Dick Morris: Clarke Nixed Warnings About Terrorist States

The list of contradictions between what ex-terrorism czar Richard Clarke told the 9/11 Commission this week and what he's said in the past just keeps growing longer and longer.

Now comes word that the anti-terror crusader actually tried to tone down terrorism warnings in President Clinton's speeches.

"In 1995, when President Clinton was about to speak to the United Nations, I wrote a speech draft for him that included an explicit condemnation of rogue nations North Korean, Iran, Iraq and Libya," former White House insider Dick Morris told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly Thursday night.

"And the National Security Council under Richard Clarke took it out of the speech."

When Clinton gave another speech in California a few months later, Morris said he put the same language in, and Clarke's NSC took it out again.

Finally, Morris said, Clinton told him he wanted the terrorism language in his next speech, and to fax it to him directly to keep Clarke out of the loop.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Morris said, "Clarke didn't take terrorism that seriously in the first term. Nobody in the Clinton administration did."

Morris said that whatever attention the terrorist threat did get was Clinton's doing, not Clarke's.

In his old boss' second term, the terrorist threat might have loomed larger but for the two women in Clinton's life, maintained Morris.

"Let me say something that nobody has the guts to say right now," he told O'Reilly. "The reason that the United States didn't do anything [about terrorism] in the second Clinton term was because of impeachment, Monica Lewinsky, and then getting Hillary elected to the Senate."

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