At last. Some honesty and grace about what happened.


March 25, 2004 NY TIMES
Assessing the Blame for 9/11

The seminal moment of this week's hearings on 9/11 surely came yesterday when Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton administrations, opened his testimony by apologizing to the families whose loved ones died in the terror attacks. The government, Mr. Clarke said, had failed them, "and I failed you." He added, "We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed." It suddenly seemed that after the billions of words uttered about that terrible day, Mr. Clarke had found the ones that still needed saying.

The two days of hearings by the commission investigating the attacks have been invaluable in helping the American people better understand the chain of miscommunications, wrong guesses and misplaced priorities that left the nation so poorly defended against the terrorists. Mr. Clarke, by accepting responsibility, offered the American people the freedom to hold their leaders accountable for an event most had come to see as an unstoppable bolt from the blue.

Mr. Clarke is clearly haunted by the thought that if things had gone differently, the attacks might have been averted. That seems like the longest of long shots. But there are still plenty of questions to be answered about what happened, particularly about the apparent lack of urgency in the Bush administration's antiterrorism efforts before 9/11.

The Clinton administration also made mistakes. Although aware of the danger posed by Osama bin Laden, it was somehow unable to create and carry out an effective strategy to deal with him. Bill Clinton, distracted by the threat of impeachment, failed to educate the American people adequately about the nature of the danger, and what it might take to fight it. Senior officials from the Clinton and Bush administration testified, one after another, that in the pre-9/11 world, they could not have gone further in trying to run down Mr. bin Laden because, they believed, the country and our allies would not have supported it.

But there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism, and on occasion, like the December 1999 alert that appears to have averted an attack on the Los Angeles airport, it produced results.

The attitude of the Bush administration seems harder to pin down. Mr. Clarke's conclusion was that after George Bush became president, neither he nor the terrorism agenda got the same top-level attention. The Bush administration officials who testified denied that vociferously. Their arguments suffered from the absence of Condoleezza Rice, the person to whom Mr. Clarke reported. Ms. Rice has been doing the rounds of talk shows in an attempt to bolster her argument that the administration had found Mr. Clarke's plans wanting and immediately began a full-bore effort to come up with a new antiterrorism strategy. What the nation deserved to hear her address publicly before the commission is why that process took eight months. A new plan was not approved by the White House until the eve of the terror attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

The real impression gleaned from the hearings is not that the Bush administration was indifferent to the threat of terror, but that its officials had trouble fully understanding it. Ms. Rice was trained as a Sovietologist. Many of Mr. Bush's other top advisers are also former cold warriors who remained loyal to the agenda of the gulf war era, the early 1990's. Their mind-set did not allow for the possibility of an extranational threat not orchestrated by any one particular government. Once 9/11 happened, they organized an effective attack on Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden had been operating, but they then turned their attention to Iraq, a country that no one in Mr. Clarke's operation regarded as an incubator of international terrorism.

Despite attempts by a few commission members to paint Mr. Clarke as a disgruntled former employee trying to get publicity for his new book, the former counterterrorism chief was an impressive, reasonable witness. He has done the country a service in focusing attention on the failures leading up to 9/11. The only problem with his apology was that so few of those failures really seemed to be his.



_______________________________________________________________