Richard Clarke Lays Out His Dark Vision
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the SunJanuary 11, 2005
WASHINGTON - In the next six years, Al Qaeda will launch terrible attacks on America's casinos, shopping malls, and rail lines. The federal government will intern tens of thousands of Muslims in remote facilities and issue national identification cards. The price of oil will spike to more than $80 a barrel, and rebel forces will launch a successful coup in Saudi Arabia. And one more thing: Iran will obtain an A-bomb.
That's the vision of the future in a lengthy cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly by former counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke, who predicts the American economy - not to mention civil liberties - will decline precipitously after a second wave of attacks that he says Al Qaeda will launch this year.
Written as the transcript for a fictional lecturer, Roger McBride, giving a 10th annual September 11 address to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Mr. Clarke drives his point home when he writes, "No one could stand here today, in 2011, and say that America has won the war on terror."
Mr. Clarke made headlines last year at the September 11 commission hearings when he said the White House was not sufficiently focused on Osama bin Laden in the eight months before September 11, 2001, and was too preoccupied with the dangers of Saddam Hussein. In those hearings, he said the current war in Iraq had distracted America's resources from its proper target, the terrorist organization Mr. bin Laden created out of the Mujahadeen who helped oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Since those hearings and the release of his 2004 book, "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke, who left the Bush administration in 2002, has been one of the loudest voices in Washington predicting that America's efforts to liberate Iraq will in fact create a new generation of Islamic terrorists.
Mr. Clarke sounds that theme in the first paragraph of his faux transcript: "Bush ordered the ill-fated invasion and occupation of Iraq, which effectively turned his administration into an active recruiting office for al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups around the world."
In the concluding remarks of the fictional lecture, he takes a shot at Mr. Bush's vision to bring democracy to the Middle East: "Our haranguing Arab governments to be nicer to their citizens ended up producing a backlash against us, because our exhortations were seen as hypocritical in view of our bombing, torture, and occupation tactics in Iraq."
The grist of Mr. Clarke's new piece is derived largely from the once-classified predictions of the national security bureaucracy in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. One paper prepared by the FBI in early 2002, for example, predicted a second wave of attacks on American financial institutions, a theory bolstered by some Al Qaeda members who were detained in Afghanistan. That led the agency to issue a warning in 2002 to banks up and down the East Coast.
In Mr. Clarke's latest forecast, he predicts Al Qaeda will use Southeast Asians who infiltrate from Canada to blow up a casino in Las Vegas. He predicts that Al Qaeda will form a North America branch that will issue communiques taking credit for a chemical plant explosion in Delaware. He also says Mr. bin Laden's organization will target shopping malls, and that the terrorist group will launch massive cyber attacks on America's digital infrastructure.
While all of these scenarios have been discussed by counterterrorism experts in the past, Mr. Clarke may also stand to gain financially by publicizing them. In July 2003 he became chairman of the consulting company Good Harbor LLC, which among other things counsels Fortune 500 companies in protecting against terrorist and cyber attacks.
The author of "Imperial Hubris," Michael Scheuer, who retired last month from the CIA's clandestine service, where he served as the chief of the unit devoted to catching Mr. bin Laden, said he agreed with Mr. Clarke that Al Qaeda would attempt an attack in America in the near future.
"I do think they will try to attack in the relatively near future because they have warned us they would," he said, referring to Mr. bin Laden's video in the week before the election and the subsequent video from Mr. bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. "They have completed the warning cycle."
An author who interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively for his book "Losing Bin Laden," Richard Miniter, said, "In 1999, Al Qaeda attempted to carry out a series of attacks inside the United States largely along the lines of what Clarke predicted in the Atlantic Monthly. Each of those plots was thwarted by a special team run by Mr. Clarke without the Patriot Act, national ID cards, or any other changes in law. Why does Mr. Clarke think that the very same approach that worked in 1999 would not work this year?"
A former CIA specialist in the Middle East, Ruel Marc Gerecht, said Mr. Clarke has consistently overestimated Al Qaeda's network inside America. "Al Qaeda tried to develop Western cells, to have self-sustaining cells that could launch attacks in the United States. It would appear that mission has failed in America. It is entirely possible that through some method they will find Muslim Americans that will become death-wish holy warriors. But Muslim Americans, who are the unsung heroes, have not thrown themselves into bin Ladenism to the extent that European Muslims have. If they had, I think our streets would be running red," said Mr. Gerecht, who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Scheuer disagreed with Mr. Gerecht, pointing out that the federal government still lacks a good method to measure the size and strength of Al Qaeda. "The problem is there is no metric," Mr. Scheuer said. "I am not sure I have any confidence in the FBI's ability to find these people. Just because the FBI has not found domestic cells does not mean they are not here."
Mr. Gerecht attributes Mr. Clarke's gloomy scenario largely to his disagreement with the president on invading Iraq. "His primary motivation is that he hates the Iraq War, and because he hates the Iraq War so much, that has led him to believe that we are at the dawn of a new dark age of Islamic, holy-war terrorism," he said.
Mr. Miniter said Mr. Clarke is largely unaware of recent American victories in the war on terror. "Richard Clarke has been out of the loop ever since he resigned in 2002.Without access to daily intelligence briefs, Mr. Clarke does not realize how well the war on terror is going," he said. "Some publicly released statistics should grab his attention: More than 3,000 Al Qaeda operatives have been killed or captured in 102 different countries since September 11, 2001. That is more than a quarter of known Al Qaeda forces."
