Mr. Clarke

yeah, Hadley looked like a sacrificial lamb out there in his Sally Jesse rapheal glasses, I think he was expecting Ashton Kutcher to jump out and tell him "Hadley dude, guess what bro, you've just been PUNK'D!!"

I bet that this is likely a career ending interview for him although he was just following orders (to lie), most likely.

 

LOL!

 

Couple of observations here:

1.) Hadley said, "I stand by my statement." He didn't just try to change the subject. His next statement was "You're missing the point..."

2.) He also negated Clarke's assertion that his report came back refused with "Wrong Answer" written across it. Hadley's claim was that he said, "Keep it updated" instead. That is very sensible.

A lot of Clarke's assertions are speculative.

 

Giddyup, is essentially wrong in his conclusions, though right with his quotes. The stricken look on Hadley's face, when busted, said it all. He came back weakly with "I stand by my statment". What was he going to do? Break down and confess.

After his credibility was shot with those woho aren't true believers, . It is sort of hard to give much credibility to his "needed updating" claim.

I've got to disagree with Sam. I think Hadley just cemented his status as a Bush lifer. He's got Condoleeza's job if she moves on.

 

Clarke Kent
He's no mild-mannered reporter -- more like a human bulldozer -- but Richard Clarke also appears to have ducked into a phone both and come out a changed man. The former career securocrat has ripped off his suit and tie and put on his tights and cape. And he's going after Shrub like Superman going after one of his many imposters:

"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."

That's what's going out on 60 Minutes Sunday night, when Clarke's interview with Leslie Stahl is aired. What effect it will have on Bush's entirely undeserved public reputation as an anti-terrorism gunslinger is anybody's guess. Ditto for Clarke's book, due for release on Monday. But there's no question Clarke is giving the White House the Lex Luthor treatment.

Now maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I find this rather remarkable. Clarke is a SES man -- Senior Executive Service, the top tier of the career civil service -- and one who has served seven presidents, five of them Republicans. I can't recall any previous examples of a career executive of Clarke's rank and caliber going so publicly ballistic on a sitting president.

True, there was a right-wing FBI man seconded to the White House who wrote a smear job on Clinton, but my recollection is that the guy was just a field agent, and a G. Gordon Liddy wannabe to boot. But for a senior career guy like Clarke -- one who has worked directly under some of the most important appointed policymakers in the government -- to make such blunt, damning statements about his former superiors, while they're still in office, and on a critical national security issue ... well, maybe there's precedent, somewhere back in the Nixon or Johnson administrations, but I can't think of it.

Actually, the only comparable incident I can recall involved a military man, Gen. John Singlaub, an ultraconservative and deeply politicized general who blasted Jimmy Carter in a 1977 interview with the Washington Post for his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea. Singlaub, the chief of staff of the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, was relieved of his command. Carter, however, eventually cancelled the troop withdrawal.

Hawk vs. "Hawk"

The Clarke case isn't comparable, although I'm sure the GOP propaganda mill won't waste much time trying to "redefine" him as a wimpy liberal Democrat on the Kerry payroll. (In fact it's already started.) But Singlaub was a national security ultrahawk taking aim at a dovish president. Clarke is a national security ultrahawk taking aim at a hawkish president.

As a journalist, I never dealt with Clarke personally (anti-terrorism was never one of my beats) but a fellow reporter who did, on a number of occasions, describes him as a ferocious national security hardliner, openly contemptuous of most Democrats on the Hill, and critical, to the point of being abusive, of the FBI and the CIA:

Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, said people at the agency "resented" Clarke "because he was a hands-on bureaucratic guerrilla who rode roughshod over the bureaucracies." Cannistraro acknowledged, however, that such an approach is sometimes useful.
Cannistraro knew Clarke during his tenure as deputy chief of intelligence and research at the National Security Council, where Clarke "often came up with questionable proposals for covert action," Cannistraro said. "He was contemptuous of the bureaucracy, and this attitude earned him few friends.


Clarke was (is?) also close to Steven Emerson, a former CNN reporter turned terrorism "expert," who in the years leading up to 9/11 made a cottage industry out of his "American jihad" investigations, which at times came dangerously close to labeling all Arab-Americans as members of a terrorist Fifth Column. Emerson, in turn, has ties to the Likud Party, the Project for a New American Century, right-wing security extremists like Frank Gaffney and James Woolsey, etc.

Birds of a Feather

In other words, up until the time he left the Bush administration, Clarke appeared to have a personal and policy profile not so very different from the neocons in and around the Bush Administration. And like them, he's never shown much reluctance about the use of U.S. military power -- even when the intelligence backing that use is dubious. Clarke is widely credited, for example, with persuading Clinton to retaliate for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa by demolishing a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory -- a factory, it turned out later, that was engaged in the nefarious business of producing anti-malarial drugs. The Clintonites later tried to block a U.N. investigation of the site.

Following the Khartoum strike (and perhaps because of the embarrassment it created for Clinton?) Clarke focused more heavily on his duties as the federal government's designated "cyberczar," responsible for preventing a digital Pearl Harbor -- a massive attack on sensitive computer and telecommunications systems that could cripple the U.S. economy.

