Clinton Administration

WASHINGTON - While the world focuses on threats of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, one of the key figures in pulling America from the brink of nuclear war nearly 43 years ago now advocates "the elimination - or near-elimination - of all nuclear weapons." Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was part of President John F. Kennedy's inner circle that navigated the United States out of the fearful confrontation with the Soviet Union over its placing nukes in Cuba in 1962, calls for their abandonment in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

WASHINGTON - After three years of war and challenging the world to line up alongside the United States or "with the terrorists," President Bush is wrapping the hard edge of his second-term foreign policy in a softer message: freedom. Announcing his nomination of confidante Condoleezza Rice to become secretary of state, Bush highlighted his national security adviser's childhood in the segregated South, where "she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn." The president, in his remarks, continued to give top priority to fighting insurgents in Iraq, breaking up terror networks and curbing the spread of the world's deadliest weapons, reminding Americans that "we're a nation at war."

THE CLOSE of a president's term provides an ideal time to review his fiscal legacy and to compare it with his predecessor's. Let's ask which president, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, left the nation's fiscal house in better order. When President Bush took office, the federal government had just run a budget surplus for 2000 of more than $236 billion. In the eight years of the Clinton administration, the burden of the national debt on the average American family of four had fallen by $9,200, measured in constant 2003 dollars.

WASHINGTON - Surely it was an innocent mistake, former Clinton administration National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger's stuffing classified documents into his pants, his jacket and perhaps even his socks before leaving the National Archives building last fall. After all, what could he possibly have been trying to hide? Mr. Berger had been asked by President Bill Clinton to review documents that had been requested by the 9/11 commission relating to the Clinton administration's handling of terrorism.

WASHINGTON - Samuel R. Berger, a former Clinton national security adviser, quit as an adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign yesterday after he was revealed to be the subject of a criminal investigation for mishandling classified documents. Berger acknowledged he removed classified documents from the National Archives while reviewing them for submission to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. One former government official who reviewed the documents said they were marked "code-word secret" because they contained intercepts from the National Security Agency about possible terrorist threats in Jordan.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft, fresh from successful surgery on his innards, wasted no time in his appearance before the 9/11 commission demonstrating that his instinct for the jugular remains securely in place. Faced with a staff report indicating that the FBI under his jurisdiction was in disarray at the time of the terrorist attacks, and testimony by Thomas J. Pickard, former acting director of the FBI, that his boss had turned a deaf ear to the threat, Mr. Ashcroft boldly went into attack mode himself.

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9/11 commission Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft heatedly rejected assertions yesterday that he failed to make counterterrorism a priority or to improve a woefully inadequate FBI before the Sept. 11 attacks, declaring instead that the Clinton administration was to blame for any failures. Testifying before the 10-member bipartisan commission investigating the terrorist attacks, Ashcroft also said the Clinton-era Justice Department hampered the efforts of FBI agents to share information about threats to the country.

Text of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's statement, as prepared for delivery yesterday to the Sept. 11 commission. The text was provided by the White House. The terrorist threat to our nation did not emerge on September 11th, 2001. Long before that day, radical, freedom-hating terrorists declared war on America and on the civilized world. The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the rise of al-Qaida and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, these and other atrocities were part of a sustained, systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos and to murder innocent Americans.

WASHINGTON -- Condoleezza Rice faces not just the 9/11 commission but the specter of Richard A. Clarke, the disgruntled former White House counterterrorism expert who did his best to undermine the credibility of his former boss when he testified before the commission March 24. The main thrust of Mr. Clarke's testimony was that Ms. Rice and the entire Bush team were insufficiently attentive to terrorism as an imminent threat. And the media played right along, parroting Mr. Clarke's criticism with front-page news stories questioning Ms. Rice's pre-9/11 judgment.