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March 22, 2004

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Transcript of Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes

Here's the transcript of Richard Clarke's appearance on 60 minutes last night. Scary.

My favorite part:

Mr. CLARKE: Well, [immediately after 9/11] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And--and we all said, 'But no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.'
STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.
Mr. CLARKE: Oh, initially, I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in--inn Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.
STAHL: Now, what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, what I said was, you know, invading Iraq, or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else--you know, it's akin to what did Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to war with Japan, he said, 'Let's invade Mexico.' You know, it's very analogous.

HEADLINE: 9/11 Before & After; Former White House counter-terrorism expert Dick Clarke discusses military intelligence on al-Qaeda

ANCHORS: LESLEY STAHL

BODY:
9/11 BEFORE & AFTER
LESLEY STAHL, co-host:
Right now a special presidential commission is investigating whether the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were preventable. There were few people in a better position to answer that question than Richard Clarke, the administration's former top advisor on counter-terrorism, who left the White House last year. Clarke has helped shape US policy on terrorism since the 1980s, when he got his first presidential appointment from Ronald Reagan. He went on to serve the first President Bush, then was President Clinton's terrorism czar, and was held over by President George W. Bush. In testimony before the 9/11 commission later this week, and in a new book to be published tomorrow, "Against All Enemies," Clarke will tell the story of what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after September 11th. He does so first tonight on 60 MINUTES.
(Footage of police car; employees; White House; policeman; policemen and employees; man)
STAHL: (Voiceover) When the terrorists struck on the morning of 9/11, it was thought that the White House would be the next target, and the building was evacuated.
Mr. CLARKE: It went from having hundreds of people in the White House complex, a hubbub of activity, to being totally abandoned.
(Footage of Richard Clarke and reporter walking)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Richard Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.
Mr. CLARKE: Well, I kept thinking of the words from "Apocalypse Now," the whispered words of Marlon Brando when he thought about Vietnam, "The horror, the horror." Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows, people falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America.
(Footage of helicopter; George W. Bush; Clarke typing; book spine; Clarke and reporter; Clarke)
STAHL: (Voiceover) After the president returned to the White House on 9/11, he and his top advisors, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but was surprised that the talk quickly turned to another target.
You relate a conversation you had with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
Mr. CLARKE: Well, Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And--and we all said, 'But no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.'
STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.
Mr. CLARKE: Oh, initially, I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in--inn Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.
STAHL: Now, what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, what I said was, you know, invading Iraq, or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else--you know, it's akin to what did Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to war with Japan, he said, 'Let's invade Mexico.' You know, it's very analogous.
STAHL: Yeah, but didn't they think that there was a connection.
Mr. CLARKE: No, I--I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked for a connection, and there's just no connection.'
STAHL: And you told them that?
Mr. CLARKE: Absolutely.
STAHL: You personally?
Mr. CLARKE: I told them that, George Tenet told them that.
STAHL: Who did you tell?
Mr. CLARKE: I told that to the group, to the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, the attorney general. They all knew it.
STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.
Mr. CLARKE: Yes, the president--we were in the Situation Room complex. The president dragged me into a--a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now, he never said, 'Make it up,' but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'
STAHL: Didn't you tell him that you'd looked and--and there'd been no connection?
Mr. CLARKE: I said--I said 'Mr. President, we've done this before. We--we've been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind, there's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam--find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.
STAHL: You--in other words, you did go back and look?
Mr. CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.
STAHL: You did. And was it was a serious look? Did you really...
Mr. CLARKE: It was a serious look. We--we got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report, we sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the president, and it got bounced by the national security advisor, or deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'
STAHL: Come on.
Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: 'Wrong answer'?
Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Did the president see it?
Mr. CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the president saw it, because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Lesley, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer.
(Photos of Clarke and Bush)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke was the president's top advisor on terrorism, and yet it wasn't until 9/11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to 9/11, this administration did not take the threat seriously.
Mr. CLARKE: We had a terrorist organization that was going after us, al-Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda, and it was pushed back and back and back for months.
