There are ways to get tough with Iraq which don't include invasion. As for an urgency to our focus, I wish that is what would have happened after 9/11. Instead our focus has been diffused by going into Iraq, rather than fight the war on terror.
I guess we have nothing further to discuss. No, wait. I will add my own qualifier; Iraq was invaded to pad the pockets of WH cronies. If you can't understand that, we have nothing further to discuss. To establish a very debatable point of contention as the basis for any future discussion, especially when that discussion itslef revolves around that very point is a non-starter. I don't necessarily believe the point about padding the pockets, but merely used it to illustrate the logical flaw in your position, and to hopefully demonstrate how it is read by someone who very much doesn't see Iraq as part of the war on terror, and who sees that as a central point they have made several times. To simply state, contrary to all evidence, the reverse as a starting point for any future discussion is silly. And the Clinton stuff doesn't bait me; I said he should have been booted from office, and voted against him the 1st time. And, lastly, why is it that anytime any of the government officials who have spoken out against the war do so, war supporters will lay the blame at the years they worked under a Democrat, and overlook the years they worked under Republicans? What is the basis for the assumption that this is an attemtp at a partisan shift in blame, when the persons themselves worked under both parties? Are the only people whose accounts of events we can trust those who are currently in power?
Josh Marshall again... _________________ "Richard A. Clarke said in a television interview airing Sunday that Bush 'ignored terrorism for months' before the 2001 attacks, then looked to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan, the nation harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks." That's from Bloomberg. It is fair to say that anyone who has seriously reported on this issue, or has read a lot of the good reporting on it, already knows this: namely, that the incoming Bush administration downgraded the attention given to terrorism and al Qaida specifically in the last years of the Clinton administration, and this after being warned by out-going members of the Clinton team that combatting al Qaida should be at the top of their agenda. In short, they pushed al Qaida and a lot of resources aimed at fighting al Qaida to the backburner until the whole thing blew up in their faces on 9/11. Their focus, as we've noted before, was on the centrality of states rather than shadowy transnational terrorist groups -- thus their preoccuption with issues like national missile defense. In any case, as I say, we've basically known this. But it's another thing to have the person who was there at the center of the action as NSC counter-terrorism czar -- both under Clinton and Bush -- saying on camera that the president ignored terrorism and al Qaida right up until the day of the attacks. Clarke was there. In fact, to the extent that Bush and Rice and Cheney and the rest of the team were ignoring the issue, it would have been Clarke's urgent warnings they were ignoring -- since he was the head of counter-terrorism on the NSC staff. White House Spokesman Sean McCormick told the New York Times: "The president and his team received briefings on the threat from al-Qaida prior to taking office, and fighting terrorism became a top priority when this administration came into office. We actively pursued the Clinton administration's policies on al-Qaida until we could get into place a more comprehensive policy." But Clark says that's baloney. And he was the one who headed up Clinton's counter-terrorism policies and Bush's. So who are you going to believe? Now do you understand why they're stonewalling the 9/11 commission? And while we're discussing the commission, why do they even really need to stonewall it? Consider this passage from a piece in today's Times ... They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others. One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led. At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed. "It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser. Now we know about Rice and Hadley, her deputy. But how about Zelikow? He's a former NSC official from the first Bush administration and a close associate of Rice's. The two of them even wrote a book together. He was in the key meetings where the warnings -- seemingly ignored -- about al Qaida came up. He seems like someone you'd want to talk to to find out what they were warned about and why they didn't take the warnings more seriously. Well, you don't have to look far to find him. He runs the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow is the Executive Director of the Commission, which means he has operational control of the investigation under the overall management of the two co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton. Now, Zelikow is no hack. He's an accomplished Republican foreign policy hand. But Condi Rice and what happened in the hand-off between the administrations is central to the whole 9/11 investigation enterprise. Does it make sense to have the guy who's running the investigation be one of her close professional colleagues? The 9/11 families didn't think so either. -- Josh Marshall
Yeah, here's one: why is the Bush Administration supposed to take these warnings so seriously when the Clinton Administration was rather passive about Al Qaeda?
Once again, Clinton spent more time and money on terrorism than ANY other pre-9/11 president in history. Sorry, but that "Clinton was passive about Al Qaeda" dog won't hunt when you face facts. EDIT: For God's sake, Clinton was doing the right thing by NOT starting a war that he would have to hand off. Instead, he gave the incoming administration dire warnings about Al Qaeda and urged them to do something. Those warnings went unheeded and the terrorism budget was slashed, contributing to the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen.
