'No good deed shall go unpunished'

by David Grand
April 8, 2004

That's the credo of whistle-blowers, which counterterror expert Richard Clarke and countless others can attest to. For as surely as day follows night, those who they point their finger at will do their damndest to deny or play down the accusations made against them, as well as attacking their motives, credibility and character. Destroy the messenger is the name of that game.

I watched some of the hearings held by the 9/11 commission and the swift reaction by the White House to Clarke's sworn testimony of Bush having put combating terrorism "on the back burner" for the eight months preceding that fateful day, which as Clarke stated may have emboldened the al-Qaida to launch their attack. However, on my "shock meter" it only registered in the 2 to 3 range out of a possible 10. For in my mind, even though he was able to provide an intimate insight into all the goings-on prior to 9/11 and of the roadblocks that were put in his path as he tried to "sound the alarm," his testimony only corroborated the conclusion reached by the Army War College report (quoted in my Jan. 22 column) that "the war with Iraq was a costly detour from the importance of combating the al-Qaida organization."

But I still admire Clarke, for his forthrightness and his heartfelt apology to the families of the 9/11 victims: "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you." As the husband of one of the victims said, "I've been waiting for an apology from the government for two and a half years," with a woman saying "I cried hysterically, and couldn't stop. Here was somebody, at last, telling the truth." But when Cheney was later interviewed and asked whether he felt an apology for failing to prevent Sept. 11 is necessary, he dodged the question and would only say, "We would've liked to have been able to prevent that attack; and obviously, I think everybody here feels bad about the loss of life." So saith the "Iceman."

And I don't fault Clarke as some have for moving up the release date for his book "Against All Enemies" to coincide with his testifying before the 9/11 commission, any more than I'd criticize him for joining the ranks of other former presidential appointees who became book-selling defectors; such as: John Dean, Nixon's lawyer who wrote "Blind Ambition" out of a sense of betrayal; or Donald Regan, who wrote "For the Record" out of spite for having been fired as Reagan's chief of staff (at Nancy's urging); and Alexander Haig, Reagan's canned secretary of State, who published "Caveat" in which he claimed Reagan's White House was like a "ghost ship" with no one at the helm. But none of those books even came close to the sales of Clarke's book which is in fifth printing and topping the New York Time's list of best sellers. But to his credit, Clarke said will give the bulk of his earnings to charities and families of the 9/11 victims.

During the White House's blitzkrieg on Clarke, my mind flashed back to the early 1970s, when another whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, a former government researcher at the Rand Corporation's "think tank," dropped a bombshell on the Nixon White House by leaking Top Secret documents known as the "Pentagon Papers" (revealing the "true" history of the Vietnam War) to the New York Times in 1971, which published the report in June of that year.

He was brought to trial by the government on 12 felony charges. But the judge threw the case out of court upon learning of illegal FBI "taps" of 15 of his phone conversations, and of the White House's attempts to gain derogatory information on him by having a team of burglars break into the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who was treating Ellsberg. (Hope Clarke has had his phones checked.)

On a personal note, that team known as the "plumbers' unit" of later Watergate fame was directed by Bob Ehrlichman's aide Egil (Bud) Krogh, who was later appointed as the Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), where I was the Director of Security. And I can remember like yesterday when an order came from the White House in the wake of Nixon's resignation directing that Krogh "be walked out of the building immediately," and my being given that unpleasant task. I recall thinking after I escorted him onto the street, so it goes "when the mighty have fallen."