STAHL: You're about to testify publicly before a committee that wants to know if the Bush administration dropped the ball. What are you going to tell the committee when they ask you that?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for--urgently--underlined "urgently"--a cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo wasn't acted on.
STAHL: Do you blame her for--for not understanding the significance of terrorism?
Mr. CLARKE: I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in--in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back, they wanted to work on the same issues right away--Iraq, Star Wars--not new issues that--the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.
(Footage of Clarke walking; Paul Wolfowitz)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke finally got his meeting to brief about al-Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or the cabinet, it was with the number twos in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr. CLARKE: I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden, we have to deal with al-Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years.' And I turned to the deputy director of CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
STAHL: In eight years.
Mr. CLARKE: In eight years.
STAHL: Now explain that.
(Footage of Clarke; George Bush Sr. and man)
STAHL: (Voiceover) He explained that there was no Iraqi terrorism against the US after 1993 when Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate the first President Bush while he was visiting Kuwait.
Mr. CLARKE: We responded to that by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters...
(Footage of bombed buildings)
Mr. CLARKE: (Voiceover) ...and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis saying, 'If you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won't just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it'll be your whole government.'
It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked, because there's absolutely no evidence since that day of Iraqi terrorism directed against the United States until we invaded them. Now there's Iraqi terrorism against the United States.
STAHL: Was there any connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?
Mr. CLARKE: Were they cooperating? No.
STAHL: Was Iraq supporting al-Qaeda?
Mr. CLARKE: No. There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda ever.
STAHL: But, you know, you call certain people in the administration and they'll say, 'That's still open. That's an open issue.'
Mr. CLARKE: Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over.
(Footage of the White House; Bush and man)
STAHL: (Voiceover) By June 2001 there still hadn't been a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though the US intelligence community was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House.
Mr. CLARKE: George Tenet...
STAHL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. CLARKE: ...was saying to the White House, saying to the president because he briefed him every morning...
STAHL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. CLARKE: 'A major al-Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead.' He said that in June, July, August.
(Footage of CIA seal; photo of Clarke and Bill Clinton; photo of cabinet meeting; photo of Clinton and Clarke; LA International Airport; photo of operative; photo of car; photo of explosives; Bush and man; Bush)
STAHL: (Voiceover) The last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of intelligence chatter was back in December 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says President Clinton ordered his cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they were on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack at Los Angeles International Airport, when this al-Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before 9/11.
Mr. CLARKE: He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his national security advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject.
STAHL: Why would having a meeting make a difference?
Mr. CLARKE: If you compare December '99 to June--June and July of 2001, in December '99 every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the attorney general, had to go to the White House and sit in the meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done...
STAHL: Hmm.
Mr. CLARKE: ...to stop the al-Qaeda attack.
STAHL: Hmm.
Mr. CLARKE: So they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees, personally, finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001 we might have found out in the White House, the attorney general might have found out that there were al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI at lower levels knew--never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.
(Photos of operatives; Clarke and reporter walking)
STAHL: (Voiceover) The FBI and the CIA knew that these two al-Qaeda operatives, both among the 9/11 hijackers, had been living in the United States since 2000, yet neither agency passed that information up the chain of command or told Dick Clarke, as the White House terrorism coordinator.
Mr. CLARKE: And here I am in the White House saying, 'Something's about to happen. Tell me, you know, if--if a sparrow falls from the tree. I want to know if anything unusual is going on, because we're about to be hit.'
STAHL: No one told you.
Mr. CLARKE: The...
STAHL: No one told you?
Mr. CLARKE: The--the FBI knows they're in the country.
STAHL: Oh.
Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, if we had put their picture on "The CBS Evening News," if we had put their picture on Dan Rather, on USA Today, we could have caught those guys, and then we might have been able to pull that thread and--and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.
(Photos of 9/11 hijackers; Clarke)
STAHL: (Voiceover) But as we all know, the al-Qaeda sleeper cell was left free to plan the 9/11 attack while Dick Clarke kept agitating for the high-level White House meeting he'd been seeking.
STAHL: You finally did get your cabinet-level meeting, finally. When did that meeting take place?
Mr. CLARKE: The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place, one week prior to 9/11.
STAHL: When Clarke got his meeting on September 4th, he proposed a plan to bomb al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden. It's the same plan he had tried to persuade the Clinton administration to adopt to no avail. When we come back, Clarke's view of the president's actions after 9/11, and the White House view of Clarke.
