Printable Version

Counterterrorism And The Battle Of Ideas

A CNP Conversation With Richard Clarke

January 18, 2006

Summary

Former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke urged the Bush Administration to pursue a two-pronged terrorism strategy using traditional counterterrorism techniques to eliminate threats while waging a war of ideas to prevent the rise of future terrorists.

Transcript

Roemer: Let me welcome both our distinguished guest Richard Clarke and also our distinguished audience. Thank you again for attending one of our Speaker Series here at the Center for National Policy.

We are very honored to have Richard Clarke with us today, an expert on terrorism, counterterrorism, national security policy, and the chairman of his own consulting firm. We are delighted here at the Center for National Policy to be working on national security issues and intelligence reform. As a former Member of Congress -- I’m from Indiana -- I’m still taken aback a little bit when Congress, today, as we speak, is talking about legislation to insulate itself from the Abramoff scandal. Yet, when Al Qaeda is threatening to attack the United States we still have fifty percent of the 9/11 Commission recommendations sitting on the sidelines with nothing being done. Congress can’t wait to try for insulation for an upcoming election for a lobbyist scandal but they still are not acting quickly enough to protect our nation from Al Qaeda in a national security scandal.

We hope that Congress and the White House will continue to act to pass what they’ve started with the 9/11 Commission reforms, and I think you’ll hear from Mr. Clarke today that the threat is still very real. We need recalibration, we need to change the way we think about Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda continues to change every day, every week, and every month. We are not changing quickly enough in the United States to a threat that changes every single day. Whether it’s the FBI, whether it’s domestic security and the FBI reforms, with communications, whether it’s the Department of Homeland Security which is too big and bureaucratic to fight a very agile enemy, we need smart change in the United States.

Nobody has talked more about that change more aggressively than our guest today. He has served in the United States government since 1973, where he started in the Defense Department, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and has served for 30 years for the United States of America. He served under seven presidents, but directly under four presidents on national security issues at the White House -- most particularly for President George Herbert Walker Bush, President Clinton and President Bush today, where he served as a national security advisor right up to 2003. I’ve had the pleasure of actually listening and paying attention to Dick Clarke. One of the first times I listened to him was when I served on a Joint Inquiry, which was the first look by the United States Congress, a combination of the Senate Intelligence and House Intelligence Committees at trying to evaluate what went wrong on 9/11. And while our national security agenda was not very broad, we did not have subpoena power to go after particular documents on the Joint Inquiry with executive privilege being threatened and time running out, we did have Mr. Clarke testify in closed session before the Joint Inquiry. And I knew when I heard that testimony in the Joint Inquiry in closed session, that if there was another commission looking at this, what he had to say was particularly interesting, explosive, and an indictment of some of the mistakes that have been made in the executive branch leading up to 9/11.

The next time I got to hear Mr. Clarke was on the 9/11 Commission. We had – many of you tuned in to those hearings -- Mr. Clarke and Dr. Rice, almost on successive days. And Dick Clarke I think had one of the classiest things to say when he testified. He slowly turned around to many of the 9/11 family members who had attended almost everyone of our hearings, sometimes 30 to 50 in the crowd, and he genuinely apologized to those families for mistakes that the government made and mistakes that he had personally made. It was really one the first times we had heard any witness take personal responsibility for mistakes. I think that action helped lodge in the minds of many people watching TV that day what kind of person he was, as he took personal responsibility for mistakes.

What I find particularly interesting about Dick Clarke is not just what he says. I think we all try to pay attention to some of the interesting people who have this experience with the world like Clarke does. But what I found interesting on the Joint Inquiry and 9/11 commission was not just what he said, but what he wrote -- what he wrote on January 25 in a memo to the Bush administration talking about the Al Qaeda threat. What he wrote days before 9/11 about the possibility of Americans being dead and an attack taking place in the United States. It’s one thing to listen to a witness before the 9/11 Commission say that they said things, it’s another thing to go back and read documents that they actually wrote at that time, talking about particular threats and what to do about these threats. That gave his testimony, I believe, added credibility to the 9/11 Commission and to the Joint Inquiry. So, I’m very, very pleased to introduce Mr. Clarke today. I think you’ll find that -- when he has talked the Joint Inquiry, when he was talking to the 9/11 Commission, when he talked to the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century and predicted that people would be dead in the streets of America someday due to a terrorist attack -- people listen to what Dick Clarke has to say. Sometimes it’s controversial, sometimes it’s out there on the edge, sometimes it’s thinking outside the box. That’s what the 9/11 Commission concluded was the biggest failure of 9/11: a failure of imagination. I don’t think you’ll see that failure of imagination today from Dick Clarke. Please join me in a very warm CNP welcome to one of the preeminent experts on national security and terrorism in the United States, serving our country and the world, Richard A. Clarke.

Clarke: Thank you very much Tim for that warm introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here. I thought -- there’s a lot of things we talked about, and I’m sure a lot of things will come up in the questions session -- I thought for a moment we might talk about how we balance counterterrorism with the battle of ideas. Because one of the greatest recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was that we recognized that we have to fight this struggle against the jihadist movement on two levels -- both on the counterterrorism level and the battle of ideas. What we now know we need to focus on is the tension between those two approaches because I think this administration has regrettably fought the struggle against the jihadists in a highly counterproductive way, not understanding the relationship between the counterterrorism approach on the one hand and the battle of ideas on the other.

Let’s begin by admitting as President Bush would say, “This is hard work.” It is hard work. It is complicated. Let’s also admit at the outset that we do have an enemy. We can argue about the nature of the threat, how strong the threat is, to whom the threat is, but there is a force in the world. We can short hand it as jihadism. There is a force in the world that is going about killing people, that wants to kill Americans, wants to drive us out of the Middle East, but more fundamentally wants to establish theocracies, a caliphate, in Southeast Asia, in Central Asia, in Southwest Asia, on the Arabian Peninsula, wants to overthrow governments and particularly targets the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, now Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. All of those governments are really threatened by this movement and it’s not inconceivable that we could wake up 10 years from now -- if we could take an Ambien and wake up 10 years from now instead of 10 hours from now -- you might find that one of those governments had become a caliphate, a Taliban-like fundamentalist government, because in large measure of the pressure of this jihadist terrorist movement. So because they are trying to kill us, because they are threatening governments around the world, it’s an important thing to go after them. But how do you go after them?

