WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- A senior national security official who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations is expected to tell a public hearing of the Sept. 11 commission this week that the incoming Bush administration ignored warnings about the threat from al-Qaida which might have enabled them to prevent the attacks.
Other Clinton-era officials will also testify under oath and are expected to face tough questions about why they themselves did not do more to deal with the threat, after al-Qaida had bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, killing more than 250 people.
Richard A. Clarke, the most senior official to serve in both the Clinton and Bush national security councils, said in an outspoken attack on the Bush administration that he and his colleagues from the outgoing national security staff were ignored when they raised the al-Qaida threat with the new administration.
"Al-Qaida ... should have been the first thing on the agenda," Clarke told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast Sunday, "And it was pushed back and back and back."
Administration officials say that the incoming national security team took the threat very seriously, and have characterized Clarke's comments -- which they rebutted point by point in a Sunday evening e-mail to journalists -- as pre-election posturing.
Clarke's angry intervention is likely to make political waves, coming as it does on the heels of a row about Bush's use of imagery from Ground Zero in his re-election ads.
"I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism," Clarke said. "He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11."
Clarke says that while CIA and the FBI officials knew there were al-Qaida operatives in the United States -- and taking flying lessons -- that information never reached the White House. Clarke says a nationwide manhunt might have found the men.
"And then we would have been able to pull that thread, and -- and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped Sept. 11, but we could have at least had a chance."
The White House said Clarke never requested that the president or vice president do more than they were already doing and "did not advocate to the Bush Administration any plan of action to address al-Qaida's presence in the United States ..."
But Clarke's allegations will nonetheless resonate, in part because the more familiar complaint -- that the Bush administration did not continue developing or put into practice Clinton administration plans to capture or kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden -- ignores the fact that by 2001, the plot was so advanced that even a successful decapitation of the network might not have foiled it.
Clarke also reveals that Philip Zelikow, a Bush transition official who is now the executive director of the commission, was present at the meetings where the new team was briefed.
This news brought an outraged response from relatives of those killed in the attacks, who have long been uncomfortable about Zelikow's role, given his close ties to Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"I can't put into words how outraged I am," Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ron, was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. "This calls into question the integrity of the whole inquiry and the leadership of the commission."
The families have called for Zelikow's resignation, and for him to be questioned under oath about his role in the transition when he reported to Rice.
"It is now apparent," the relatives wrote Sunday to Commission Chairman and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, "why there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We now can see that trail would lead directly to the staff director himself."
Zelikow has previously acknowledged his role in the transition, but this is the first time it has become clear how close was his involvement in the transition's counter-terror strategy.
The question is significant, because critics of President Bush contend that the incoming administration's transition team effectively "dropped the ball" on the fight against Osama bin Laden, and on counter-terrorism policy generally.
Clarke said that counter-terrorism was not on the administration's priority list, which was crowded with what he called "Cold War issues," leftovers from the last Bush administration.
"It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back; they wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues that-the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years," Clarke said.
Clarke said when he eventually did get to brief senior officials -- in April -- Defense Department representative Paul Wolfowitz argued that bin Laden was "a little guy" and that the real problem was Iraqi state-sponsored terrorism.
The White House says that the briefing, which took place in March, not April, did develop a strategy to eliminate al-Qaida, and that steps Clarke recommended -- like increasing aid to the government in Uzbekistan -- were taken.
Clarke said that there was a desire on the part of some officials to pin the blame for Sept. 11 on Baghdad, and that he personally was questioned by the president in "a very intimidating way" about the connection.
"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" Clarke said.
"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaida, ever."
Of those in the administration who claim that this question is still open, Clarke maintained, "they'll say that until hell freezes over."
Coming as they do in the opening weeks of the general election campaign, Clarke's comments are bound to prove a rich vein for critics of the administration to mine. But the president's supporters are fighting back, as ABC political analyst and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos made clear Sunday "I ... spoke to several officials yesterday and they're making it clear that Richard Clarke, now that he's written a book, is fair game," he said on "This Week."
And Clarke himself says he knows what's coming. "I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things," he told 60 Minutes, "And I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me."
Clinton-era officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, will also appear at the public hearing of the commission scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.
None would comment about their testimony in advance of the hearing, but in the past, they have defended their role, saying that they were constrained in their response to al-Qaida by a lack of adequate intelligence, doubts about the legality of plots to kill the group's leaders and the reluctance of the military to get involved in what was seen as primarily a law enforcement matter.
They are slated to testify along with Bush Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and George Tenet, director of the CIA during both administrations.
