On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Richard Clarke and his aides scrawled their names on a legal pad.
It was a list to be e-mailed from the White House to help search and rescue teams identify their bodies.
Clarke was the nation’s counter-terrorism czar that crisp September morning. He had served four presidents in a distinguished career: three Republicans and a Democrat.
When news came that one of the hijacked planes was heading toward the nation’s capital, Clarke and his staff stayed at their posts in the Situation Room. The passengers on United Flight 93, who stormed the cockpit and brought it down in a Pennsylvania field, may have saved his life.
Clarke was one of a tiny band of government experts consumed by the al-Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, who failed to spur their complacent bosses to action. He and the others live a life of might-have-beens, haunted now by the notion that the United States is still not responding effectively.
The attacks that day seem “very much like they happened yesterday,” Clarke says. Yet “four years is a very long time. The United States succeeded in defeating both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in four years – simultaneously – while still building the nuclear bomb, with the Manhattan Project.”
Four years after President Bush stood on the rubble of the World Trade Center and vowed to do “whatever it takes” to avenge the dead, Osama bin Laden is alive and free to pray and plot. “Some would argue that al-Qaeda has not gotten substantially weaker,” Clarke says.
Bin Laden’s gang has been deprived of its base in Afghanistan, and about three-fourths of its leaders have been captured or killed, or are being held by Iran under house arrest. “Unfortunately, they have been replaced,” Clarke says, by others from the ranks.
More disturbingly, al-Qaeda has “morphed into an ideological movement” of 14 to 18 organizations, scattered around the world, operating independently, he says.
“Most of (these groups) are as alive and well now as they were on 9/11,” Clarke notes. Indeed, there have been twice as many terror attacks around the world in the four years since 2001 as in the four years preceding it.
America’s leaders took their eyes off the ball, he says. The war in Iraq has, if anything, has made things worse.
“It has provided a training ground for terrorists,” Clarke says. The administration now has evidence, he says, that veteran fighters are leaving Iraq and journeying to other countries, presumably to plot more attacks.
Clarke scoffs at the Bush administration’s suggestion that by fighting Iraq’s insurgents “over there,” we are keeping ourselves safer “over here.”
The dead transit riders of Madrid and London bear witness, he says, that “as long as the war in Iraq is going on it will continue to feed terrorist activities outside.”
So why have Americans enjoyed four years of relative peace at home?
“Everybody wants to know why they haven’t attacked,” says Clarke. He credits geography, demography and U.S. law enforcement – including much-maligned FBI and immigration – officials.
Though he worries that the U.S. could breed a generation of Islamic extremists in its prison systems, our immigration patterns have resulted in the odd fact that “the majority of Muslims in the United States are not Arab, and the majority of Arabs are not Muslims.”
Al-Qaeda prefers to use indigenous populations to support its terror attack teams and, unlike many European countries, “we do not have a large and alienated Muslim population,”
Clarke says. For a time, geography has spared us.
The U.S. has made strides in securing commercial airline flights, says Clarke, but fails to protect other significant areas: mass transit, cargo aircraft and the chemical industry.
“The one that bothers me the most is what we have failed to do protecting chemical plants,” he says. If breached, some facilities could generate huge clouds of lethal gasses. It is “an example of how it is still easy for terrorist groups to use our infrastructure against us.”
Many of these plants are located in urban areas, surrounded by thousands of families, but “Congress had diddled,” he says, and failed to address the danger.
Bush loyalists call Clarke an alarmist. Disgruntled. A grandstander. But in the wake of the administration’s performance in Hurricane Katrina, it’s their own credibility that seems tattered.
“If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy, how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance warning?” wonders Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Four years out. Thousands of GIs dead and wounded. And “it is difficult to say, with the exception of passenger aircraft, of a place where we are clearly safer,” Clarke says.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Comment at the Washington and the West blog (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington) or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