Typically, this administration has done what is obvious, you use law enforcement, you use intelligence, and occasionally you use military force, as well as diplomatic activity. You may recall, by the way, the campaign for president the last time and the time before that, the Republican candidate dismissed the Clinton administration’s use of law enforcement approach to go after terrorism, but nonetheless, this administration is using the law enforcement approach. So what does that look like? What does it look like when you use law enforcement, intelligence and occasionally a military approach? It does mean cooperating with other governments, improving the ability of other governments to do the counterterrorism mission, it does mean sharing information, and it does mean from time to time staging operations where you capture terrorists. However, this administration has carried it out in such a way that it has lost support from the very kinds of governments we need, West European governments, Islamic governments.

If you go back to the day after 9/11, imagine if you will, sitting down with a clean slate that morning and saying how am I going to go after this meeting, what do I need to do? You would have said early on you need the support of the Islamic governments. Islamic governments are on the front lines because they have to make sure that their mosques haven’t been taken over by radicals, they have to make sure that their intelligence services and police services have not been infiltrated by radicals, and their intelligence services and police services have to go out and find them. So number one would have been support by these governments. Number two would have been support from the European governments because many of these terrorists are in Western Europe. And the West European governments have their own intelligence networks in the Middle East.

What we have done has been to systematically alienate both the Islamic governments and now the Western European governments. Now first of all obviously we invaded Iraq. We can talk about Iraq until the cows come home but whether you think it was a good thing or bad thing to go in, the fact that we went in required us to pay a price of support in Islamic governments and support in Europe. Then the way in which we conducted ourselves once we got into Iraq, with Abu Ghraib, and all the other kinds of things that you see on Al Jazeera. You can say Al Jazeera distorts the news. Well sometimes it perhaps does. Sometimes it merely shows the news through an Islamic lens. What do I mean by that? Watch the same story on Al Jazeera and on CNN. Let’s say it’s the assault on Fallujah. You watch that on Al Jazeera, you see civilian casualties, you see the number of Iraqis being killed, you have the camera inside Fallujah looking out at the assaulting Americans. If you see the same story on CNN, what you see is only Marines were killed, how many Marines were pinned down. Is Al Jazeera distorting that story? No, it’s just showing it from a different angle -- the angle of interest to its viewership. So if you’re in those Arab countries and you’re watching Al Jazeera day after day what you see of American activity in Iraq looks very much like we are suppressing Iraqis, we’re killing Iraqis. And in Europe, what the European press coverage stories talk about, they talk about renditions, they talk about CIA agents sweeping people off the streets in Rome, and disappearing them somewhere. They talk about secret prisons the United States may have established in Europe and elsewhere. They talk about secret flights going through their airspace. If you read the European press, on a regular basis, you see story after story after story, all of which are true or most of which are true, about the United States violating the sovereignty of European states, violating human rights laws and agreements, violating the international agreement on torture. All of that alienates the Europeans, alienates the Arab governments, and it makes it very difficult for us to get the level of cooperation that we need.

It didn’t have to be that way. What we have to realize is that there’s a relationship between the counterterrorism activities that we do on one level and the battle of ideas that we’re trying to fight on the second level. Both of these plains are necessary ultimately to win this effort of suppressing the jihadist movement. You cannot win on just one level. You have to win on both levels. But if you don’t recognize the relationship between activities on one level and the other, we will never succeed. What we do on the counterterrorism level has, can have, if we do it improperly and with no sensitivity, can have a negative impact on the battle of ideas level. And ultimately if you only succeed on the counterterrorism level, all you’re doing is tactical success. The strategic success is achieved by the battle of ideas.

What do I mean by that? The counterterrorism level, about law enforcement, about intelligence, is about finding out about terrorists, finding their particular location, and arresting them. Breaking up the cell, preventing the attack, that’s hard work. But we’re doing it and we’re having some success doing it. Many of the leaders of Al Qaeda have been arrested or killed, many cells have been broken up, but the organization hasn’t been destroyed. Quite the opposite, the organizations continue to grow. And the number of terrorist attacks continue. If you look at the statistics of Al Qaeda related attacks, take the 36 months prior to 9/11, compare it to the 36 months after 9/11, the number of Al Qaeda related attacks around the world doubled. Terrorism attacks worldwide last year reached an all-time high, four times what they had been in 1999. So, as Rumsfeld said, you can continue to capture and kill them, but they are producing more than we’re capturing or killing. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to emphasize the counterterrorism level and the tactical part at the expense of the battle of ideas. If you wage the counterterrorism operations in a way that makes it difficult to succeed on the battle of ideas, you will never succeed in the struggle. I like to tell the story of the movie “The Battle of Algiers,” but before I get into the story let’s see a show of hands, has anybody seen the movie “The Battle of Algiers”? Ok, that’s good, you invite smart people (laughter).

Roemer: We ask them that before they came in (laughter).

Clarke: The point of that movie, at least in my mind, is the French counterterrorism forces do intelligence operations, they do law enforcement, and while it’s difficult, they find all of the leaders of the Algerian terrorist group. They have a chart on the wall with all the names and all the linkages, and as they capture them or kill them, they cross them off on the chart. And in the very last scene they kill the last one. And you’re impressed by this, you go boy I wish we were as good as those guys. But then you think, wait a minute, didn’t in the real world the French lose? Weren’t the French thrown out of Algeria because of the terrorist movement, because of the nationalist movement? And the answer is yes and you see in the last few seconds of the movie the words coming up on the screen that two years later France was thrown out, two years later the movement that they apparently, in the movie, suppressed was successful. And you ask yourself, how did that happen? Because the French counterterrorism people at the tactical level were good and did get all those guys, but the way in which they did it -- torture, blowing up parts of the city -- so alienated the people that the whole new generation of terrorists grew up, people whose names they didn’t know, a new organization that they had no leads on, and it was successful. So when we look at all the Al Qaeda people we’ve rounded up or have been captured or killed, all the cells we’ve broken up, tactically we’re being very successful. But are we doing exactly what the French did in the movie? Being tactically successful, but because of the tactics we’re using, because of our failure to concentrate on the battle of ideas and our lack of credibility when we do the battle of ideas because of our tactics on terrorism, are we laying the seeds for a new Al Qaeda to grow up in Europe, to grow up in the Islamic countries? A new Al Qaeda who we don’t know, whose names we don’t know, whose organizational chart we don’t know, and a new movement whose attacks may come five years from now. But they will come because we have put the seeds in. In the last several years, we have put the seeds in.

