EDITORIAL
What did Bush know: Condi Rice must testify

It's pretty clear by now that White House attempts to make Richard Clarke's pre- and post-9/11 allegations go away with a vicious campaign of character assassination will fail.

This tactic succeeded in earlier instances: after Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress that postwar Iraq would require an occupation force of several hundred thousand American troops, and when Ambassador Joseph Wilson's evaporation of the White House "yellow cake" uranium lie led to the destruction of his wife's CIA career.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's writings about the White House's post-9/11 obsession with invading Iraq closely jibed with Clarke's recollections, but O'Neill's charges were undercut by a meaningless diversionary fuss about release of classified documents.

And now there's Richard Foster, forbidden from telling Congress that the Bush administration was underpricing its prescription drug plan by one-third.

But the frenzied attempt to discredit Clarke isn't gaining traction, for several reasons. First, perhaps the White House has gone to the well once too often (see above). Second, even Republicans are blanching at seeing Clarke, a respected and loyal official in four administrations (three of them Republican), fed to the wolves.

And most important, the ad hominem attacks from the White House fail in any way to address issues of substance raised by Clarke in support of his contention that President Bush has "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

One of the persons trotted out to blunt the Clarke threat is his former boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has been hitting the talk shows on a regular basis in this pursuit.

To appreciate the unseemliness of Rice's effort to discredit Clarke, one must picture her on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when it was thought that hijacked aircraft still in the air might be targeting the White House. Trusting Clarke to take charge of the Counterterrorism Security Group, Rice headed for the shelter while Clarke and his colleagues remained in harm's way, working to ground jets, rouse rescue workers and, yes, organize the president's protection.

What the White House is failing to grasp is that the bipartisan 9/11 panel is not looking for a scapegoat, but for a clear understanding of what went wrong in order to prevent a recurrence.

White House obfuscation has thus far prevented the panel from penetrating the fog surrounding what the president knew, and when and how he learned it. Rice is uniquely positioned to end that confusion.

Clarke's testimony suggests that the Clinton administration to some extent took the al-Qaida threat more seriously than did Bush. But he concedes that stopping the 9/11 attacks was in any case a long shot.

So the portion of Clarke's testimony likely to be politically most damaging to Bush is his insistence on attacking Iraq despite repeated intelligence analysis showing its irrelevance to the 9/11 attacks. But investigation of this development is not on the 9/11 panel's plate; that question can await another day.

For now, Rice must testify, under oath and in public, about the events preceding 9/11. The only question is how long it will take the White House to surrender to that imperative.