is featured in today’s Boston Globe here.  Actually, it is far more than an interview, and very much worth the read.

The title of the piece is quite long:

The Insider:

A year ago, Richard Clarke blew the whistle on the Bush administration’s failure to take Al Qaeda seriously. He’s still whistling — but how long will the public listen?

Written by Patrick Radden Keefe, who is listed as a project leader at the World Policy Institute and the author of ”Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping” (Random House), to read it requires (free) registration — the Globe is afterall owned by the NY Times.   I will offer some selections and comments below the fold.
One issue raised by the article, which is based on an interview the author had with Clarke and his former deputy Rogger Cressey, and also includes quotes from Rand Beers and others, is how long a whistle blower can hold the attention of the American public:

Whereas former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, another high-level official who was critical of President George W. Bush’s policy on Iraq, has faded from view since the election, Clarke — whose 2004 book ”Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror” coincided with his appearance before the 9/11 Commission and helped make him a household name — shows no sign of going away. Which raises the question: What happens when a whistleblower keeps on whistling? And how long will the public continue to listen?

In this long piece, one issue is how well a whistleblower can maintain his credibility, and what he does with it.  Here are back to back paragraphs which address this issue.  Note who is speaking in the 2nd of these:

Like other whistleblowers, Clarke also faced a vigorous assault on his credibility. Cheney’s remark was benign next to suggestions by Republican politicians and commentators that Clarke’s revelations were merely a bid to sell copies of his book, smear Rice (who had stripped him of some of his authority when she arrived in office), or score a job in a Democratic administration.

”You get one crack at being a big whistleblower,” Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense and state department official who in 1971 leaked the classified documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, said in a recent interview. ”Then your credibility decays.” But Clarke has worked hard to sustain his credibility and stature since the election, writing and speaking out regularly on defense and intelligence debates as though to position himself as a kind of national security adviser in exile.

The article talks about what Clarke is now doing  — teaching, writing magazine articles and a novel as a way of addressing through fiction the kinds of issues about which he is concerned.  To explain why he is doing the things he is,  Clarke notes

”My role is to help people understand complex security issues,” Clarke told me. ”It’s all about continuing the debate, the dialogue, but trying to do it in a less shrill, partisan way than people did during the campaign. Educating people so they can make their own judgments, but providing the factual and sometimes the interpretive counterweight to the crap the administration gives them.”

One current issue is how the administration has manipulated terror warnings, an issue that received new impetus after the recent remarks by Tom Ridge.  Here are remarks by Beers and Bob Kerry and insight from Clarke on the consequences:

”The administration as a user or manipulator of intelligence has really lost its credibility and the intelligence community’s credibility,” says Rand Beers, pointing to the trumped-up case of Iraqi WMDs and the failure, ”despite a hemorrhage of data points in the summer of 2001,” to appreciate the terrorist threat prior to Sept. 11. One result has been the perception, especially in the charged atmosphere of the election campaign, that the administration’s decisions about when to go public with threat assessments have been driven as much by politics as security.

”Have there been any Al Qaeda press conferences since the 5th of November?” former senator and 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey asked. ”None. How many were there leading up to the election? About one every week. My guess is that the number of threats has not gone down.”

The repeated warnings, Clarke believes, have caused the country to drop its guard. He says that the fire and police chiefs whom he advises have told him that the terror alert level ”can go orange, red, yellow, polka dot,” and they will not react, because they have become inured to such warnings.

The article offers differeing views on Clarke.  Michael Scheurer, “Anonymous” of Imperial Hubris, while agreeing with Clarke on most issues thought Clarke was self-serving and job-seeking.  Dan Ellsberg, who disagrees with that assessment, is still troubled that Clarke and others did not make public their concerns BEFORE it was too late.  Here are back to back remarks:

”I have a very jaundiced view of Clarke,” says Scheuer, who maintains that Clarke’s performance before the 9/11 Commission was a bid for a role in a Democratic administration, and who describes Clarke’s book as ”a job application.”

Daniel Ellsberg disagrees, pointing out that if Clarke was concerned merely with his own professional advancement, resigning his senior post in the Bush administration would have been counterproductive. ”Clarke was in,” Ellsberg told me.

Still, Ellsberg asks why it was that Clarke — like O’Neill, or Scheuer, or, for that matter, himself during the Vietnam War — waited to make his revelations until it was, in some respects, too late. Had Clarke and others broken rank earlier, Ellsberg said, ”I believe they could’ve stopped the Iraq war.”

Clarke (and later Cressey) express concern that by focusing on the leadership of Al Qaeda, the US is creating a new problem that will be more difficult.  Let me offer an example of his thinking:

”This is my ‘Battle of Algiers’ analogy,” he said, referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film about the Algerian revolt against the French. ”In ‘The Battle of Algiers’ the French have an organizational chart of the Algerian resistance and they eliminate all of them. And then they lose.”

”For us,” he continues, ”the Battle of Algiers is Iraq. Because we’re doing Iraq, we’re generating a whole new generation and we have no idea who they are.”

The foregoing is ironic, given that the Pentagon apparently screened the picture in question, and then totally ignored the lesson the French learned to their horror — they could kill or capture all of the identified Algerina leadership, but in the process lost the war they were attempting to win.   Cressey and Clarke worry that we are going from confronting an Al Qaeda organized like a business with idnetifiable leadership that could be tracked and therefore was somewhat predictable to a global movement that cannot be confronted in a similar fashion.   Clarke makes clear part of his concern in the final brief paragraph:

”I think there’s a cycle,” Clarke concluded. ”If you think of Al Qaeda as a curve, we’re largely on the downside of that curve, but where that curve starts sloping down, the curve of the next wave, the next generation, is building up. And it’s going to hit us in a little while.”

I strongly suggest that people here take the time to read the entire article.  I have quoted as much as I can without violating the limits of fair use.   Trust me, the Boston Globe is well worth the annoyance of having to register in order to read.  You can always delete the cookies after each time you access their site.  

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