In the Islamic world and in Europe, because of our tactics in fighting the counterterrorism war, and because of our stupidity in putting the emphasis, when there was a choice -- there is a tension between the two, between counterterrorism and the battle of ideas -- we have stupidly, I think, always given in to putting the emphasis on counterterrorism, no matter what the price, in terms of the battle of ideas. The best example is Iraq itself and there are a lot of other examples where we have diminished support for the United States and we have increased support around the world for the jihadists.

The sad part is we’re also doing it here at home. You can’t do this kind of struggle successfully without overwhelming support from your own people and in the Congress. And yet what you see at home is not people talking about the battle of ideas or talking about how we can defeat the jihadists. Instead we talk about did the President break the law, the FISA law, with regard to surveillance activities here. Instead we’re talking about the fact that the administration arrested an American citizen in the United States and took away all of his rights by claiming he was a terrorist -- Jose Padilla. Instead we’re talking about the fact that the government created a Total Information Awareness Program at the Pentagon to do data mining on innocent civilians, innocent citizens here in our country. And so through our ham-handed, unnecessary approach to counterterrorism here at home, violating civil liberties, we’ve also created a large block of Americans who are dubious now about the war on terrorism and the way in which we’re conducting it. None of this had to be the case; none of this had to happen. It happened because we are in this country, in this administration, so insensitive to the larger strategic issues both at home and abroad. Now if we continue to pursue this kind of effort to go after the jihadists, we will never succeed. I’ll stop there.

Roemer: Alright, thank you very much Dick, that’s a great place to stop and I know we not only have a smart crowd, who’ve watched lots of specials that you narrate, but they like to ask questions too so they’re not shy about things. Let me start. You talked about this as a battle of ideas and tactical battlefield. We’ve just had an instance of the Predator or a series of Predators above Pakistan where maybe these two issues did collide and there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes when the U.S. is in a position to take out some terrorists and then there are protests afterwards, maybe that kind of incident does create future terrorists and protest on the part of the Pakistani people but in effect it was the right thing to do in terms of taking out four or five terrorists. It may still be unclear whether or not the main target is in the rubble, maybe, maybe not. I know in the 9/11 testimony you were a strong advocate of putting the Predator up and probably how it’s being used now. How would you decide what happened in Pakistan with the Predators, was that the right decision? And then how do you reconcile what happens next with the protest, for this battle of ideas?

Clarke: You picked an example where I would have erred on the side of the counterterrorism activity rather than battle of ideas. That demonstrates that it’s not always one answer. It demonstrates that these are complex choices we have. You’re right, I did start the Predator program in Afghanistan, and started the armed Predator program and I think it’s a very useful tool. What we have in that area of Pakistan, Northern Waziristan and those provinces is an area where the government of Pakistan has no control. And you think well, we should beat up on the government of Pakistan, we should do a better job. No government of Pakistan, including the British when they were there, including Alexander the Great when he was there, no one, no central government has ever controlled that area. So we can give the central government of Pakistan a little understanding and sympathy on that issue. We’ve worked out, I think, a modus vivendi with the government of Pakistan that we and they together will collect intelligence on what’s going on in that region and when we believe that there are Al Qaeda people in that location, we or they will go after them, including through use of the Predator. If I had been in office and been told we had reliable intelligence that there was going to be a meeting of Al Qaeda people in that compound and that the other people living in the compound were from the black turban network, the organization that is, in fact, the group that’s been sheltering the Al Qaeda leadership, I would have done the same thing. I don’t have a problem with it. Did it cause protests in Pakistan? Well yeah it did, but if you look at the protests there were 5,000 people in Rawalpindi -- that’s a drop in the bucket in a city like that. I don’t think in this instance that I would have chosen to say ‘no it’s going to cause problems for us in Pakistan, don’t take the shot.’ I would’ve taken the shot. But you have to make those decisions on every activity where there’s a possible negative reaction that could occur, that continues this idea that we are anti-Islamic, that we’re imperial, we have to make a decision on every activity. Are we contributing to a pattern that ultimately undermines our support?

Roemer: And that’s the basic question that is asked at the end of the day. In terms of our own domestic support from this war on jihadism as a member of the Intelligence Committee we often work with the FISA courts and we found that they cooperated quickly and effectively. My take on what the administration did on the NSA issue is that they circumvented the law and may well have broken the law. We’ll see. What is your take on what happened….on this NSA issue and not going through the courts.

Clarke: …I think we have to admit, at least I have to admit, I don’t know what they did. I don’t know what they’re doing, and as far as I can tell most of the Congress doesn’t either. And some in the Congress who were briefed, were briefed in a very cursory way.

Roemer: Without staff, without taking notes, without being able to talk about the program.

Clarke: Right, and that’s not oversight, that’s not Congressional oversight. Bringing four Members of Congress into the program, alone, in some sort of “star chamber” with the Vice President, being told ‘you can’t take notes, you can’t tell anybody about this, and this is the only time you’ll ever hear about it. And thanks for your support’. That ain’t oversight. So there may be two or three Members of Congress who know what’s going on, there may not be. Let’s begin by saying we don’t know what exactly they’re doing. The President admitted they’re doing something, and from what he’s admitted, if you read the FISA law, I don’t see any loophole that would authorize what he’s doing. In other words, I think what they’re doing is illegal. The FISA law says this is the exclusive means by which these kinds of activities shall be authorized. Now you said that the court process was quick and easy. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. If you look at the number of FISA requests that have been made over the years and the number of approvals, the number of approvals is 99.99999. So it looks like it’s easy.

