It is often the case in this town that the truthfulness of an accusation can be measured by the ferocity of the attack on the accuser.
And few accusers have been attacked as vigorously and personally as Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism adviser to President Bush.
The administration put out an army of aides and operatives to call Clarke names, question his credibility and challenge his motives.
In best light, they accused Clarke of being a hype artist interested only in selling his new controversial book, which portrays the administration as insufficiently attentive to terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001 and hellbent on war with Iraq after it. (Whatever the truth, Clarke’s book is selling famously.)
The tactics employed against Clarke were straight from any campaign playbook: When challenged, shoot the messenger. One new wrinkle was that the administration, as part of its bill of particulars, outed Clarke as “background” source in a 2002 Time magazine interview because his sentiments as a spinner for the president contrasted with the words of the book Clarke now stands so unequivocally behind.
The White House dropped a copy of the briefing in the lap of “fair and balanced” Fox News, and it ended up in the lap of former Illinois Gov. James Thompson, a Republican and a member of the federal bipartisan commission investigating intelligence failures.
Thompson tried for a moment of drama during the televised hearings by holding up a copy of the transcript in one hand and Clarke’s book in the other and pointedly asking which was true.
Clarke schooled Thompson on the ways of Washington and the workings of the White House to the point that Illinois longest serving governor was left to merely utter, “I’m from the Midwest.”
Though Clarke was highly critical of President Bush, he was even more pointed in his attack on one of Bush’s most trusted aides, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. He suggested that Rice, who burnished her academic and government credentials during the Reagan years as an expert on the Soviet Union and Cold War, had never heard of Al Qaeda when she returned to Washington to serve Bush.
Rice, showing a political kinship to the Bushes, proved that even a former Stanford provost could throw a sharp elbow. She went out of her way to try to discredit Clarke in every public venue but the one that really mattered, namely the Sept. 11 commission, where witnesses take an oath.
She was more than willing to do a round of television interviews; she was emboldened to summon a gaggle of White House reporters to her office to rebut Clarke’s sworn testimony. She even offered up that she would come back to the commission again and talk to them, again behind closed doors.
The reason given for her reluctance to swear an oath is that it could undermine executive privilege, an assertion that if the national security adviser to the president were required to testify in a public forum then the advice to the president could be severely compromised and thus deserved protection.
It seems like noble proposition. But it smells like other efforts by the Bush White House and the Clinton White House before it, and the Bush I White House before it, and the Reagan White House before it, to use an otherwise laudable principle to obscure an uncomfortable truth.
Clarke has rolled a very powerful grenade at the Bush administration. The administration is fighting back with even more powerful weapons. The argument as it stands now is a classic “he said, she said.”
Which is why the Sept. 11 commission needs to be the adult in the room.
Until this week, most of its work was done out of the public limelight. But with a midsummer deadline for producing a report and potent unresolved issues dominating public debate, there is a heightened burden on the commission to come to a conclusion.
Washington’s history is full of blue- ribbon commissions made up of safe and comfortable figures, both Republican and Democrat, who make a practice of making problems go quietly away.
This should not be one of those moments. There is a higher public expectation, and one made more urgent by the fact that this is also a presidential election year and how the president has handled the war on terrorism will be a fundamental issue.
On the commission sit at least three members who at one point in their own political careers had visions of sitting in the Oval Office: Thompson, commission chairman and former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat.
Others include longtime Washington fixtures, Republican Fred Fielding and Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste.
Thompson made much of the fact that the commission had taken a single partisan vote during its work so far, a sentiment that Ben-Veniste seconded. But their questioning of Clarke clearly broke down along partisan lines, with Republicans far more prosecutorial and Democrats as defense counsel trying to rehabilitate a witness.
With all that political firepower and capital savvy, the commission surely could find a way to resolve combustible conflict between Clarke and Rice. They could tailor Rice’s testimony simply to the unresolved issues and protect the sanctity of communication with the president.
The issue between Rice and Clark can be reduced to fact, and it should be reduced to fact. The commission’s credibility depends on it doing so, and in public.