All very futuristic, and therefore scary, and Clarke and his team certainly knew how to make the threat sound urgent. But it appears there are more than a few computer security analysts who think Clarke hyped the threat, and kept hyping it, right up the moment he resigned from the government.

In his farewell e-mail to the troops, for example, Clarke claimed the 2003 "Sapphire Worm" had led to the cancellation of a Canadian national election, and disabled "some root servers, the heart of Internet traffic." These claims were quickly shown to be rather exaggerated.

But of course, 9/11 certainly validated the old line about even paranoids having real enemies. And, as the Clarke and his people point out, the cyberwar threat is only going to increase as the global economy becomes more wired. Worrying about cyber-terrorism now may be as smart as worrying about, oh, say, the threat of suicidal terrorist hijackers would have been in the late 1990s.

Which means my observations about Clarke's track record aren't intended to slam his credibility -- even if his reputation as a gifted counter-terrorism guru is a little exaggerated. Rather, I wanted to highlight the fact that Clarke's attack on Bush (and by extension, on the neocons) appears to be totally at odds with his ideological sympathies -- and, probably, with his old partisan loyalties as well.

Cassandra Complex

So what's going on here? Is this all about the righteous wrath of a policy Cassandra -- one who tried to warn the Mayberrys about the approach of the real threatening storm but was ignored? There's certainly been plenty of evidence presented to back that story line.

And now Clarke has added a vivid picture of Shrub the simple-minded CEO, demanding that his underlings tell him exactly what he wants to hear:

"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."


The Enron president, trying to fight an Enron war.

Now this allegation is so bad it's already thrown the White House into full-blown Watergate mode -- complete with non-denial denials from Mr. Uranium:

As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, [Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen] 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."


Why do I get the feeling that particular stand will be rendered "inoperative" before long?

Slime and Pretend

At the moment, the VRWC seems to be having a hell of a time figuring out how to try to spin Clarke. They do repeatedly refer to him as a "Clinton Administration official," and imply, if not flat out accuse him, trying to hustle a quick buck off a scandal book (something no decent Republican whistleblower would ever dream of doing). But the machine keeps breaking gear teeth on Clarke's distressing tendency to call 'em like he sees 'em -- and not just about his former masters in the Bush White House. Here's NewsMax's attempt to turn that trait into a liability:

In a "60 Minutes" interview set to air Sunday night, Clarke blasts Bush for doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism."
But just a year ago Clarke was singing a different tune, telling reporter Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," that it was the Clinton administration - not team Bush - that had dropped the ball on bin Laden.


The slimeballs really are going to have to do a lot better than that if they want to impeach Clarke's credibility, since it flatly contradicts the other main conservative attack line -- about Clarke being a Democratic weenie in disguise. In fact it gives his charges against Bush even greater non-partisan credibility.

Well, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the people who read NewsMax. But for the rest of the American population, the non-lobotimized part, Clarke's assault may finally begin to crack their stubborn will to believe that when it comes to fighting terrorism, Bush actually knows what he's doing -- as opposed to his completely clueless handling of all the other aspects of his presidency.

Which means the slime-and-defend brigade is going to have to work overtime to come up with some new Kryptonite to throw at our new superhero. They've got to figure out an alternative to the Clarke-as-the-righteous-Cassandra story line. And it's not going to be easy, since it actually seems to be the truth.

Not that that's ever stopped them before.

link

 

Anybody would have a stricken look on their face when corrected in front of a camera like that-- whether or not it was true. It was a kind of one-upmanship on her part.

I thought Clarke was very believable. I thought his most telling commentary was the Cold War frame of mind that he felt this Administration brought to the table. As I said earlier, though, much of it is just his opinion. He quotes the president as asking IF there is a connection between Iraq and 9/11 but what he takes away is the feeling of a mandate to establish such a connection. That is a stretch.

I just don't know that it is an indictable offense. Clarke said he couldn't get the Clinton Administration to implement his plans to take out OBL either. Yes, they gave him a cabinet-level position, but they were on watch when the Towers were first bombed and also for the bombing of the Cole. They were more naturally wary. Things had calmed down for awhile by the time GWB took office.

 

And a lot of them are true, which means the Bush Administration has a lot of explaining to do to the American people.

 

For What its worth.. here's the White House Rebuttal by Condi Rice in today's Washington Post


9/11: For The Record


By Condoleezza Rice

Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A21


The al Qaeda terrorist network posed a threat to the United States for almost a decade before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout that period -- during the eight years of the Clinton administration and the first eight months of the Bush administration prior to Sept. 11 -- the U.S. government worked hard to counter the al Qaeda threat.

During the transition, President-elect Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda. The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals. In response to my request for a presidential initiative, the counterterrorism team, which we had held over from the Clinton administration, suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted. No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.

We adopted several of these ideas. We committed more funding to counterterrorism and intelligence efforts. We increased efforts to go after al Qaeda's finances. We increased American support for anti-terror activities in Uzbekistan.

