The testimony of Richard Clarke last week before the 9/11 Commission and the release of his book to the press has created a firestorm among pundits over Clarke, the culpability of the Bush administration, and the politicization of the 9/11 investigation. I'd like to try my sober best to look at these issues and consider what has come to light. The first question should be is Dick Clarke correct in what he says about the Bush administration? There have been almost no substansive arguments made against Clarke's allegations, exepting V. P. Cheney's laughable allegation that Clarke was "out of the loop" and Condoleezza Rice's early accusations that Clarke had a meetings fetish. But, since Clarke's public testimony, most of the allegations have been against him and his integrity. Clarke's critics say that he is only making his public accusations in order to sell books, that he is bitter at the administration for snubbing him, that if he was really so worried about the administration's policies, he would have spoken out earlier, when it counted, before the war with Iraq. See, for example, this blog (the 3/29 and 3/30 posts). If what Clarke says is accurate, the fact is that the Bush administration was alarmingly delinquent in addressing terrorism before September 2001. But, people say, no matter what the administration did, they couldn't have prevented 9/11. This is a bastardization of something Clarke himself addressed in his testimony. When Commission member Slade Gorton asked Clarke, "Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" Clarke responded with a simple "No." But later on, when Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste asked Clarke if he had had knowledge that two individuals who were identified as Al Qaida had entered the country, and if Clarke had had knowledge of Zacarias Moussaoui and his erratic behavior in flight school, combined with the five to six year-old intelligence that Al Qaida had thought about using aircraft as weapons, what could he have done? Clarke replied, "I would like to think, sir, that even without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I could have connected those dots." The fact is, if terrorism was not a priority in the pre-9/11 Bush administration, we'll never know what could have been done to prevent 9/11. The fact is, in the pre-9/11 Bush administration, according to Clarke, close to nothing was done to prevent terrorist attacks of any kind. That is the allegation that needs to be investigated, because even though we do have the benefit of hindsight and even though it is easy to criticize knowing now how events turned out, 9/11 DID HAPPEN, there's no denying that. Maybe there were a lot of things on the administration's plate in the spring and summer of 2001, maybe they were worried about China and North Korea and Israel and Palestine and the recession, and maybe with all of that going on, people at the time could have reasonably said that Al Qaida is not one of our major worries, but we know now that it should have been. Nobody is saying that Bush or Cheney or Rice or anyone in the administration or the administration as a whole is responsible for 9/11. The terrorists are responsible for 9/11. But it was a failure of leadership, it was a failure of our government to let 9/11 occur. And the purpose of the Commission is to investigate where that failure took place so that steps can be taken to ensure that there is never another terrorist attack like it. In this investigation, administration officials may come out looking bad. It is the responsibility of the Commission, I believe, to be honest and even harsh in its assessment, just as it is the responsibility of our leaders to accept that the decisions they make and have made may have adverse effects, and hopefully to learn from that. So, when people complain about the politicization of the 9/11 Commission, I'm puzzled. Do they not expect witnesses and Commissioners to be honest or brutal in their analysis? Certainly everyone will have their own bias, but what's important is that the facts come out. If some witnesses and some Commissioners blame Clinton and others blame Bush, there will be a chance in the end to examine all of the facts, at least those released to the public, and see what needs to be done. Some people seem to think it'd be best to look for the causes of this horrific event only in non-election years, or only as long as everyone is polite, or only when we're not at "war" (don't even get me started on the people who say that we should go lockstep with whatever the administration does because we are at "war", the "war" on terror, yeah yeah, we are fighting terrorists everyday, but that's no reason to turn off our brains). So give me crass politics and flying accusations and brazenly self-serving grandstanding, as long as we get some facts, and I think Richard Clarke and others have supplied us with facts, and I think in the end we'll be better off for the knowledge we will have gained.