The bold Richard Clarke

Character assassination is easy.

Digging out the facts is hard.

It's high time for the Bush administration and the media to stop taking the easy road and start doing the hard work of addressing Richard Clarke's unprecedented claims regarding the Bush administrations anemic efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.

In a bold move, Clarke, President Bush's former National Counter Terrorism Coordinator, has spoken out against the Bush administration's feeble attempts to prevent the 9/11 attacks and against Bush's foolhardy war in Iraq.

Unlike other members of the Bush administration, Clarke admitted that the government failed its citizens, in his public hearing before the 9/11 commission on March 24. "To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed," he said.

In response to his claims, the Bush administration and the media have decided to circumvent the facts and instead have engaged in a series of character attacks against Clarke. They have questioned his motivation – suggesting that he is merely trying to promote his book Against All Enemies or land a job in a Kerry administration – and even suggested that Clarke is prejudiced against his African American female boss, Condoleezza Rice.

Clarke has persuasively and eloquently refuted all of these allegations.

Clarke has pointed out that his facts have stayed the same but, because his role has changed from White House employee to ordinary citizen, he is now permitted to voice his true feelings on the Bush administration because he no longer has an obligation to promote them. "I have no obligation anymore to spin. When you're in the White House, you spin," said Clarke on NBC News' Meet the Press on March 28.

As to his motivation, Clarke was crystal clear: "The actual motivation for writing this book is to, number one, tell the people who have been asking me for two or three years, you know, what happened on 9/11 and why couldn't we stop it," said Clarke on Meet the Press. In fact, Clarke specifically rejected any possibility of a reward for his actions from the Kerry campaign: "Let me say here as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one." (Clarke's testimony in the 9/11 hearings, 3/24)

Mercifully he has not dignified the suggestion that he is sexist and racist with a response.

He's an honest public servant trying to sound the alarm -- it's time for the press and administration to pursue and explain the reasons for downplaying the intelligence information they received from Clarke and others regarding the threat of terrorism. And it's time to focus on the real meat of his revelations that the White House was determined to go to war with Iraq despite the lack of any evidence what so ever linking Iraq to al Qaeda and 9/11.

Bush, despite the fact that he was "getting those intelligence briefings every morning from George Tenet and week after week, month after month, hearing about al Qaeda," as Clarke said on Hardball on March 31, never took any action against the threat.

We know now that the FBI and CIA had information regarding the attacks such as the fact that two of the hijackers were in the country prior to 9/11. Bush took no actions against the threat making it seem more than plausible that, had some action been taken and each member of the bureau and agency vigorously questioned for every detail of al Qaeda and terrorist threats, the attacks could have been prevented.

Then, instead of reproaching himself for not taking stronger actions before 9/11, Bush worsened the war on terrorism by targeting the wrong country. "We had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we've inflamed the ideology. We've played right into the hands of al Qaeda and others. We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do," Clarke said on Meet the Press. As Clarke put it, "invading Iraq after 9/11 is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor."

By attacking Iraq, a country whose people had no connection to the 9/11 attacks, Bush has fueled anti-American sentiments in the Middle East. "We're going to catch bin Laden. I have no doubt about that. In the next few months, he'll be found dead or alive. But it's two years too late because during those two years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization, independent cells like the organization that did the attack in Madrid," Clarke said on Meet the Press.

This issue needs to be refocused. The media and Bush administration need to turn its eye to Clarke's contentions so that the American people can get some concrete answers. "This is about the president's job in the war on terrorism. This is about how going into Iraq hurt the war on terrorism. This is not about Dick Clarke," said Clarke on Meet the Press.

All quotes were gathered from transcripts of NBC News' Meet the Press and MSNBC's Hardball