We pushed hard to arm the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle so we could target terrorists with greater precision. But the Predator was designed to conduct surveillance, not carry weapons. Arming it presented many technical challenges and required extensive testing. Military and intelligence officials agreed that the armed Predator was simply not ready for deployment before the fall of 2001. In any case, the Predator was not a silver bullet that could have destroyed al Qaeda or stopped Sept. 11.

We also considered a modest spring 2001 increase in funding for the Northern Alliance. At that time, the Northern Alliance was clearly not going to sweep across Afghanistan and dispose of al Qaeda. It had been battered by defeat and held less than 10 percent of the country. Only the addition of American air power, with U.S. special forces and intelligence officers on the ground, allowed the Northern Alliance its historic military advances in late 2001. We folded this idea into our broader strategy of arming tribes throughout Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban.

Let us be clear. Even their most ardent advocates did not contend that these ideas, even taken together, would have destroyed al Qaeda. We judged that the collection of ideas presented to us were insufficient for the strategy President Bush sought. The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or "roll back" the threat. Once in office, we quickly began crafting a comprehensive new strategy to "eliminate" the al Qaeda network. The president wanted more than occasional, retaliatory cruise missile strikes. He told me he was "tired of swatting flies."

Through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda -- which was expected to take years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived. It focused on the crucial link between al Qaeda and the Taliban. We would attempt to compel the Taliban to stop giving al Qaeda sanctuary -- and if it refused, we would have sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime. The strategy focused on the key role of Pakistan in this effort and the need to get Pakistan to drop its support of the Taliban. This became the first major foreign-policy strategy document of the Bush administration -- not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda.

Before Sept. 11, we closely monitored threats to our nation. President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of the CIA every day -- meetings that I attended. And I personally met with George Tenet regularly and frequently reviewed aspects of the counterterror effort.

Through the summer increasing intelligence "chatter" focused almost exclusively on potential attacks overseas. Nonetheless, we asked for any indication of domestic threats and directed our counterterrorism team to coordinate with domestic agencies to adopt protective measures. The FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration alerted airlines, airports and local authorities, warning of potential attacks on Americans.

Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to free U.S.-held terrorists. The FAA even issued a warning to airlines and aviation security personnel that "the potential for a terrorist operation, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States, remains a concern."

We now know that the real threat had been in the United States since at least 1999. The plot to attack New York and Washington had been hatching for nearly two years. According to the FBI, by June 2001 16 of the 19 hijackers were already here. Even if we had known exactly where Osama bin Laden was, and the armed Predator had been available to strike him, the Sept. 11 hijackers almost certainly would have carried out their plan. So, too, if the Northern Alliance had somehow managed to topple the Taliban, the Sept. 11 hijackers were here in America -- not in Afghanistan.

President Bush has acted swiftly to unify and streamline our efforts to secure the American homeland. He has transformed the FBI into an agency dedicated to catching terrorists and preventing future attacks. The president and Congress, through the USA Patriot Act, have broken down the legal and bureaucratic walls that prior to Sept. 11 hampered intelligence and law enforcement agencies from collecting and sharing vital threat information. Those who now argue for rolling back the Patriot Act's changes invite us to forget the important lesson we learned on Sept. 11.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the president, like all Americans, wanted to know who was responsible. It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Because of President Bush's vision and leadership, our nation is safer. We have won battles in the war on terror, but the war is far from over. However long it takes, this great nation will prevail.

The writer is the national security adviser.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13881-2004Mar21.html

 

a point borne out by woodward's book.

 

I would love to cross examine or depose you, it would be a joy.

The conclusions (maybe we'd have prevented sept 11 if bush had...etc) might be subjective, but his assertions (about meetings, quotes, etc) are factual, and based on first hand recollections, and tell us a lot about the administration.

 

Kind of weird for her to end her piece with this third person self-reference, don't ya think?

She's written a sensible statement here. I think some of the criticism of the administration is unjustified, BUT the emerging picture of the Iraq War is worse than I had thought. It is interesting to note that she avoids defending the pre-emptive war in her remarks, and she avoids addressing the centerpiece of Mr. Clarke's criticisms concerning the Iraq obsessions.

 

And may I also remind readers that Ms Rice's piece is an opinion piece.

 

I would like to add that it appears that Rice's opinion is that she needs to cover her (and her boss') a$$(es).

 

Here's a link to the interview in case you missed it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml

Some of the more incredible quotes:

 

Clarke has an agenda to pursue and he's using the anti-Bush, liberally biased media to affect his agenda. He suffers from a case of sour grapes and he's hawking a book, which explains why we didn't hear anything about this until now. He's about as credible as Kentucky's title hopes.

 

You have absolutely no basis to question his credibilty other than the fact that what he says conflicts with your world of makebelieve.

Tell me, when he goes before the 9-11 commission and gives sworn tesimony, punishable by perjury as to these exact same facts and circumstances, most of which (concerning meetings, etc) would seem to be fairly easily verifiable, will you persist in this accusation or will you switch to a new rationalization (reverse psychology, perhaps)?

 

Absolutely. It corroborates statements by other administration officials like Rand Beers, Cofer Black, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Sy Hersh's articles, Ken Pollack's articles, Milt Bearden's articles, the Army War College report, the list goes on and on and on and on, literally.