Current and former defense and state department officials were due to enter the US election-year fray yesterday over who, if anyone, was to blame for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks on America.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor Madeleine Albright, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessor William Cohen will testify before the national commission investigating the 2001 hijacked plane attacks that killed about 3,000 people.
Their testimony comes after a weekend bombshell by Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official in the White Houses of US President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton, who says the Bush administration did not take the al-Qaeda threat very seriously before the Sept. 11 attacks and then afterward tried unsuccessfully to tie them to Iraq.
The Bush administration, when it first came into office, believed Clinton and his administration were "overly obsessed with al-Qaeda," Clarke writes in his newly released book Against All Enemies.
Bush failed to act before Sept. 11 on the threat from al-Qaeda despite repeated warnings, then "harvested a political windfall" for taking obvious steps after the attacks, and launched an unnecessary war in Iraq, Clarke writes.
Clinton identified terrorism as a major post-Cold War threat and worked to improve counterterrorism capabilities, but was weakened by political attacks and could not push the CIA, Pentagon and FBI to adequately deal with the threat, he wrote.
"What is clear is that there were failures in the organizations that we trusted to protect us, failures to get information to the right place at the right time, earlier failures to act boldly to reduce or eliminate the threat," Clarke writes.
The White House counterattacked, saying Bush recognized the al-Qaeda threat and his administration almost immediately begun working on a strategy to eliminate Osama bin Laden's network upon taking office in 2001.
National security has been a hot US political issue as the US November presidential election approaches. Democrats say the Bush White House gave the terrorism threat too little weight and focused too much on Iraq. Republicans say the Clinton administration did too little against the threat from al-Qaeda, leaving it for Bush to deal with.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States must complete its report on Sept. 11 by July 26, coincidentally the start of the Democratic National Convention, where John Kerry will be formally nominated as the Democratic challenger to Bush.
"This very complex series of charges and counter charges that surface saying how guilty the Clinton administration and the Bush administration were, not knowing what al-Qaeda was going to do in the future, is doing absolutely nothing except distracting people from the real job, which is to deal with the current and future threat," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security expert at The Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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