needed]

[edit] Pre-9/11 memo about Al Qaeda threat

Clarke and his communications with the Bush administration regarding bin Laden and associated terrorist plots targeting the United States were mentioned frequently in National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's public interview by the 9/11 investigatory commission on April 8, 2004. Of particular significance was a memo from January 25, 2001 that Clarke had authored and sent to Rice. [1]

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.

Clarke says that on September 12, 2001, President Bush "testily" asked him to try to find evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist attacks. After an initial denial, the White House has since conceded that the meeting took place. In response he wrote a report stating there was absolutely no evidence of Iraqi involvement and got it signed by all relevant agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA. The paper was quickly returned by a deputy with a note saying "Please update and resubmit," apparently unshown to the President.

[edit] 9/11 Commission testimony

On March 24, 2004, Clarke began what would become a nearly 20-hour testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Many of the events Clark recounted during the hearings were also published in his memoir, Against All Enemies.

According to the 9/11 Commission, Clarke gave the final okay for the members of the bin Laden family living in the United States to fly to Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2001, a request that originated with the Saudi embassy. During the hearing, Clarke told the Commission that he did not know who within the Bush Administration formally presented the request to him. But when pressed, he said that it was most likely came from the State Department or the Office of the White House Chief of Staff. Clarke initally said that once the request came to him he refused to approve it, instead deferring the matter to the FBI. [2] However, he later admitted that he alone authorized the flight, telling reporters, "I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again." [3]

[edit] Criticism and support

After Clarke appeared before the 9/11 Commission, his detractors attacked his credibility, suggesting that he was too partisan a figure. They charged that he exaggerated perceived failures in the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies while exculpating the former Clinton administration from its perceived shortcomings.[4]

Clarke did find supporters among members of the American media. According to Knight-Ridder, the White House tried to discredit Clarke in a move described as "shooting the messenger."[5] New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was more blunt, calling the attacks on Clarke "a campaign of character assassination."[6]

Conservatives within and without the Bush Administration vigorously attacked both Clarke's testimony and his tenor during the hearings. As for the families of the 9/11 victims, their position toward Clarke was mixed. Some supported him, while others felt he was self-aggrandizing and that his criticisms were misplaced. In an "Open Letter to America," one group of family members accused Clarke of "politicizing 9/11 and further dividing America."[7][8]

[edit] Positions on Iraq and al-Qaeda

Clarke has also been criticized by conservatives for suggesting the possibility of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda but then, after investigation, concluding that no link had been established. Regarding Hussein's offer of safehaven in Iraq, Clarke wrote in a January 1999 memo to Sandy Berger that he was concerned that “old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad.” (p. 134)[9] Clarke also made statements that year to the press linking Hussein and al-Qaeda to an alleged joint chemical weapons development effort at the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.[10]

Since 1999, however, the United States government has admitted that its evidence regarding Al Shifa is inconclusive, and Clarke has changed his view about an Iraq-al Qaeda link. In Against All Enemies he writes, "It is certainly possible that Iraqi agents dangled the possibility of asylum in Iraq before bin Laden at some point when everyone knew that the U.S. was pressuring the Taliban to arrest him. If that dangle happened, bin Laden's accepting asylum clearly did not," (p. 270). In an interview on March 21, 2004, Clarke made the statement: "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda, ever." This change in point of view has brought Clarke criticism from Christopher Hitchens [11] and the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes.[12] Clarke makes clear in his book that he came to his more recent conclusion as a result of several investigations, prompted by the Bush Administration, specifically into the possibility of an Iraqi connection to September 11th.

Regarding who was to blame over possible "intelligence failures" leading up to 9/11, Clarke engaged in a duel of words with Michael Scheuer, former chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the Central Intelligence Agency. When asked to respond to Clarke's claim that Scheuer was "a hothead, a middle manager who really didn't go to any of the cabinet meetings," Scheuer replied:

I certainly agree with the fact that I didn't go to the cabinet meetings. But I'm certainly also aware that I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available against Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.[13]

According to one article, Scheuer believed that Clarke’s "risk aversion and politicking" negatively impacted the hunt for Bin Laden prior to September 11, 2001. Scheuer further asserted that his CIA team had provided information on ten different occasions that could have led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, but recommendations to act upon the information were turned down by Clarke and other senior intelligence officials.[14] Despite this heated exchange, Scheuer agrees with Clarke that the invasion of Iraq was a serious diversion from the war against al-Qaeda.

[edit] Book: Against All Enemies

Main article: Against All Enemies

On March 22, 2004, Clarke's book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror--What Really Happened (ISBN 0-7432-6024-4), was published. The book was critical of past and present presidential administrations for the way they handled the war on terror both before and after September 11, 2001 but focused much of its criticism on Bush for failing to take sufficient action to protect the country in the elevated-threat period before the September 11, 2001 attacks and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Clarke feels greatly hampered the war on terror, and was a distraction from the real terrorists.

Critics say errors can be found in Clarke's book Against All Enemies. Most notably, they point to a passage on page 237 in which Clarke describes a September 4, 2001 meeting of national security principals in which he states Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "who looked distracted throughout the session, took the United States Deputy Secretary of Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorists concerns, like Iraq." Rumsfeld has publicly stated he was not at the September 4, 2001 meeting, and Defense Department officials have confirmed he was not in attendance.[15]

[edit] Additional works

[edit] Affiliations

  • Chairman, Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, a strategic planning and corporate risk management firm.
  • Contributor, GoodHarborReport.com, an online resource for homeland security, defense and political issues, operated by Good Harbor Consulting, LLC.
  • Advisory Board Member, Civitas Group, LLC[16]
  • On-air consultant, ABC News.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../r/i/c/Richard_A._Clarke_bb3c.html"
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