In point of fact, if you’re the FBI agent in Chicago, filling out the form to get one of these, it can take months. Because you have to send that paperwork to FBI headquarters where it’s reviewed, Justice Department where it’s reviewed, and it probably comes back to you with 20 questions. So it was cumbersome, and at the end of I think 60 days of monitoring, you’d have to go back to the judge and ask for a renewal. You’d have to say, look it was successful. We now have even more reason to believe that this guy is a terrorist because of what is on the wire tap from the last 60 days, so let’s do it for another 60 days. And that’s cumbersome. And if you’re doing this for a couple hundred cases at a time, the system is designed for that. If you’re doing it with thousands, or tens of thousands of telephone numbers, the system is not designed for that. So I’m guessing, I assume what might have happened is you take the cell phones of the 9/11 hijackers, and you get their 19 phone records, while they’re in the United States. That’s probably couple thousand phone numbers they called. And you eliminate some of them because it’s United Airlines, Hertz or something, but you still end up with hundreds of people. And therefore you want to listen to them. And then perhaps you realize that some of them might actually be jihadi supporters and you want to see who they called and this begins to blossom. Nineteen people called a thousand people, those thousand people called a hundred thousand people and it gets very large. And maybe the FISA procedure can’t handle that. But since we have the choice, if you believe you have a problem like that, the choice is not to say the FISA law doesn’t work for that so we’re going to ignore it. The only choice to me is to go to Congress. And had they done that, Tim, you were a Member, I don’t think there would have been a problem with it.

Roemer: Dick, I think if they would had gone to Congress, especially in the window of days or weeks right after 9/11 and asked Congress to revise or improve that process of making the streamlining process work a little bit more effectively for that FBI agent in Chicago, I think Congress would certainly given the way they were acting at that period they would have approved that kind of a change to FISA.

Clarke: I would think so. I saw in an interview with the Attorney General in which he was asked, “Why didn’t you go to the Congress to ask for a change in the law?” and he appeared to say, I listened to it on television, he appeared to say “we didn’t go to Congress to ask for a change in the law because we didn’t think Congress would have approved.” Well let’s seriously understand what’s going on, this is quite remarkable if I heard him correctly, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States is saying “well because Congress wouldn’t authorize this, we did it anyway without telling them.” That’s quite remarkable. The point here is you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to be ham-handed, you don’t have to undermine the Constitution, you don’t have to break the law, you don’t have to diminish support for the counterterrorism effort, you don’t have to worry about half our population afraid that they’re being wire-tapped and worrying about their civil liberties going away, worrying about Big Brother, you don’t have to do that.

Roemer: Let’s open it up. Yes, Sir.

Question: Mr. Clarke, I was wondering if you could go back to the war of ideas. In the President’s 2002 National Security Strategy he promised Americans we’d fight terror militarily but also concurrently address the legitimate grievances of people in the region. We’ve heard much about the former and little about the latter. It’s as if, if you continued watching Al Jazeera after they ran their Fallujah reels you would also see amongst the Arab population, people in the Arab Muslim world getting continually inflamed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the perceived bias the U.S. has in handling and approaching this conflict and not making an extended effort to resolve it. There’s a phenomena, and its not just limited to Bush’s advisors who deny that it’s a real problem for us and they seem to think it’s the Arabs just sitting around all day, thirsting for democracy and that their minds aren’t closed by their unwillingness to trust what’s coming out of our mouths because they think we have ulterior motives based on our actions in Israel. Counterterrorism officials only seem to footnote this as a problem and hardly ever speak up about it and I recall reading your book, there’s just a few paragraphs in your book that the Clinton administration tried and thought that this would be a big effort in crumbling Al Qaeda, but Bush had a different philosophy. At any point did you ever approach people within the administration and say look you’re crippling our ability to fight terror by not sending your diplomats out to do something. At any point did you stand up to them and say, you’re handing votes out to Al Qaeda when you do nothing, you’re helping them to recruit allies, did you ever put it into those blunt of terms, and if not, why?

Clarke: Well the larger question that you’re asking is the relationship between of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the jihadist movement. Let me start at that level. Yes, jihadists and their supporters talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of their justifications. However, if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we would still have all the jihadists that we have and all the organizations that we have and all the attacks that we have. So, yes it does motivate them, but it’s one of many motivations. And if you actually look at what bin Laden talked about in the 1990’s, when he wrote and talked about what Al Qaeda in general is about, Israel didn’t feature very prominently. Palestinians didn’t feature very prominently. Al Qaeda never did any of its attacks directed against Israel. It never tried to influence the Israeli-Palestinian process through its activities, it left that to others. And as a counterterrorism person worrying about Al Qaeda we also left the issue of dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue aside. Because, as you know, it’s an immensely complicated issue that people in the United States government who work on it, have worked on it for 20 years. And you can’t do both counterterrorism and the peace process. But at least in the Clinton administration there was recognition that we had to be engaged heavily in the peace process.

I think this administration has come to that realization somewhat late. They gave themselves the excuse for a couple of years, that Yassir Arafat was a bad guy and therefore we shouldn’t deal with him and that therefore we couldn’t do much about the peace process. I think the reason we need to be engaged heavily in the peace process is for the long-term stability of Israel. Israel is a democracy, Israel is an ally, and we owe it to Israel to try and solve this problem that is undermining its long-term future and stability. I would not respond and work on this issue simply because the jihadists use it as one of their many justifications. The jihadists are motivated chiefly by their desire to create caliphates, and to overthrow the existing Muslim governments, not because of the Israelis. Recognize that on the one hand and on the other hand say, yes, I agree with you that we ought to work very, very hard on the peace process and make something happen. It’s difficult particularly now because the leadership on both sides, the Palestinian side and the Israeli side, is in flux. It’s very difficult for any administration to be engaged. There are ebbs and flows in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict where there are times when you can engage and there are times frankly when you can’t. And there’s not much the administration can be doing at this point.

