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Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Why was Richard Clarke demoted to terrorism tsar to cyberterrorism tsarevich ?

Clarke had been telling the Bush administration for 8 months that Al Qaeda was an imminent threat and that more should be done to fight it. September 11 2001 he was proven right. Within a month he was demoted. Why ?

Was he demoted for being right ? This seems fairly likely to me. Bush's top advisors might have been unwilling to face him saying "I told you so" perhaps at some critical point in a policy debate. The fact that he had clearly been right and they had been, at least, less right made him a dangerous bureaucratic adversary. They might have decided that they had to demote him to neutralise him.

It is also possible that Clarke was demoted because the position of anti terrorism tsar had become very important. Before 9/11 his efforts to be a major player by e.g. briefing the cabinet were blocked on the grounds that anti terrorism was less important than missile defences, tax cuts, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Tax cuts, and tax cuts. After 9/11 that approach was no longer feasible.

The hypothesis I find most interesting is quite different. We now now, in spite of the repeated dishonest denials of Hadley and McClellan that Bush asked Clarke if there was evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 and did not accept Clarke's immediate response that there was none. We know that Clarke consulted the FBI and CIA and on 9/18 sent a memo towards Bush with the conclusion that there was no evidence of a link and that a link was very very unlikely. We know that Hadley sent it back asking for "more research", that is to look harder for evidence of such a link that is, as translated into plain English by Clarke "wrong answer." That Clarke looked harder and sent the same memo about two weeks later. That the memo was never given to Bush and that Clarke was demoted about a week after sending the memo for the second time.

It seems quite likely to me that Clarke was demoted from handling terrorism to handling cyber terrorism because he refused to claim that a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 was plausible.

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