The White House is disputing assertions by US President George W. Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator that the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al-Qaeda in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.
National security deputies worked diligently between March and September 2001 to develop a strategy to attack the terror network, one that was completed and ready for Bush's approval a week before the suicide airliner hijackings, the White House said in a statement Sunday.
It said the president told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice early in his administration he was "`tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda, rather than simply waiting to respond."
The point-by-point rebuttal confronts claims by Richard Clarke in a new book, Against All Enemies, that is scathingly critical of administration actions.
Clarke wrote that Rice appeared never to have heard of al-Qaeda until she was warned early in 2001 about the terrorist organization and that she "looked skeptical" about his warnings.
"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," Clarke said in the book, which went on sale yesterday.
Clarke said Rice appeared not to recognize post-Cold War security issues and effectively demoted him within the National Security Council staff. He retired last year after 30 years in government.
Rice echoed the administration's rebuttal in a guest column in yesterday's Washington Post and addressed Clarke's characterization of her obliquely.
"Before Sept. 11, we closely monitored threats to our nation," she wrote.
"President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of the CIA every day -- meetings that I attended. And I personally met with [director] George Tenet regularly and frequently reviewed aspects of the counterterrorism effort," the National Security Advisor wrote.
Clarke, who is expected to testify today before a federal panel investigating the attacks, recounted his early meeting with Rice as support for his contention the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al-Qaeda.
He said that within one week of Bush's inauguration he "urgently" sought a meeting of senior Cabinet leaders to discuss "the imminent al-Qaeda threat."
Three months later, in April 2001, Clarke met with deputy secretaries. During that meeting, he wrote, the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz told Clarke, "You give bin Laden too much credit," and he said Wolfowitz sought to steer the discussion to Iraq.
The White House responded that the Bush administration kept Clarke as a holdover from the Clinton era because of its concerns over al-Qaeda.
"He makes the charge that we were not focused enough on efforts to root out terrorism," Bush communications director Dan Bartlett said Sunday.
"That's just categorically false," he said.
Bartlett said Clarke's memo to Rice in January 2001 discussed recommendations to improve security at US sites overseas, not inside the US.
"Each one of these, while important, wouldn't have impacted 9/11," he said.
Clarke harshly criticizes Bush personally in his book, saying his decision to invade Iraq generated broad anti-American sentiment among Arabs. He recounts that the president asked him directly almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.
"Nothing America could have done would have provided al-Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country," Clarke wrote.
He added: "One shudders to think what additional errors [Bush] will make in the next four years to strengthen the al-Qaeda follow-ons: attacking Syria or Iran, undermining the Saudi regime without a plan for a successor state?"
Demcratic Senator Joe Lieberman said Sunday he doesn't believe Clarke's charge that Bush -- who defeated him and former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election -- was focused more on Iraq than al-Qaeda during the days after the terror attacks.
"I see no basis for it," Lieberman said on Fox News Sunday.
"I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric," he said.
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