New York, March 21 (Reuters): A former White House anti-terrorism adviser has accused President George W. Bush of ignoring terrorism threats before the September 11 attacks and of making America less safe.

Richard Clarke, Bush’s top official on counter-terrorism who headed a cyber security board, told CBS 60 Minutes in an interview he thought Bush had “done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.”

“I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11,” Clarke told CBS.

Clarke, who was an adviser to four presidents, says in a book to be published next week that the Bush administration should have taken out al Qaida and its training camps in Afghanistan long before the attacks of September 11, for which the militant network was blamed. “I think the way he has responded to al Qaida, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he’s done after 9/11, has made us less safe,” Clarke told CBS.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the Bush administration followed former President Bill Clinton’s policy on al Qaida until it had developed its own terrorism strategy.

In a transcript of an NBC News interview, made available by the White House yesterday, Rice said terrorism was a high priority for Bush from the outset of his term. “We did pursue the Clinton administration policy and pursued it actively, until we could get in a place a more comprehensive policy — not to roll back al Qaida — but to eliminate al Qaida,” Rice said.

She said Bush had only been in office 230 days when the September 11 attacks happened.

“Even if we had been able to do it in 190 days, or 150 days, it was a policy that our counterterrorism people told us was going to eliminate al Qaida over three to five years,” she said. “This was not something that was going to stop September 11th.”