Nothing could be more devastating for President Bush's re-election hopesthan Richard Clarke's belief that Democrats were better at fightingterrorism, writes Conor O'Clery
When Richard Clarke took his seat at the 9/11 commission hearing on Wednesday he began his testimony with an apology to bereaved relatives. "Your government failed you," he said. "I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed."
It was the seminal moment in a week of high political theatre in Washington. In the front row of the Capitol Hill hearing room widows and mothers wept silently. Afterwards they embraced the silver-haired official whose accusation that the Bush administration did not act with sufficient urgency on terror threats before 9/11 has created a political furore.
The Pennsylvania-born Clarke (53), son of a chocolate factory worker, is an unlikely celebrity. First appointed to the National Security Council by George Bush senior in 1988, he was the secret operative at the heart of American counter-terrorism until his retirement last year.
His actions have ranged from co-ordinating the US intervention in Somalia to drawing up secret plans to destabilise Libya's President Gadafy. He was accused in 1992 by the State Department of condoning the sale by Israel of American arms to China.
Clarke has long been known to insiders as a zealot on counter-terrorism, abrasive and bullying, never satisfied that enough had been done. He had a scant regard for rules and might not turn up at meetings if he was busy. Over the years, colleagues learned not to cross him. He was one of only three White House officials who carried a gun for protection, and it was said jokingly that the .357 Magnum in his belt was for inter-agency combat.
Brilliant and obsessive, his manner of working was tolerated, even respected, in the Clinton White House, but the more tightly-controlled Bush team did not like the idea of a loose cannon, and did not share his fixation on al-Qaeda.
Incoming National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice downgraded Clarke, excluding him from high level meetings and asking him to report to deputies rather than cabinet members. She sent him an e-mail when he failed to show up for a meeting, which he ignored. "I know how to manage people," she said icily this week, recalling the incident. After she sent a second e-mail "we didn't have a problem".
But a furious, slighted Clarke would later pose a problem of a different kind. The Bush team learned this week that politically his words were as lethal as the hollow-point bullets in the Magnum. What Clarke told the 10-member bipartisan commission, and what he spelled out in his book, Against All Enemies, was actually not new. His central allegation, that the Bush administration did not pay urgent attention to al-Qaeda in its first eight months, despite all his prodding and harrying, has been detailed in several books and articles over the past year.
It is confirmed by President Bush himself in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War in which he admitted "I didn't feel a sense of urgency" about al-Qaeda's threats before 9/11.
The claim to the commission by the outgoing National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, that he and Clarke warned Dr Rice that terrorism should be her number one priority, is also not new. In his book House of Bush: House of Saud, author Craig Under describes a meeting at 1.30 p.m. on January 3rd, 2001 in room 302 of the Old Executive Office Building where Clarke gave a power presentation to Rice and others on his plan to deal with al-Qaeda, which had bombed the USS Cole just three months earlier, killing 17 American sailors.
Each of 14 slides was headed "Response to al-Qaeda: Roll Back". Clarke's plan called for air strikes and covert operations against Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, increased aid for the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban, freezing al-Qaeda's assets and source of funds and giving money to countries fighting al-Qaeda, like Uzbekistan.
In his book he says that when he first briefed a sceptical Rice "her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before". This observation seems to reflect pique rather than reality. Rice, a Russian speaker and foreign policy expert, had indeed not focused on terrorism and hadn't mentioned it in her foreign policy speech to the Republican National Convention in 2000. But a year before she had given a radio interview in which she spoke knowledgeably about al-Qaeda.
Clarke wrote to her in late January asking for a principals' or cabinet-level meeting to review the imminent al-Qaeda threat. Rice told him that deputies would have to frame a policy first. The deputies didn't meet until April - despite an alarming report by a bipartisan commission led by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman on January 31st that a devastating terrorist attack on the US could be imminent.
By Clarke's account the meeting did not go well. He warned them that something spectacular was going to happen soon, but Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz "scowled" and protested at giving bin Laden too much credit.
When Clarke said bin Laden had boasted of planning major terrorist acts, just as Hitler told the world in advance of his plans in Mein Kamf, Wolfowitz retorted, "I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan". It wasn't until September 4th that the full principals' meeting took place. The hijacked planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon seven days later.
With his apologies to the relatives and his obsession with preventing the attack, Clarke has the families behind him. His credibility has also largely survived, though publishing his book this week has generated some charges of profiteering and sour grapes. He has created an image of a zealot defender of America against terrorism, haunted by the prospect that he just might have been able to connect the dots if he had been better served by his masters and by the CIA and FBI.
The former Bush aide has also made the case that the Clinton White House was more assiduous in tracking down terrorism than the Bush administration in the pre-9/11 days. The accusation of a counter-terrorism expert from within the depths of the administration that Mr Bush has undermined the fight against terror with the war on Iraq are damaging.
But for a Republican president campaigning for re-election on his record against terrorism, nothing could be more devastating than the idea that the Democrats might actually have done a better job.