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2004-03-24 - 4:29 p.m. THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke was so concerned about the possibility of terrorist attacks that he wrote to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001 - a week before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - urging her to imagine what would happen if hundreds of Americans were killed in a terrorist attack, an investigative commission was told today.
During his testimony, Clarke, a senior counterterrorism official who served President Clinton and then President Bush, said that fighting terrorism was "an important issue but not an urgent issue" during the first eight months of the Bush administration. Clarke portrayed an approach to terrorism that was downgraded from the attention it received in the Clinton administration. "Fighting terrorism in general and fighting Al Qaeda in particular were an extremely high priority in the Clinton administration," he said, adding that no other issue received higher priority. Under Bush, he said, the matter did not carry a sense of urgency. His testimony had been widely anticipated because he served in national security staff positions beginning in the Reagan administration, and because the book he has written offers a sharply critical insiders look at what he has presented as failures by the Bush White House to devote attention to his warnings about impending terrorist actions. Speaking in a deliberate, measured manner before the bipartisan panel, Clarke said he and Tenet, appointed by Clinton and kept in his job by Bush, had tried to create a sense of urgency about the terrorist threat. Although Clarke said he continued to say it was an urgent problem, "I don't think it was ever treated that way." He agreed with testimony, delivered in the morning by Samuel R. Berger, Clinton's national security advisor, that during the Clinton presidency, everything he sought in the way of counter-terrorism action he was able to obtain. But, he said, his efforts to move the Bush administration to action were largely pushed aside, beginning with a memorandum he wrote to Condoleezza Rice, Berger's successor, five days after Bush took office. In that memo, Clarke said he sought an urgent, Cabinet-level meeting to address the threat of terrorist attack on the United States. � 
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