Question: I think that the emotional psychology of the administration, particularly the Rumsfeld-Cheney relationship sort of points at the old saying that if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, which I think goes to your point about the military approach and it’s devoid of everything else, so let’s play where the puck is going and not where it’s been. We had 9/11, actually we had it twice because the first attack was a failed attack and Al Qaeda came back to the World Trade Center.

Roemer: You’re talking about the ’93 attack?

Question: I’m talking about the ’93 attack. It was a pretty good warning that was not only not heeded, but not even recognized as such. I think we now face two huge issues, domestic terrorism and one that was pointed out in your report, Tim, the vulnerability of our ports which is probably the number one problem we will face -- the next mega-attack given the ease of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, to come into a relatively unprotected port and the vulnerability internationally. You said in your last answer the Saudi Arabian government which may be far less stable than people realize. Can you talk about those twin issues, the problems we face in terms of tactical port security, what that may mean for the future and the international situation, with Saudi Arabia as the example.

Roemer: Dick I’m not going to do the Oprah Winfrey version of hawking books, but we do have copies of The Scorpion’s Gate on Saudi Arabia, the fictional work, Against All Enemies, and then something most people probably haven’t seen, Defeating the Jihadists, so if you want to weave all those books into this answer…

Clarke: Well, you talked about ports, that’s one of the many vulnerabilities we have. This administration has failed miserably on homeland security. It’s not me saying that, it’s anyone who has looked at it. Lots of reports, the last 9/11 Commission report, there’s also a new book coming out next month by the former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Clark Irvin, who was a Bush appointee, who was with Bush in the Texas government. This is no Democrat critic. And the book is a devastating critique of the failure of this administration on homeland security. Not that you needed further evidence but he has further evidence. And you ask yourself why with all this lip service to homeland security have they failed really to make a dent in any one of our vulnerabilities here at home. Is it because to do so would cost more money, and it would be spent domestically and they don’t like doing that? Is it because to do so might require some regulation to occur, and they’re ideologically opposed to regulation? Is it because, if you really funded things where the threats are, you’d be putting federal dollars into blue states more than red states and perhaps they don’t want to do that.

I think the real reason at the end of the day is what they say so openly, we’d rather fight them over there than fight them here. For a while I thought that was just a mantra, just an election bumper sticker, a slogan. Now I’ve come to believe they actually believe it, which is even more frightening. It’s illogical on its face. Think about it, because we’re fighting in Iraq, no terrorists can come here. Excuse me, how is that? How do our divisions of Marines and Army in Iraq prevent a terrorist from coming here? It doesn’t. And in fact quite the opposite, it encourages them to come here. But because they’ve got this offensive mindset that the way we to deal with this problem is we’re going to be macho and fight over there, they’re not serious about homeland security. So, it’s not just the ports, the port security issue that hasn’t been taken care of, it’s the chemical plants, it’s the passenger trains, go down the list, it’s our response capabilities for major calamities as demonstrated with Katrina. They haven’t solved one of the homeland security problems that were identified six years ago, seven years ago. Not one. And I think particularly because we failed in the battle of ideas abroad, we have to recognize that the probability of another major terrorist attack in the United States is pretty high. The fact that there hasn’t been one in four years doesn’t mean at all that there won’t be one. We’re laying the seeds all around the world for terrorists to come here and attack us. And we’re doing nothing to stop them from coming here. The borders are wide open. We don’t have an effective FBI doing domestic security here, that’s pretty evident. We haven’t done anything to mitigate the security on subways or chemical plants or other facilities. We haven’t really improved the capabilities of local hospitals or first responders in case there is an attack. We don’t even have interoperable communications in most cities so that fire and police can talk to each other securely and reliably across jurisdictions.

So, it’s a complete failure on the homeland security issue, one that I must say the Democrats haven’t done much to highlight and the press hasn’t done as much as they should to highlight. Complete failure, you talk about ports being a way in which radioactive and nuclear materials can get into the United States. You don’t even have to do that. There’s radioactive material throughout the United States already. All you have to do is blow that up, you don’t have to smuggle anything in. ABC News, for which I consult, went around to college campuses that had nuclear reactors and found that you could drive a truck bomb up next to any one of them, blow up a facility and spray radiological material all over the city. If you go to most major hospitals in the United States, there’s cesium in large amounts, is it closely monitored? How cesium much is there? Who has access to it? How is it taken care of? No, not at all. So yes, there’s a major homeland security agenda and people throw up their hands and say it’s too hard, it’ll take too much money, there are so many vulnerabilities. How about this? How about we have a five year plan that says here are the vulnerabilities, here’s what we’re going to do about every one of them and if you don’t like the priorities, if you think we’re spending too much money on the ports and not enough much money on the chemical plants, too much money on biological vaccinations, too little somewhere else, then we have an open discussion about it, in the administration, in the Congress, and we can see over five years, how specific goals are going to be achieved at certain funding levels. And we can change the funding levels or we can do tradeoffs among the goals. Right now we’re spending money and we have no idea what we’re achieving for, and when we’re going to reduce those vulnerabilities and by how much. So let’s just bring a little management to the process. That’s all I’m saying.

Now with regard to Saudi Arabia, Tim’s right, in The Scorpion’s Gate, it’s fiction, sort of. The Saudi government has collapsed and been replaced by a jihadist government. Could that happen? Well perhaps. If you go back to 1978, our ally in the Middle East wasn’t the Saudis so much as it was the Shah of Iran and the House of Pahlavi. And the CIA wrote a report in 1978 saying the House of Pahlavi was well liked in Iran and would rule certainly for the next 20 years and they were out on their ass within months. Why? Because the CIA and the State Department were unable to collect intelligence in Iran about support for the regime because the government wouldn’t let us. They would say you want to know about the Iranian government, you want to know how stable we are, how popular we are, are there any threats to us, just ask us, we’ll tell you. But don’t go around inside our country finding out. We were blindsided. Guess what’s happening now in Saudi Arabia? The State Department is not allowed to go around and find out how popular they are, the CIA is not allowed to go. We’re told by the Saudi government you want to know how stable we are, how well liked we are, just ask us, we’ll tell you. We know that there is opposition to the government, we know there have been terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, is it possible that someday we could wake up and have the Saudi government overthrown? And that it would be another intelligence failure? Yes. Is it possible that it’ll ever happen? Yes, because we just don’t know, but after this happened in Iran we said we would never be put in that position again and that’s exactly the position that we’re in now.

