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| Friday, 26 March 2004 |
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Former US security chief says Iraq invasion undermined war on terror WASHINGTON, Thursday (AFP) A former top White House security chief accused President George W. Bush of undermining the war on terrorism by invading Iraq and not giving the al-Qaeda threat enough importance before the September 11 attacks. In stunning testimony to the official inquiry into the 2001 terror strikes, Richard Clarke, whose new book has angered the Bush administration, apologised to relatives of the September 11 victims saying that the US government had failed them. Clarke said Iraq was "the reason I am strident in criticism of the president of the United States." "By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism," he said, silencing the room. Clarke, who quit his White House post last year, reaffirmed accusations that Bush had underestimated the threat from Osama bin Laden's group. "I believe the Bush administration in its first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue," Clarke told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The former counter-terrorism czar sought the forgiveness of relatives of the 3,000 September 11 dead. He said public meetings of the commission were "finally a forum where I can apologise to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. In his book "Against All Enemies" which was published on Monday, Clarke accuses the Bush administration of ignoring the mounting threat from al-Qaeda in the months before September 11. The administration has strongly denied the allegations and countered that Clarke was launching a political attack to influence this year's presidential election. The White House on Wednesday took the rare step of releasing an off-the-record briefing by Clarke in which he indicated Bush was taking a tough line on al-Qaeda. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials have insisted at the commission hearings that even killing bin Laden before September 11 would not have stopped the attacks on New York and Washington with hijacked airliners. Testifying on Wednesday, Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet said that warnings "lit up" in the weeks before September 11. "They indicated that multiple spectacular attacks were planned and that some of the plots were in their final stages. The reporting was maddeningly short on actionable details. The most ominous reporting hinting at 'something big' was also the most vague." When asked what went wrong, Tenet responded: "We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was." |
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