(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)
(Announcements)
(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)
STAHL: Richard Clarke was in the Reagan, Bush one, and Clinton administrations before he became George W. Bush's top official on counter-terrorism. In a new book, he says that the Bush administration should have and could have taken out al-Qaeda and its training camps in Afghanistan long before the attacks of September 11th. He also says the fact that Osama bin Laden is still at large is another major failure, made possible by what he calls the administration's sluggish response to 9/11. Clarke's book, in effect an indictment of the president's handling of the war on terrorism, arrives just as Mr. Bush is beginning to hit the campaign trail in earnest.
President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From campaign ad) I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message.
(Ad footage of 9/11)
STAHL: (Voiceover) The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of 9/11. He's making it the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.
You're writing this book in the middle of this campaign. The timing, I'm sure, you will be questioned about and criticized for. Why are you doing it now?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me. But frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know.
STAHL: Does a person who works in a White House owe the president his loyalty?
Mr. CLARKE: Yes.
STAHL: Well, this is not a loyal book, I'm sorry.
Mr. CLARKE: No, no, I know. It just--up to a point. Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. And the way he's...
STAHL: You think he risked people's lives?
Mr. CLARKE: I think the way he has responded to al-Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe, absolutely.
STAHL: Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11? Showed strength, got us through it. You don't give him credit for that?
Mr. CLARKE: He gave a really good speech the week after 9/11.
STAHL: You don't give him credit for anything? Nothing?
Mr. CLARKE: I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.
(Footage of Clarke; Stephen Hadley and reporter climbing stairs; Hadley and reporter talking)
STAHL: (Voiceover) That may be the most serious indictment yet of the administration's handling of terrorism, since it comes from the president's own former terrorism advisor. It's not a surprise then that the number-two man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees with Clarke. He says the president has taken the fight to the terrorists and is hardening the homeland.
Dick Clarke--he was the administration's top official on counter-terrorism. How would you describe the job he did?
Mr. STEPHEN HADLEY: Look, Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the president came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration really...
(Footage of Hadley; reporter; Hadley)
STAHL: (Voiceover) He says Clarke did a good job but is just dead wrong when he says the president didn't heed the warnings about al-Qaeda before the attacks on 9/11.
Mr. HADLEY: The president heard those warnings. The president got--met daily with his chief of intelligence--the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, and his staff, and they kept him fully informed. And at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of--of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al-Qaeda?'
(Footage of Hadley; Bush)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, the president didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.
Mr. HADLEY: All the chatter was at--of an attack--a potential al-Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community, 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administrations, the FBI...
STAHL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HADLEY: ...saying, 'the--the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared, we don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore, preparatory steps need to be made.' So the president put us on battle stations.
STAHL: Now, he's the top terrorism official in this administration at that point. He says you didn't go to battle stations.
Mr. HADLEY: Well, I think that's just wrong, and the...
(Footage of Hadley; Hadley and reporter)
STAHL: (Voiceover) He also says Clarke was wrong when he said the president pressured him to find a link between Iraq and 9/11.
Mr. HADLEY: We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.
STAHL: Now, can I interrupt you for one second? We have done our own work on that ourselves, and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarke that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.
Mr. HADLEY: Look, the--I--I stand on what I said.
STAHL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HADLEY: But the point, I think, we're missing in this is of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.
STAHL: So he's not denying the president asked for another review, nor is he denying that Clarke wrote a memo stating once again that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. In fact, the White House showed us the memo dated September 18th. As Clarke said, it was bounced back. The notation reads: "Please update and resubmit," and it was written by Stephen Hadley.
Mr. HADLEY: I asked him to go--to go back, not "wrong answer." I asked him to go back and check it again a week or two later to make sure there was no new emerging evidence that Iraq was involved. That's what I was asking him to do.
(Footage of Hadley; photo of Bush and Colin Powell; photo of Condoleezza Rice; photo of cabinet meeting; Clarke and man walking; staircase)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Hadley says the whole issue about Iraq was moot by the time Clarke submitted his memo, since the president, at a meeting with his war cabinet at Camp David, had already decided to focus the US response to 9/11 on Afghanistan, which is what Clarke had been recommending. But Clarke says it was not moot, because the administration wanted to make Iraq phase two of the response no matter what happened in Afghanistan.
Pres. BUSH: (From file footage) You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.