Seems like, if your assertion was true, that the Bush Administration would take it more seriously. If they'd been so passive about Al Qaeda, then the fact that they were concerned enough about what they saw in the intelligence to warn the next administration, then it was something that should've made the Bush team concerned. Of course, the assertion isn't true...
ultimately, you can't have it both ways. you cannot argue that the incoming Bush administration ignored dire warnings about the threat from al queda, and also argue that the clinton administration has nothing to answer for in that regard. if the threat was indeed that severe, clinton should have acted himself, rather than passing the buck. on the other hand, we know from clinton's own statements how severely he viewed the threat from iraq. once cannot then turn around and fault bush for taking that threat seriously. if the arguement is that bush focused on iraq at the expense of al queda, it patently isn't true. why can there only be one "focus?" one might as well argue bush focused on the economy at the expense of al queda. it's a fallacious arguement on it's face. the real "scandal" here, if indeed there is one, is that Bush had to clean up Clinton's mess. i don't necesarily believe that to be true, but it's as useful an arguement as the one most of you are trying to make.
More from CBS News... I love the defense of Bush, who intuitively knows (through God's will?) that there might be an attack on the Homeland... and isn't it interesting that the Bushies downgraded the prominence of Clarke's position? _______________ Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link? March 20, 2004 In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one. The charge comes from the advisor, Richard Clarke, in an interview airing Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes. The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place. Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda. "Frankly," he said, "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. Maybe. We'll never know." Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees. He says Mr. Bush has taken the fight to the terrorists, and is making the U.S. homeland safer. Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking. Clarke is due to testify next week before the special panel probing whether the attacks were preventable. His allegations are also made in a book, "Against All Enemies," which is being published Monday by Simon & Schuster. Both CBSNews.com and Simon & Schuster are units of Viacom. Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorrism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush. In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11. When the terrorists stuck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing. "I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America," he tells Stahl. After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq. "Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it. "Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection." Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush. "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.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But 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. "I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' "He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report." Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.' "I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer." Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously. "We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months. "There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on. "I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years." Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz. Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' "And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over." By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August. Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject." Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11." In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden. Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl. "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'" Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001. "All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.' "And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations." Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration didn't go to battle stations. As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said." Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists." When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar. When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House, Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank. Stahl said to Clarke, "They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes, because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?" Clarke's answer: "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit." Until two years later, after 30 years in government service. A senior White House official told 60 Minutes he thinks the Clarke book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.
if the arguement is that bush focused on iraq at the expense of al queda, it patently isn't true. Except that it is in some ways. Army personnel complained early in the Iraq war that their intelligence resources to track Al Queda had been moved to Iraq. The special forces teams that caught Hussein are only now being moved to hunt for OBL. It isn't the soldiers so much as the support system. Notice the renewed offensive on Afghanistan this spring. Why didn't it happen last spring? Perhaps because our focus was on moving resources to Iraq? And this ignores the ally issue. If you accept that we need Europe's help to hunt down AQ in that region, and you accept that Bush alienated many countries (or certainly their populations) with the Iraq stuff - both of which are reasonable assumptions - then that means we're less likely to get maximum cooperation from those countries when we're need to push the limits or doing borderline activities there.
Basso, I agree in part with what you are saying about Clinton and Al Qaeda. In hindsight it's obvious that he should have done more. But we can still attack the Bush administration on this, because they did even less than the Clinton administration. In fact they immediately started putting other programs like the pointless missle defense shield ahead of terrorism and spent their money on that. Clinton did not pursue something so silly, and as has been, mentioned spent more on fighting terrorism than any other pre 9-11 president. As for Iraq, getting tough with them was a good idea, and if Bush had pursued the inspections that his strong speech to the UN allowed to be continued again, that would have been great. I would have admired him, and said that is what we needed all along. Bush did great up until that point of making the UN take their resolutions seriously. Iraq would've been so hemmed in, that their non-existent WMD's wouldn't have been built, and we could have pushed harder on Hussein. As we all know that isn't what happened. Many lives, billions of dollars, and the loss of U.S.'s credibility later we are stuck in the position we are in now.
Really? Patently isn't true? Well if its patently not true then you'll have no trouble providing support for it. Unfortunately that will be somewhat difficult as scores of individuals and entities from within and without the administration have made this charge, such as: a report published by the Army War College (I know, it's foolish trusting them over basso, but...) [iraq war] "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al Qaeda." http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.pdf the right leaning cato institute: Rather than needlessly resurrecting and antagonizing such enemies[axis of evil] - none of whom have attacked the U.S. homeland or present a direct threat to U.S. national security - and putting them in a position where conflict seems a foregone conclusion, the United States needs to first finish the job against the those who did attack the country and still represent a real threat to inflict great harm: the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Their training camps in Afghanistan may be destroyed, but the worldwide network - operating in more than 60 countries - is still largely intact. Their leader is still presumably alive, as is most of the rest of the leadership. Instead of being pre-occupied with perceived unfinished business with other countries, the United States needs to remain focused on the business at hand. The United States can ill-afford to be tilting at windmills while Al Qaeda remains at large and able to operate. http://www.cato.org/dailys/02-22-02.html Hamid Karzai "Stay with us" http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/02/26/us.afghan/ as well as numerous soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan from around the tiime of the war (can't find the link) expressing that concern. Also, former CIA agents Robert Baer and Milt Bearden have voiced concern about this as well.
