HOW HE SEES IT Al-Qaida worried many

By DANIEL BENJAMIN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
In its effort to discredit Richard Clarke, the White House and its allies claim that what the former counterterrorism chief has said in his book and before the 9/11 commission is inconsistent with his past remarks. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has said his book is "180 degrees from everything else that he said."
Perhaps. I haven't seen everything Clarke said or wrote when he was in the administration. But I do know that the judgments Clarke has offered in "Against All Enemies" and his public testimony comport precisely with what he told me in early 2002.
As director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, I worked for Clarke in 1998 to 1999, and I stayed in touch with him after I left. In meetings in his Old Executive Office Building suite, at his home and over meals, he described for me his deep disappointment at the failure to stop the 9/11 attackers and his conviction that the Bush administration had not viewed the threat of jihadist terror with sufficient urgency. No amount of bureaucratic badgering, he felt, could get them to recognize Al-Qaida as the pre-eminent threat.
In reporting for our book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," Steven Simon and I found that Clarke was not alone. Several top U.S. government officials agreed in interviews that the new administration had been unwilling to revise its understanding of America's security position and too slow to recognize the danger of Al-Qaida.
Clinton official
Brian Sheridan, President Clinton's outgoing assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, was astonished when his offers during the transition to bring the new Pentagon leadership up to speed on terrorism were brushed aside. "I offered to brief anyone, any time on any topic. Never took it up."
Even if one dismisses Sheridan's remarks as those of a political appointee, the same cannot be done for Don Kerrick. A three-star general, Kerrick had served at the end of the Clinton administration as deputy national security adviser, and he spent the final four months of his military career in the Bush White House. He sent a memo to the NSC's new leadership on "things you need to pay attention to." He wrote about Al-Qaida: "We are going to be struck again."
But he never heard back.
The most damaging remarks came from Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until Oct. 1, 2001. Shelton told us that in the Bush administration terrorism had moved "farther to the back burner." He also recounted how the Joint Chiefs of Staff, frustrated at the lack of progress in dealing with Al-Qaida, had begun a disinformation program in the last year of the Clinton administration to create dissent within the Taliban. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz shut it down.
XBenjamin was on the NSC staff from 1994 to 1999.