(Footage of Bush)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Clarke contends that with statements like that, the president continually left an impression that Saddam had been involved in 9/11.
Mr. CLARKE: The White House carefully manipulated public opinion. Never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it.
STAHL: Yeah, but you're suggesting here they knew better, and it was deliberate.
Mr. CLARKE: They did know better. They did know better. They did know better. We told them, the CIA told them, the FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging September 11th, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. I think for a commander-in-chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.
(Footage of Bush)
STAHL: (Voiceover) And he thinks the president to this day misinterprets the nature and the scope of the terrorist threat.
Mr. CLARKE: He asked us after 9/11 to give him cards with pictures of the major al-Qaeda leaders and tell us when they were arrested or killed so he could draw X's through their pictures.
STAHL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. CLARKE: And, you know, I write in the book I have this image of George Bush sitting by a warm fireplace in the White House drawing X's through al-Qaeda leaders and thinking that he's got most of them and therefore he's taken care of the problem. And while George Bush thinks he's crossing them out one by one, there are all these new al-Qaeda people who are being recruited who hate the United States in large measure because of what Bush has done.
(Photo of Saddam Hussein; burning American flag; protestors)
STAHL: (Voiceover) He says that the war in Iraq has not only inflamed anti-Americanism in the Arab world, it drained resources away from the fight to Afghanistan and the push to eliminate Osama bin Laden.
Mr. HADLEY: It's not correct. Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center in the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al-Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone, their sanctuary in Iraq is gone, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies in the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way to narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists.
STAHL: Don't you think that Iraq, the Middle East, and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?
Mr. CLARKE: I think that...
STAHL: I mean, it's a widely held view that that's--he was a man...
Mr. CLARKE: Lesley, I--I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay. The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it.
STAHL: What do you mean?
Mr. CLARKE: Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it--an oil-rich Arab country.' He'd been saying this. This was part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich, and occupy and oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al-Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al-Qaeda, have been greatly strengthened.
(Footage of Madrid train bombing)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Exhibit A, he now says, is the attack on the passenger trains in Madrid.
Dick Clarke worked for Reagan, Bush one, Clinton, and now here. He has a track record. Why do you think a man with those credentials would be so completely critical of the way this administration has handled the war on terrorism?
Mr. HADLEY: Well, I don't know. I have not read Dick's book. I don't know what he said about the prior administration, which, again, was in office and dealing with this problem for eight years. We were in office dealing with this problem for 230 days. At the time when he left us, the conversations I had with him was that he was pleased at the leadership provided by the president.
STAHL: He did tell you he was pleased when he left?
Mr. HADLEY: My--my belief was that he appreciated the leadership that the president had provided.
(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; photo of Clinton and man; Clarke)
STAHL: (Voiceover) But there's no hint of that in his book or in our interview. When Clarke worked for President Clinton he was known as the terrorism czar. When George Bush came into office, though he kept Clarke on at the White House, he stripped him of his cabinet-level rank.
They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, frankly, if I had been so upset that the national coordinator for counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a cabinet-level position to a staff-level position, if that had bothered me enough I would have quit. I didn't quit.
(Footage of Clarke and reporter walking; Clarke typing; book spine)
STAHL: (Voiceover) Not for another two years. He finally resigned last year, after 30 years in government service. A senior White House official told us he thinks Clarke's book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.
Are you working to defeat Bush, and are you working to help Kerry get elected?
Mr. CLARKE: No, I'm not working for Kerry. I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign.
STAHL: We're here at Harvard right now. You teach a course at the Kennedy School with Kerry's national security advisor...
Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm.
STAHL: Rand Beers.
Mr. CLARKE: Mm-hmm. I have worked for Ronald Reagan, I have worked for George Bush one, I have worked for George Bush two. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know.
STAHL: Looking back on September 11th, the day itself, besides the attacks and the--and the horrible images of those planes hitting, what do you remember?
Mr. CLARKE: I remember trying very hard to keep my emotions in check. I knew people in the Pentagon, I knew people in the World Trade Center. I assumed that friends of mine had died, and, in fact, it turned out they had. I felt an enormous rage and anger against al-Qaeda, but also and anger against the US government that we hadn't been able to stop this.
STAHL: Well, I'll tell you something, some of that rage is in this book.
Mr. CLARKE: Well, it should be.
STAHL: Over the weekend we got a note from the Pentagon saying, 'Any suggestion that the president did anything other than act aggressively, quickly and effectively to address the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat in Afghanistan is absurd.'
(Footage of 60 MINUTES clock)
(Announcements)
Announcer: 60 MINUTES, a CBS News magazine, will continue. And it's always on cbsnews.com.
(Announcements)

LOAD-DATE: March 22, 2004

categories: Politics, War and Security
posted by adm at 3:24 PM | #