WASHINGTON, 26 March 2004 — A former counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents claimed that President George W. Bush had not done enough to protect the country from terrorists.

At an extraordinary series of hearings into the Sept. 11 attacks, Richard Clarke accused the Bush administration Wednesday of scaling back the campaign against Osama Bin Laden before the attacks and undermining the fight against terrorism by invading Iraq.

Under questioning, Clarke said the Clinton administration had “no higher priority” than combating terrorists while the Bush administration made it “an important issue but not an urgent issue” in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

Clarke’s criticism contradicted testimony given to the panel Tuesday and Wednesday from Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. All said the administration grasped the threat posed by Al-Qaeda and was working hard to fight it.

Clarke’s appearance raised partisan tensions in the commission. While Democrats offered praise, Republicans questioned Clarke’s integrity, morality and candor. They also suggested his criticism was intended to spur sales of a new book on the subject by Clarke or boost the candidacy of Bush’s likely challenger in the November vote, Sen. John Kerry.

The White House took the unusual step of identifying Clarke as the senior official who had praised Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts in an anonymous briefing for reporters in 2002.

At the hearing, Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, held up Clarke’s book and a text of the briefing and challenged the witness, “We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?”

Clarke said both were true. He was still working for Bush at the time of the briefing and was asked to highlight the positive aspects of the administration’s counterterrorism efforts and minimize the negative, he said.

Meanwhile, a senior State Department official told Congress this week that despite shortcomings, Saudi Arabia remains a stalwart US ally in the global war against terrorism. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, and particularly after last year’s suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi authorities have taken numerous steps to crack down on terrorist financing, including some that are “among the most restrictive measures” in the world, said Cofer Black, the department’s counterterrorism coordinator.

“We have such a like-minded counterterrorism ally in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Black told a House International Relations Subcommittee on Wednesday. “It is clear that the Saudi government ‘gets it’ when it comes to terrorism. Their performance has not been flawless, and they have a large task before them, but we see clear evidence of the seriousness of purpose and the commitment of the leadership of the Kingdom to this fight,” he said.