Excerpts from "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" by Ric

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/23/politics/23CWOR.html?ex=1080622800&en=e44567d102f16ed7&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Published: March 23, 2004

Following are excerpts from "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" by Richard A. Clarke:

On Preparing for Other Attacks

I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other that getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.

On the morning of the 12th D.O.D.'s focus was already beginning to shift from Al Qaeda. C.I.A. was explicit now that Al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor — Iraq must have been helping them.

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