The 9/11 Blame Game

The attack came, both literally and metaphorically, out of the blue. Literally, in that the hijacked planes that crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, had been flying in a cloudless sky so blue that it seemed unreal. I happened to be on jury duty that day, in a courthouse only a half--mile or so from what would soon be known as Ground Zero. Some time after the two planes reached their targets, we all poured into the street--just as the second tower collapsed. And this sight, as if it were not impossible to believe in itself, was made all the more incredible by the perfection of the sky stretching so beautifully over it. I felt as though I had been deposited into a scene in one of those disaster movies being filmed (as they used to say) in glorious color.

But the attack came out of the blue in a metaphorical sense as well. About a year later, in November 2002, a bipartisan "9/11 Commission" would be set up to investigate how and why such a huge event could have taken us by surprise and whether it might have been prevented. Because the commission's public hearings were not held until we were all caught up in the exceptionally poisonous presidential election campaign of 2004, they quickly degenerated into an attempt by the Democrats on the panel to demonstrate that the administration of George W. Bush had been given adequate warnings but had failed to act on them.

Reinforcing this attempt was the testimony of Richard A. Clarke, who had been in charge of the counterterrorist operation in the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and then under Bush before resigning in the aftermath of 9/11. What Clarke for all practical purposes did--both at the hearings and in his hot--off--the--press, bestselling book Against All Enemies--was blame Bush, who had been in office for eight months when the attack occurred, while exonerating Clinton, who had spent eight years doing little of any significance in response to the series of terrorist assaults on American targets in various parts of the world that were launched on his watch.

Yet according to John Lehman, one of the Republican commissioners, Clarke's original testimony, given in a closed session, had included a "searing indictment of some Clinton officials and Clinton policies." The Republican members of the commission (but not their Democratic colleagues, who seemed to have known what was coming) were therefore taken aback when, in the public hearings, Clarke omitted his earlier criticisms of Clinton and delivered a one--sided assault on Bush. Then, in a different, though related, context, the commission's final report would quote material written by Clarke while he was still in office that was inconsistent with his more recent public and much--publicized denial of any relationship whatsoever between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us.

In a less polarized political and cultural climate, these two revelations would have discredited Clarke altogether. But so useful was he to the violently anti-Bush animus then gathering steam that he became the first in a long string of such former members of or outside consultants to the Bush administration who, no matter how seriously their credibility had been damaged, would be rewarded with fame and/or fortune for turning on the president they had once served. (I will have more to say in due course about the most notorious of these, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.)

But the point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was exaggerating or lying. It is that the attack on 9/11 did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that no one ever took such a...

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NORMAN PODHORETZ is now editor at large for Commentary magazine, of which he was editor in chief for thirty-five years. He is also an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Making It, Breaking Ranks, Ex-Friends, My Love Affair with America, and The Prophets.