Question: I was just wondering about the battle of ideas, what exactly you’re advocating? The administration has the Karen Hughes effort, I mean she’s close to the president but who knows if that’s doing much. Then you say embassies, their role has diminished over the years and that’s part of the problem. What would you do?

Clarke: In the battle of ideas there’s both the issue of what you do proactively and what you don’t do. And when the administration looks at the battle of ideas, it looks at it through this Madison Avenue approach, that we’ll send Karen out there -- who’s quite good -- and we’ll have a radio station playing top 40 music and commentary in Arabic and that’ll help. Well, I talked to my Arab friends and they listen to the radio station and when the news comes on they switch to the BBC, but the music is still good. Maybe then we can create CNN in Arabic and have the United States government run a CNN-like vehicle. So they did that, they spent a lot of money on nice studios out in Virginia and lots of people reading the news in Arabic and beaming out to the region and no one watches it. If all you think of as the battle of ideas as sort of this Madison Avenue approach of radio and television and let’s have the embassies have more cultural coffees, that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is not doing things in a way that is likely to alienate the people. So, don’t do things like Abu Ghraib. Be sensitive about the way you conduct operations in Iraq, be sensitive about the way you conduct operations in the region. It’s a failure to recognize that the counterterrorism activities, the way they are being performed, are negatively affecting the battle of ideas. That’s what I’m talking about. Now beyond that, what would I do? I would work with each of the regional governments that have a problem. Quietly behind the scenes, to find out what their strategy is and see if we can find the best practices from other governments, what’s been working, and cross-fertilize among those governments so that the best practices that have been working in one place are adopted in another. There are countries that have been very successful, quietly in finding the radical imams and removing them from the mosques, finding the radicals who are teaching the young in the madrassas and elsewhere and removing them.

There are countries that have found people who used to be Al Qaeda and have realized the error of their ways and now those former Al Qaeda people are out giving lectures and writing newspaper columns. I saw one four days ago in Dubai, a guy who was a Saudi who had been affiliated with Al Qaeda and has now converted voluntarily, realized the error of Al Qaeda and is now writing a column twice a week, attacking Al Qaeda. That’s not the United States government doing it and it’s not a Madison Avenue approach. It’s the locals doing it themselves. That’s what we have to do, we have to find out those kinds of techniques that have worked and work quietly behind the scenes with those governments to get them to do those things -- at the same time, while we stop doing things in the counterterrorism field in a way that fuels opposition to the United States.

Question: Say if this strike in Pakistan was successful and we did take out the number two, the number three leadership in Al Qaeda, how effective, what would that mean, we keep hearing about they captured this person, they captured that person, but is that really the goal?

Clarke: I know what you’re getting at. Because we’ve captured the number two guy in Al Qaeda in Iraq about 100 times. It’s a worthy goal, but it’s not a silver bullet, it’s not a great solution. If we found bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri were killed, not a lot would change. Why then run the risk in Pakistan? Because the elements in that Waziristan area, the old Al Qaeda remnants are now working with the Taliban remnants, they’re working with the group supported by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord, in forming an opposition to the Afghan government. Not a legitimate opposition, but a terrorist opposition. So the reason we carry out these operations in Waziristan is not just so that we can find and kill bin Laden but so that we can suppress a terrorist group that is trying to undermine, trying to be an insurgency in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda itself, the old central Al Qaeda led by bin Laden and Zawahiri is essentially destroyed. And what we have to understand is we are no longer going after that organization as an organization. It has morphed into a movement, into an ideology, not a central, highly hierarchical organization. There are thirteen, fourteen organizations. In “Defeating the Jihadists” I think we talked about fourteen different Al Qaeda spin-offs around the world, most of which are regionally based. So Abu Sayaff in the Philippines, JI in Indonesia, all the way across the GSPC, in Algeria and Morocco, there are about fourteen spin-offs from Al Qaeda that continue to grow for the most part, get more adherents, conduct more attacks, those are the organizations that we have to go after. It would be nice to get bin Laden, but whether he’s dead or alive, he’s a symbol of the jihadist movement. And I don’t think he’s much more than that, he’s a symbol today of someone who stood up effectively to the United States and got away with it. But I don’t think he’s sending out attack cells, I don’t think he’s got his hands on a command and control network. It’d be nice to get him, unfortunate that we didn’t, but dead or alive he will still have the influence that he has today.

Question: Dick as you know very well, administrations learn from the start as they proceed, a lot of your former colleagues, great people still serving in the Bush administration, a lot of great people who get the battle of ideas in Congress, do you see some signs that the administration might be getting it more, that there might be some progress on this?

Clarke: Yes, I do. Many of the things that a number of us have been saying about Iraq, I think are now finally being done in Iraq. It may be too late to be implemented, but yes, I do think the administration has an ability to learn. It’s just somewhat slow in the process.

Question: Actually, I was going to ask something somewhat similar, I was just astounded hearing Paul Bremer over the weekend....

Clarke: So was I…

Question: …and the way he’s walking back as well now. It’s more along that same line, as I never quite got my hands around whether the administration believes what it says publicly as reality or whether there truly is deliberation, intelligent deliberation, behind the scenes. Obviously from your time in there, I’m curious about what your thought is on that?

Clarke: I talked about the example of “we’d rather fight them over there than over here” and I really thought for a long time that they didn’t believe that, how could anyone? Because sure, we’d rather not fight them here, but fighting over there doesn’t get you there. In fact, quite the opposite. In that example they really do drink their own Kool-Aid. I think there are other examples, however, particularly in the State Department and some parts of the CIA, where there are more sophisticated analyses being developed and sometimes they affect policy. But, unfortunately not enough and belatedly.

Question: You made a big deal about Saudi Arabia and what to do about Saudi Arabia. You’ve mentioned here that one of the threatened governments by the jihadists is the Saudis. On the other hand one of the main opponents on the war of ideas is the Saudis. How do you square that circle? What do you think we should be doing with regard to Saudi Arabia?

