White House refutes claims it did not take terror threat seriously

THE White House came out fighting yesterday after claims it did not consider the threat of terrorism an “urgent” issue in the months before September 11.

President George W Bush and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were fiercely criticised by former terrorism adviser Richard Clarke on Wednesday. Giving evidence to a congressional commission probing the September 11 attacks, he said that the invasion of Iraq had "undermined" the war on terror.

With just eight months to go until the presidential election and with Mr Bush keen to show himself as tough on terrorism the White House went on the counter attack.

An angry Dr Rice told reporters she met with Mr Clarke three weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

He had said "not a word about concerns that Iraq was going to somehow take us off the path of the war on terrorism", she said.

She said: "It would've been easy to do, kick the others out, close the door, say 'I just want you to know I think you're making a mistake'. He didn't do it."

Dr Rice also claimed that she sometimes had a difficult relationship with Mr Clarke.

She said he had told her he was "too busy" to go to meetings she chaired until she finally demanded he appear. "I know how to manage people, and I asked him to come once. We continued to have a problem, I asked him to come twice. We didn't have a problem after that," she said.

But Mr Clarke, refusing to be cowed, later told CNN that Dr Rice had failed to do her job as well as her predecessor under the Clinton administration, Sandy Berger.

Mr Clarke claimed that prior to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, people within the FBI knew that two of the 19 hijackers were in the country, but the information was not passed to high level officials.

He said that in the run up to the millennium celebrations when there was a similar threat level to that before September 11 Mr Berger held daily meetings for all security and intelligence agencies.

"If Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser when she had information that there was a threat against the United States... the information would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001," Mr Clarke told Larry King Live.

Dr Rice faced further criticism for refusing to appear before the commission in public. She has spoken to the cross-party commission for several hours in private.

Republicans have claimed that Mr Clarke has a hidden agenda; that he wants Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, to take the presidency at the November election.

But in his evidence before the commission in Washington, Mr Clarke pledged not to accept any job under Mr Kerry, were the Massachusetts senator to be elected.

Mr Clarke invoked the wrath of the White House by telling the commission the Bush administration "for the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue".

He said the fight against terrorism and al-Qaida was "extraordinarily" important under the Clinton administration and that Mr Clinton had "no higher priority" than combating terrorists.

He also apologised to the families of those killed on September 11.

"Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you," he said.