The Truth Of The Matter

In his strongest public statement, to 60 Minutes, Clarke said Bush "ignored" the terrorist threat before 9/11. To the commission he testified, more soberly, that, for the Administration, it was an "important issue but not an urgent issue." Clearly, the Clinton White House worried more. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger remembers telling his successor, Rice, during the transition that, for the Bush team, "the No. 1 issue that you're going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically."

The record of the Bush Administration's first half-year suggests its members didn't buy it. They were more focused on Russia, China and especially missile defense. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward quotes Bush himself saying of Osama bin Laden, "There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace ... But I didn't feel that sense of urgency."

Clarke's strongest argument in this dispute is the pace with which the Administration considered the plan he proposed on Jan. 25, 2001 for combatting al-Qaeda. The program had evolved during the Clinton years, as al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and then the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Bush team put the proposal through an April meeting of senior officials, took their time with it over the summer and finally brought it to Bush's Cabinet-level security and foreign policy chiefs, who approved it, just a week before 9/11. None of that suggests it was a national-security priority.

The details of NSPD 9, the five-to six-page paper that was approved Sept. 4, remain classified. Its primary elements include covert and military efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda around the world, increased security of U.S. embassies and military bases, efforts to track down al-Qaeda funding networks, a strong public diplomacy program to win Muslim hearts and minds and a campaign to deny al-Qaeda a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Bush officials say they took months to approve a plan to fight al-Qaeda because they wanted to eliminate the group rather than roll it back, as they claim Clinton would have done. They also say they added crucial elements, including planning for a potential military invasion of Afghanistan three to five years down the road. But a senior Bush Administration official admitted to TIME that NSPD 9 was in nearly all respects the same as the plan Clarke proposed on Jan. 25.

--The Clinton Administration should have got bin Laden

At the hearings last week, commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, pointed out that bin Laden formally declared war against the U.S., among others, in February 1998, and argued that the U.S. should have responded in kind. In her testimony, Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright allowed that Kerrey was "probably right." But what might the U.S. have done?