Clarke: What we should be doing, what I think we are doing is pressuring them to be sending out pressure. Persuading them to the extent that we can persuade into accelerating the pace of change that the King is now pursuing. It’s glacial. Yes there’s change going on, but it is really glacial. And it’s very difficult for the United States to know more than Saudis know about their country. It’s very difficult for us to come in and say to them you have to accelerate the pace of change when they may say back to us if we go to far too fast, you’re not going to like the result. Because it is certainly true as we put pressure on governments to be democratic, that there may be times when being democratic produces a result that the United States doesn’t like. We have the famous incident in Algeria where there was an election, a democratic election, and I think you can say that the people who won were part of this jihadist movement and they were democratically elected. They never got the power because the military intervened.

If you look at the elections in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, Waziristan and that area that we’ve been talking about, there have been elections in that area and they have elected people who look a lot like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bob Baer jokes that if you have an election inside Saudi Arabia and bin Laden could run, then he’d get elected. I don’t think that’s true, but look at the recent success of the Muslim Brotherhood in the recent elections in Egypt. Look at the success of Hamas. Look at the success of Hezbollah in Lebanon. So yeah we do want democracy in the long term, but we have to recognize that, depending on the country, the rate at which democratization occurs may result in things we don’t like. Secretary Rice’s answer to that is that’s ok and we’ll accept that. Well, yes. But do you really think the United States government is going to accept a Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo, do you really think we could welcome that? Embrace that? Or a pro-Al Qaeda government in Saudi Arabia, or a pro-Taliban government in Pakistan? So look it’s a difficult process and we have to do a case by case approach, country by country. It is not merely a matter of having democratic elections. It’s also a matter of opening up the press, having freedom of expression, as a precursor to a greater democracy. It’s complex, we do have to pressure these governments, we may not in many cases have the pressure, in the case of Saudi Arabia, we don’t have a lot of leverage.

Question: Mr. Clarke I have a question about Iran. We have a state that has used a variety of terrorist tactics against the United States, we never really responded very significantly. Now that they’re leading towards a nuclear weapon and that they’re, maybe, the number two oil exporter in the world, so what do we do?

Clarke: I’ll quibble with you about whether or not we ever responded but after the Khobar Towers attack in 1996, when we discovered that the people who were behind that were in fact Iranian intelligence officials, we did respond. And not publicly, but we did respond and sent a message that said we know you did it and if you do anything more against us there will be a very significant reaction beyond what we just did to you, and oh, by the way, we just did this to you. And there hasn’t been a problem since in terms of the Iranians attacking us again directly. The problem we face with the Iranian nuclear issue.

Roemer: I like the way he still talks about classified information like that, it’s good.

[Laughter]

Clarke: I’m still bound. The problem with the Iranian nuclear issue is we see it in isolation sometimes when we talk about it here and about in the press. The Iranians and others in the region don’t see it in isolation, it is interlocked with what’s going on in Iraq. How so? On the one hand if you’re an Iranian, and you, years ago, hear that you’re part of the Axis of Evil, which contains three countries, one of which just got invaded and oh by the way the invasion is on your border and you look at your other border and there’s an American invasion going on there too. So the United States has said, you’re part of the Axis of Evil, they’ve put an army invading in one country over here and another army invading a country over here, it’s as though an enemy state had invaded Canada and Mexico and said the United States is part of this group of bad countries. Put yourself in Iran’s shoes. They have now heavily infiltrated Iraq, with Iranian military, with Iranian intelligence officers in the thousands. If the United States drops a single bomb on a nuclear facility in Iran, what do you think is going to happen?

Iran has options to go after us in Iraq, using terrorism in a way that would make the insurgency that we’re facing today look minor. They have a way of turning on Hezbollah, which they control worldwide, to go after us and our interests around the world. They can also turn up the heat on us in Afghanistan. So that’s not to say we shouldn’t worry about the Iranian nuclear program. But it is to say, don’t be too glib about saying that the United States should go down a sanctions route or a military route vis a vis Iran. Because there will be a price to pay for that. And when you think about dropping a bomb on the Bushehr nuclear facility or something like that, that makes you feel good perhaps. But what is the endgame of that multi-move exercise? We do this, they do that, and that forces us to do this, where do we end up at the end of all of those moves? You really have to have thought all of that through.

And when you try that you’re not going to like the answer because if you thought invading and occupying Iraq resulted in a mess, there really isn’t even an option, think about it, at the end of an escalatory ladder, where we invade and occupy Iran. So how do you stop the escalation, where does it end? Because they’re not just going to sit there and take us blowing up a nuclear facility and not respond. They also do have an ability to affect the world oil market and create shortages. In terms of economic sanctions, what did we learn in the last 25 years about economic sanctions? That they work, but it takes usually about a decade. You look at the economic sanctions on Libya, the economic sanctions on South Africa, they did work, but it took two things. One, about a decade and two, international support from all the major suppliers. Well are you going to get international support from all the major suppliers for sanctions on Iran? Are you going to get China and Russia to play in that? I doubt it. Do you have a decade? And what’s going to happen during that decade in terms of Iranian sponsored terrorism in response? So all I’m saying is yes, we have to worry about the Iranian nuclear program, but there’s far too much glib talk in this town and in the media about, oh we need to have economic sanctions, oh we have to move the military option. Think it through a little further than that.

Roemer: Just going back very quickly, you mentioned in the beginning in your code language which I’m bound by too, that we did something and it worked. But then in answering the follow-on, the escalation theory gets us probably into a position where we’re in real difficulty down the road. Try to provide us, I mean you’ve sat in that hot seat for a couple of presidents, what would you do right now? What would you do with our European allies? What would you do with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and some of our other allies in that area? Push it further, let’s not be glib, what are some answers, Dick? These are really some tough problems for us.

