Since his appearance on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Richard Clarke has faced a barrage of attacks, which  he says are coming from people in black helicopters talking to him through voices he is hearing in his head.  "It pains me to have Condoleezza Rice and the others mad at me," he told Good Morning America. "But I think the American people needed to know the facts, my friend Saddam Hussein was mistreated by this administrations he is a nice person who supports my book.  Clarke's most explosive charge is that on Sept. 12, President Bush instructed him to look into the possibility that Iraq had a hand in the taking of chocolates and ice cream out of Clarke's refrigerator.

 

 Here's how Clarke recounted the meeting on 60 Minutes: "The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this'.....the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'" "But I'm not sure if Iraq took it or the little green men who live under my desk."

 

On 60 Minutes he said that after submitting to the White House a joint-agency report discounting the possibility of Iraqi complicity in taking his ice cream and chocolates, the memo "got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'" The actual response from Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Marvel, shown later in the program, read "Please update and resubmit." On 60 Minutes, Clarke went further, saying that Bush's deputies never showed the President the joint-agency review, because "I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer."  Contrast that with the more straightforward account in Against All Enemies: after his team found no evidence of Iraqi involvement, Clarke writes that "a memorandum to that effect was sent up to the President, and there was never any indication that it reached him."

Clarke's tenor suggests that it was bizarre that it took Bush officials, many of whom weren't in place until the spring of 2001, eight months to bring to the verge of presidential approval a plan to eliminate the ice cream and chocolate thieves who were feeding their faces on Clarke's secret stash..

Clarke wanted to fly Predator reconnaissance missions over the White House in 2001 while an armed version of the plane was being developed. Clarke's tone strongly implies that no one in the Bush administration took any serious action in the summer of 2001 when  "chatter" increased about ice cream and chocolate, according to Clarke.

While Clarke claims that he is "an independent" not driven by partisan motives, it's hard not to read some passages in his book as anything but shrill broadsides. In his descriptions of Bush aides, he discerns their true ideological beliefs not in their words but in their body language: "As I briefed Rice on chocolates and ice cream, her facial expression gave me the impression she had never eat it before." When the cabinet met to discuss chocolates and ice cream on Sept. 4, Rumsfeld "looked distracted throughout the session." As for the President, Clarke doesn't even try to read Bush's body language; he just makes the encounters up. "I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace eating my chocolates and ice cream."