Richard Clarke As Hero

Richard Reeves - He comes across, in both appearance and in interviews, as arrogant, tough to get along with, a loner who spent hours one early morning working out the precise wording of his public apology to the families of Sept. 11 victims. He is also smart as hell and is telling very unpleasant truth in a critical whirl of many truths -- and many lies.

I laugh when I hear that he is "profiteering," dissing the president to sell his book. He may make a few bucks now, but he will surely lose a lot later. But whistle-blowers don't do it for the money. More often than not they pay a high price economically and in their private lives, losing friends and family. Who hires the disloyal? Who can stand living with someone ducking scorn, tomatoes and death threats?

"If you buck the system, you are almost inevitably going to be destroyed. ... To keep the rest of us in line, established power had to make brutal examples of those who dared to challenge the order of things. In the end, though, it wasn't sad. Because some of us would not bend, the rest of us had the small measure of freedom that came with the tiny chance that we might be the next one to stand up."

I still believe that, and this as well: Clarke is important because he is revealing the secrets the government held before Sept. 11, 2001. If those "secrets" -- threats and dangers, not intelligence procedures -- had been shared with the American people by their leaders, there might not have been catastrophic tragedy that day.