Clinton DID act, as evidenced by the fact that he spent more on terrorism and anti-terrorism than any other president in history to that point. He didn't want to saddle the incoming administration with a war that he started at the 11th hour, so he instead warned the new administration of the threats posed by said terrorists. If Clinton "passed the buck," it was done to try to help the next administration as well as to avoid more of the "Wag the Dog" cries from the Congress (you know, the same cries we heard when Clinton DID try to take out terrorists). There is no evidence that Clinton took the "threat" from Iraq as seriously as he did bin Laden. By all accounts, bin Laden was at the top of Clinton's hit list and it is pretty evident that this was communicated to the Bush White House. Bush CHOSE to ignore the threat and then CHOSE to widen the net to include Iraq, despite the fact that the administration had to manipulate "intelligence" in order to drum up support. Clinton did the right thing by avoiding a war (which would have been called "passing the buck" by you guys) in order to let the next administration deal with it. We are talking about just 2 months before Bush took office, after Gore had already lost. I guess the facts are too much for you ostriches to handle.
This bears repeating... "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.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But 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. "I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' "He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report." If, on September 11 and the days that followed, the career professionals had not convinced Bush and Rumsfeld that the threat lay in Afghanistan, we would currently be in Iraq while the Taliban would still be in control of major parts of Afghanistan and Osama would be free and roaming about the countryside doing who knows what. Thank goodness Clarke and the CIA guys were in the room to explain how to be tough on terror... Oh, wait... Still, going after Iraq immediately in the aftermath would have been a much worse course of action... think for just a moment that the Secretary of Defense and many people around the President, including the president himself, wanted to bomb Iraq... bomb a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, bomb innocent civilians who were not even guilty through their association with the nation-state they happen to live... and leave Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban completely untouched. In other news, here's Josh Marshall again with a very good point about how the world view of Bush and his people led to mistakes, cover-ups, and lies... ______________ As Talleyrand said of the restored Bourbons, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing during their time in exile. So too with the foreign policy coterie President Bush brought back from the cold in January 2001. One chilling note in this passage is that Paul Wolfowitz, the prime architect and idea man of the second Iraq war, spent the early months of the Bush administration focused on "Iraqi terrorism against the United States", something that demonstrably did not even exist. A rather bad sign. The bigger point, however, is this. The first months of the Bush administration were based on a fundamental strategic miscalcuation about the source of the greatest threats to the United States. They were, as Clark suggests, stuck in a Cold War mindset, focused on Cold War problems, though the terms of debate were superficially reordered to make them appear to address a post-Cold War world. That screw up is a reality -- their inability to come clean about it is, I suspect, is at the root of all the covering up and stonewalling of the 9/11 commission. And Democrats are both right and within their rights to call the White House on it. But screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them. Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it. As the international relations expert John Ikenberry noted aptly in a recent essay, the Bush hardliners "fancy themselves tough-minded thinkers. But they didn't have the courage of their convictions to level with the American people on what this geopolitical adventure in Iraq was really about and what it would cost." To revert again to paraphrases of Talleyrandian wisdom, this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake -- though I suspect that when the full story is told, we'll see that it was both. -- Josh Marshall
Why does a veteran of the Reagan years hate American now? How could he have been so patriotic, and then suddenly become a traitor?
He is totally savaging the administration! And lesley stahl just busted this Hadley guy from the admin for lying. This is really amazing, I didn't know it was going to be this bad!
What are you talking about? Hate America? Traitor? I'm not saying that this Clarke guy is telling the truth, but he has a right to speak. And its not unpatriotic to criticize the administration.... should we have arrested Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for exposing Watergate...or Linda Tripp for outing Clinton? Or maybe you were being sarcastic, in which case, never mind. Go vandy.
And lesley stahl just busted this Hadley guy from the admin for lying. Sam, the whole interview was amazing. The Hadley lie was particularly incredible. Hadley who apparently is Condoleeza's second in command was looking smooth when Leslie sprang the trap. Stahl referred to Clarke's assertion that shortly after 9/11, in a conversation Clarke told Bush that the CIA, FBI and he as counterintelligence chief found no connection between al 9/11 and Iraq. Bush then told him "9/11, Sadam find out if there is a connection". According to Clarke this was done threateningly and it was clear to him what Bush wanted him to find a connection.. I taped it and this is a near verbatim account. Hadely (smoothly and confidently) : "We cannot find evidence of that conversation" Stahl" Well we've done our own research. Two sources independent of Clarke verified the conversation. One was an eye witness" Poor Hadley he looked so trapped. He then tried to change the subject and Leslie let him. Nevertheless, Busted!!!! Another damaging statement was that when Clarke submitted a report that was signed off by the CIA. FBI and his group showing no 9/11- Iraq link that it was bounced back for revision and that when they resubmitted it with the same conclusions. He believes the staff does not allow Bush to see memos Bush wouldn't like to see so that Bush probably never got the report.
