Condoleezza Rice is is running around calling Clarke names. It would violate some important principle for her to testify in front of the 9/11 commission, but it’s OK for her to call press conferences, get the White House to declassify emails for the purpose of ripping Clarke, and generally talk a LOT about Clarke’s testimony. I say put her under oath and let’s see what she has to say.

The White House’s concern about the separation of powers issue is a thin argument at best. TPM cites a study which shows that national security advisors have testified before Congress. Here’s the relevant section:

Now, perhaps you’ll say, following the White House line, that she’d love to testify but a constitutional principle is at stake and she has, as she puts it, a “responsibility to maintain what is a longstanding separation — constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch.”

Now, there is a constitutional issue involved. But Rice is trying to get people to think that members of the White House staff never testify. And that’s not even close to true. In my hand I have a 2002 Congressional Research Service study that lists a whole slew of presidential aides and advisors who’ve testified in the past.

Indeed, it lists two of Rice’s predecessors as National Security Advisor who’ve given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997.

Interestingly, the CRS study lists five examples of cases where presidential aides refused to testify. It’s not clear whether this list is supposed to be exhaustive. And in most cases presidential aides are simply not even asked to testify at all, for reasons of comity between the branches if nothing else. But of the five listed four are from the Nixon administration. And each of those were before the Watergate investigation really got under way. A whole slew of Nixon aides had to head up to the Hill in 1974 after things started to go south for them — so perhaps we haven’t heard the final word on this matter.

In any case, there’s a high bar for testimony from a National Security Advisor. But it’s happened before. And more than once. If they wanted her to testify, she could testify. What they want is for her to be able to lacerate her critics, discuss whichever parts of her advice to the president would be helpful to her politically at the moment, and freely declassify documents which she or the White House believes will hurt her enemies.

She’s a veritable information geyser, a one-woman-FOIA. She just won’t answer questions under oath.

So why would they not want her to testify? Part of the problem for her is that she’s been terribly inconsistent about Clarke’s role and responsibilities in the White House. At least she’s consistent with the rest of the administration in her inconsistency. It’s easy to see why she and the White House would prefer that they remain in control of all meetings between the White House staff and Congress.

There’s also the Clarke bashing… one of the current favorites is his friendship with Rand Beers, Kerry’s advisor on foreign policy. The interesting thing is that both Rand Beers and Clarke have similar backgrounds. Again, from TPM:

And the pattern suggests two possible theories.

The first is that President Bush has the odd misfortune of repeatedly hiring Democratic party stooges for key counter-terrorism assignments who stab him in the back as soon as they leave his employ.

The second is that anyone the president hires in a key counter-terrorism role who is not either a hidebound ideologue or a Bush loyalist gets so disgusted with the mismanagement and/or dishonesty that they eventually quit and then devote themselves to driving the president from office.

Which sounds more likely?

Last bit of news to pass on. I saw part of Clarke’s appearance on Larry King last night. In it, he clarified again his two primary reasons for coming out with this story now. The first is that the Bush White House was less focused on terrorism than they should’ve been in the early months of 2001. The second reason, and far more important to me, is that the war in Iraq is undermining our ability to prosecute the war on terror. I’ll let his own words speak for him:

KING: Mr. Clarke, what would you say to the flabbergasted Dr. Rice?

CLARKE: I’d say, let’s get back to the main issue. Before you went to the break, Larry, you had the president saying that George Tenet was briefing him regularly on the threat. He was. George Tenet told me that, and I saw the briefings. The president was being told on a regular basis that an al Qaeda threat was coming, an al Qaeda attack was coming.

Now, what does the president say in his own words to Bob Woodward in “Bush at War?” He says, Bush acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. “I was not on point,” the president said. “I didn’t feel a sense of urgency.”

Well, how can you not feel a sense of urgency when George Tenet is telling you in daily briefings, day after day, that a major al Qaeda attack is coming? That’s my point. That’s one of my points. The other point is, which I’d like to get to, that by fighting the war in Iraq, the president has actually diminished our ability to fight the war on terrorism.

KING: What do you mean by that? Why does Iraq diminish the war on terrorism?

CLARKE: In three ways. Number one, it diverts us from reducing the vulnerabilities here at home, like protecting the rails from attacks like the one on Madrid. We’re spending $180 billion in Iraq. We should be spending that money reducing our vulnerabilities to terrorism here at home, much more than we are. The railroads, the chemical plants, they are all still unprotected.

The second way it reduces the war on terrorism is by inflaming the Islamic world and helping, as Rumsfeld said in his internal memo, helping create more terrorists more rapidly than we can capture or kill them, because of the hatred in the Islamic world generated against the United States by our needless invasion of Iraq.

And the third way, of course, was it actually took troops and intelligence assets away from the hunt for bin Laden. We’ll probably catch bin Laden here shortly, but it’s two years too late. In those two years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, a multi-headed organization, so that by the time we catch him now, it won’t matter very much, because all of these al Qaeda-like organizations have grown up around the world, like the group that attacked in Madrid.

The point is, the war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. And by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism. That’s what I say in the book.

I’d ask that the White House answer those two questions. Instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks on Clarke, answer what he’s saying. Was the war on Iraq necessary? Did you fixate on Iraq too early or for reasons not in the best interests of the people of the United States? These are the issues. This is not about preventing 9/11 (though that’s what the commission’s focus is). It’s about Iraq.

Finally, one other interesting point. One of the links above mention that the White House and the Republican commissioners are using a not-for-attribution briefing given by Clarke as evidence that he supported the Administration’s handling of the war on terror. The White House ignores the fact that this guy had a job to do. Here’s how he explains it (again from Larry King… read the transcript… it’s pretty interesting:

KING: But the question, Dick, was why did you praise them two years ago?

CLARKE: I didn’t praise them. What you’re referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president — here’s what happened.

“TIME” magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn’t done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on “TIME” and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I’m not going to lie. And they said, look, can’t you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive?

Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn’t do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don’t understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn’t criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that. This is part of their whole attempt to get Larry King to ask Dick Clarke this kind of question. So we’re not talking about the major issue.

OK, enough on this from me… I just really believe it’s important to not get distracted by the White House flailing around trying to discredit Clarke. He’s raised some issues. I believe he’s probably far from sainthood. The thing is, what he’s saying makes sense.