US: The charges made by Richard Clarke couldn't be more serious in a year when the President is seeking re-election on the basis of his ability to fight terrorism.
The former White House counter-terrorism adviser alleges that in the eight months before 9/11 he could not get the Iraq-obsessed Bush administration to focus on a threat from al-Qaeda. The White House has responded that Mr Clarke, whose tell-all book, Against All Enemies, was published yesterday, was "deeply irresponsible", "flat-out wrong" and guilty of "reprehensible behaviour".
The charges made by Mr Clarke, a 30-year career intelligence officer who worked for four administrations, are damaging not just to President Bush, who is quoted as demanding to have an Iraq connection established within days of 9/11, but to several of his top aides.
Within a week of the inauguration in January 2001 Mr Clarke says he asked national security adviser Dr Condoleezza Rice for an urgent Cabinet-level meeting on the al-Qaeda threat. She appeared never to have heard of al-Qaeda and it was not until April that a meeting took place and then at Deputy Secretary level. As Mr Clarke outlined to the meeting the need to put pressure on al-Qaeda, Deputy Defence Secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz "fidgeted and scowled" and grumbled that "I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden."
Mr Clarke said he replied that al-Qaeda alone posed an immediate and serious threat to America, to which Mr Wolfowitz responded that there were others, "Iraq terrorism for example." Mr Clarke writes that CIA deputy director Mr John McLaughlin told Mr Wolfowitz, "we have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the United States", to which the Deputy Secretary retorted: "You give bin Laden too much credit."
The Cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaeda eventually took place a few days before 9/11. Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld looked "distracted" and wanted to focus on Iraq. A spokesman for Mr Wolfowitz said the allegation that he dismissed the threat from al-Qaeda was false. Dr Rice said that before September 11th they closely monitored threats to America.