Roberts contradicts Frist on Clarke
By Alexander Bolton

4/14/04
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission.

Roberts’s comments to The Hill contradict a stinging condemnation of Clarke by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor after Clarke accused President Bush of failing to take Osama bin Laden seriously before Sept. 11.

Roberts said Frist did not consult him before making his floor speech, which has been criticized by Democrats. Roberts’s words make perjury charges against Clarke highly unlikely.

Democratic attack ads have used Clarke’s assertions that Bush did not adequately heed warnings about bin Laden and have been roundly rejected by the administration and its allies, particularly Clarke’s former boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Frist.

Frist has seemed to back off his earlier position, declining to repeat the charge that Clarke contradicted himself. But the majority leader continues to say it is suspicious that Clarke, who resigned at the beginning of 2003, has waited until now, in the midst of the presidential campaign season, to level his criticisms.

Speaking of Clarke’s private testimony in 2002 before a joint House-Senate panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, compared to more recent public testimony, Roberts said, “It’s not that he said one thing in one place and said another in another place. It’s just that the subject never came up during the investigation by the House and Senate.

“The prime topic was basically, Did the intelligence community have the authority to take advantage of opportunities in regard to Osama bin Laden.

“But I don’t recall any questions in regard to whether the Bush administration was responding well … I don’t think the words ever came up.”

When asked if Clarke contradicted himself, Roberts said he did not.

Roberts said Clarke’s 2002 testimony was on small-bore process issues related to the intelligence community while the later testimony took a big-picture view of policymakers’ handling of evidence of a pending attack.

He wished that Frist had consulted with him before making his floor statement.

After Clarke testified publicly before the Sept. 11 commission chaired by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, Frist urged on the Senate floor for Clarke’s 2002 testimony before the Congressional joint inquiry to be declassified.

Frist said Clarke had earlier been “effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush Administration. It is my hope that we will be able to get that testimony declassified.”

Frist went on to say “Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath. In July 2002, in front of the congressional joint inquiry on the Sept.11 attacks, Mr. Clarke testified under oath that the administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al Qaeda during its first seven months in office.

“It is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media. But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress it is a far more serious matter.”

Bob Stevenson, Frist’s spokesman, told The Washington Post that on March 24, while Clarke testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “a number of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee familiar with Clarke’s 2002 joint intelligence committee testimony contacted the senator’s staff and said ‘the tone’ was ‘quite different from 2002.’”

Roberts said Republican staffers on the intelligence panel “will be in trouble” if he finds out they took the initiative to relate Clarke’s closed-door testimony to Frist’s staff.

Roberts said the appropriate handling of the matter would have been for Senate intelligence staff to brief him and for Roberts to brief Frist directly.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the intelligence panel, said that it would have been inappropriate for Intelligence Committee staffers to contact staff in the leader’s office to relate the contents of Clarke’s 2002 testimony.

Durbin added that Frist’s condemnation of Clarke was excessive and out of character for the leader. “It’s like he was handed a script from the White House,” Durbin said.

Frist told The Hill he was not contacted by officials at the White House, officials from the intelligence community or members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

When asked if he based his floor criticisms on a transcript of Clarke’s 2002 closed-door testimony and drew his own conclusions from that transcript, Frist said that he had.



____________________________________________________________________