Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link? – excerpts from tonight’s 60 Minutes interview:
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other
people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did
this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation
left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back
with a report that said Iraq did this.“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been
looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no
connection.’“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a
connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come
back with that answer. We wrote a report.”Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the
FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the
report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’
They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it
got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced
and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’“I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because
after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I
don’t think the people around the president show him memos like that. I
don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.”Clarke was the president’s chief adviser on terrorism, yet it
wasn’t until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the
subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn’t
take the threat seriously.“We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda.
That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed
back and back and back for months.“There’s a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some
blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza
Rice asking for, urgently — underlined urgently — a Cabinet-level
meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent
memo– wasn’t acted on.“I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold
War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were
preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They
came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq,
Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the
preceding eight years.”