Clarke: I think that the thing that is most likely to succeed with the Iranian nuclear mission is to affect internal Iranian decision making. Needless to say the United States is a bit ham-handed in things like that, that’s why perhaps it’s a good thing that the Europeans are taking the lead and that the Russians are getting involved and that the Saudis and others in the region are also getting involved. When we look at this new president of Iran, you have to understand that he does not have the kind of presidential authority that our president has, that he’s really not the decision maker. There are a series of people who are the decision makers, one of whom is the guy who lost the election, Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani is still in the government, has a very important position, a position whose powers have in fact increased since the new president came into office. Because there are powerful people in Iran who don’t like the new president, don’t trust him and therefore have increased Rafsanjani’s power as a counterweight.

I think our goal has to be to use as many players as we can to persuade the leadership, including Rafsanjani, that they really don’t want nuclear weapons and that they will pay a price, that we are willing to do some things, that we will make their lives difficult, that we won’t go nuts and make their lives easy perhaps by bombing them, bombing them makes their lives very easy, everyone in Iran therefore supports the government, all the moderates are silent, the entire nation is united when we start attacking them. Persuade them we’re not nuts, we understand that. But persuade them that there are things we can do with economic relations, not necessarily sanctions, perhaps sanctions, but also positive economic relations that we can do, that other countries can do, and that altogether they are better off not going down this dangerous path. I think they’re rational, I don’t think their new president is particularly rational, but I think that the collective leadership is. You remember in the Iran-Iraq war. The collective leadership of Iran decided to stop the war because they looked at the larger picture. [inaudible]

Question: Mr. Clarke could you remind me what your date of departure was from the White House?

Clarke: February 2003.

Question: I find it jarring that you said in relation to the NSA surveillance, that you had no idea what was going on, and I think Larry Wilkerson said that it was members of the NSC staff that stopped exchanging emails because they feared the Vice President’s office was eavesdropping on them. What do these things say in general about the way this shop is working, in terms of not trusting its own people even in the most important positions?

Clarke: Well I stopped doing the counterterrorism…let me back up…before 9/11, in June of 2001, I became convinced that the administration was not paying attention to Al Qaeda, and that bad things were going to happen as a result, and I asked to be reassigned out of the counterterrorism job. And we agreed that I would be, on October 1st. That got delayed a little because of the 9/11 attacks. But I did leave the counterterrorism job in 2001, November. So if this program were instituted about that time or subsequently, I would not have known about it. But I think what you’re saying is that the Vice President has a larger role than perhaps most people are aware of in determining national security policy down to some fairly detailed programs. And I think that’s true.

Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with a Vice President who is given authority by the President to run a portion of national security. Al Gore was given all sorts of portfolios in the international arena and national security. There’s nothing wrong with having an activist vice president as long as everybody knows what he’s doing and as long as that doesn’t short-circuit the normal executive branch process for oversight, internal oversight and making sure that everyone who needs to know these things does and that the programs are appropriately vetted. Now I get the impression that a lot of what the Vice President does with Secretary Rumsfeld is not appropriately vetted in the interagency process.

Question: If I could follow up on that, I think James Risen in State of War makes a case for saying that the State Department and the CIA have both been neutered by an alliance which he perceives exists between Rumsfeld and Cheney and if that’s the case, what real hope do we have for waging the battle of ideas when the agencies which are best suited to waging it are cut out of the loop?

Clarke: Well I think it certainly seemed to be the case unfortunately when Secretary Powell was there that he and the Department were somewhat sidelined. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore now that Secretary Rice is over there. I think she has more clout frankly with the President. And I think the Cheney-Rumsfeld access must have been discredited even in the eyes of the President and the senior leadership of the White House at this point. They must have realized that some of those excesses have been counterproductive. I think there is a value to having a National Security Council staff that does run an interagency process, that does do internal oversight, and it does seem to me that many of the things like renditions have now been handed off to the CIA or others and there is very little White House oversight. We did renditions in the first Bush administration, Bush 41, we did them in the Clinton administration, they were almost all directed at bringing people back here to stand trial and so the people who are subject to renditions that I coordinated were typically as soon as they landed in the United States given a lawyer. A bit different from what appears to be going on now. But every one of those renditions was approved by the President. Every one of those renditions was handled at a very senior level in every department, State Department, Justice Department, CIA, Defense Department. That kind of oversight from the White House I think is essential to prevent excesses, and it doesn’t appear to be going on.

Roemer: A couple more question then we’ll wrap up.

Question: [inaudible]

Clarke: Yes, well I mean there’s a gap, not only on the issue of nuclear terrorism between rhetoric and actual activity, there’s a gap on almost every level so why should nuclear terrorism be different than any of the other vulnerabilities where there’s a huge amount of rhetoric about what we’re going to do and very little actually happens. The nuclear issue scares people to think about and talk about, but let’s take it apart a little. There is a spectrum that we’re talking about here from the cesium in local hospitals, which is lethal under the right circumstances. At the low end of the spectrum, some radiological material turned into a dirty bomb, and that radiological material might not be terribly lethal, may not have a long half life, or it might. So even within the dirty bomb there’s a spectrum. Beyond the dirty bomb the next step up the ladder is a terrorist making a nuclear weapon. I find that very hard to believe, it’s very difficult to do. And at the other end of the spectrum is a terrorist getting a nuclear weapon, either by buying or stealing it. That’s also very difficult to do because most of the nuclear weapons in the world are very well protected now. But there are an awful lot of nuclear materials, nuclear waste materials, and radioactive materials around the world that are not well safeguarded.

That’s where I would focus attention. I would focus attention on two areas. One, the highly lethal material in your own neighborhood, let’s find out city by city where that cesium and other material is and let’s have an accounting and security program to deal with it. And two, the worldwide distribution of nuclear waste materials which could result in a very highly lethal dirty bomb. And I would have made going after the nuclear waste materials around the world, finding out how much there is because there’s very little precise data -- I mean, precise down to the number of tons as to how much there is, country by country. Let’s find out how much there is, let’s put it under security that is as strong as if it were a nuclear weapon. And let’s pay for it, if nobody else is going to pay for it, let’s pay for it. It would be nice if it were an international effort, but dammit if you can’t get an international effort, do it yourself. It’s that important. It’s a very low-probably, high impact threat. But the impact is so enormous. If you thought we couldn’t deal with Katrina -- we’ve