He has worked in the intelligence field for decades over the course of SEVEN DIFFERENT ADMINISTRATIONS including Reagan and the elder Bush. You are totally deluded.
From today's WaPo... _______________ Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01 On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events. Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room. "Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this." "But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied. "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred." Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam." For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday. Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide." Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes. Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11. "I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism." On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange. Rice, in an opinion article published opposite The Washington Post editorial page today, writes: "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." White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated. Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of Bush's leading advisers arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he said, believed Clinton had been "overly obsessed with al Qaeda." During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda. He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight months. When deputies to the Cabinet officials took up the subject in April, Clarke writes, the meeting "did not go well." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, "why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden." When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda "poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed "at least as much" of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence. "I could hardly believe," Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the "totally discredited" theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, "a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue." Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb making and document forgery. "Given what George Tenet and Colin Powell have said publicly about Iraqi links to al Qaeda, I just find it hard to understand how Dick Clarke can be so dismissive of the possibility that there were links between them," Wolfowitz said. Like Tenet, Clarke was a Clinton holdover who faced initial skepticism from Bush loyalists. But Rice asked him to keep the counterterrorism portfolio and discouraged him from leaving in February 2003. In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis response. The next day, Clarke returned to find the subject changed to Iraq. "I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq," he writes. In discussions of military strikes, "Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan" -- where al Qaeda was based under protection of the Taliban -- "and that we should consider bombing Iraq." Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force. In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is "somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem." "Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot." "It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.
Clarke was on GMA this morning... via the Washington Post... _______________ ... "The president in a very intimidating way left us, me and my staff, with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11 because they had been planning to do something about Iraq from before the time they came into office." Clarke says: "I think they had a plan from day one they wanted to do something about Iraq. While the World Trade Center was still smoldering, while they were still digging bodies out, people in the White House were thinking: 'Ah! This gives us the opportunity we have been looking for to go after Iraq.' . . . "U.S. soldiers went to their death in Iraq, thinking that they were avenging 9/11, when Iraq had nothing to do with it. . . . They died for the president's own agenda which had nothing do with war on terrorism. In fact, by going into Iraq, the president has made the war on terrorism that much harder." Gibson asked how Clarke felt about turning around and attacking his former colleagues. "It pains me to do it," Clarke said. "It pains me to have Condoleezza Rice and others mad at me. But I think the American people needed to know the facts and they weren't out. Now they are."
Originally posted by SamFisher I would love to cross examine or depose you, it would be a joy. <b>I'm sure I wouldn't stand a chance against Perry Mason, Jr.</b> 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. <b>The subjectiveness I was speaking of was the "conversion" of Bush asking Clark "If there is a connection" to the wary feeling that he was told to "find a connection." He also said that Hadley told him "Wrong Answer," when Hadley said his instruction was to keep it updated. Those are both potentially wild interpretations.
Rice's statment and the pitiful lying by Hadley remind me of another funny moment. Rice was on Tim Russert, or one of the Sunday talk shows. She stuck to the Niger uranium story, but looked very unhappy doing so. The next day Bush admitted it wasn,t true. Poor Condoleeza
lmao! I am going to celebrate this jape since SamFisher attacked me recently and ended up getting my wonderful thread about Yao's parents LOCKED! I can forgive, but I will NEVER FORGET.
now it begins to get clearer: drudge repots viacom has a financial stake in clarke's book... http://www.drudgereport.com/ "Vice President Cheney On The Offensive on Rush Limbaugh Radio Show Monday, Responds To Clarke Book: 'He was clearly not in the loop'... On Condi: Clarke 'has a grudge, cause he wanted job she was not prepared to give him'... 'Clarke was there in the 90s -- and I don't see that they had any great success in fighting terrorism'..."
WTF!?!?!!! I thought you were the one who wanted remember happier days. F you then. It's back on, you anti marsupial bigot.
Before Sept. 11, Unshared Clues and Unshaped Policy By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 17, 2002; Page A01 On July 5 of last year, a month and a day before President Bush first heard that al Qaeda might plan a hijacking, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, according to two of those present. The group included the Federal Aviation Administration, along with the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer nonvital travel, put off scheduled exercises and place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks last summer, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness -- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack. That intensity -- defensive in nature -- did not last. By the time Bush received his briefing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, the government had begun to stand down from the alert. Offensive planning against al Qaeda remained in a mid-level interagency panel, which had spent half a year already in a policy review. The Deputies Committee, the second tier of national security officials, had not finished considering the emerging plan, and Bush's Cabinet-rank advisers were still a month away from their first meeting on terrorism. That took place Sept. 4, a week before hijacked planes were flown into the Pentagon and World Trade Center in synchronized attacks. What Bush and his government did with the information they had in August became the subject of a political brawl on Capitol Hill yesterday, largely shorn of the context of those weeks before Sept. 11. A close look at the sequence of events, based on lengthy interviews early this year with participants and fresh accounts yesterday, appears to support the White House view that Bush lacked sufficient warning to stop the attack. But it also portrays a new administration that gave scant attention to an adversary whose lethal ambitions and savvy had been well understood for years. Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had been "nearly frantic" with concern since June 22, according to one frequent interlocutor, and a written intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on June 28: "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." By late summer, one senior political appointee said, Tenet had "repeated this so often that people got tired of hearing it." The president's daily briefing, a CIA distillation of noteworthy current intelligence, seldom includes a threat "so important and so precise that everyone stops in their tracks" to head it off, one senior foreign policy official said yesterday. The reference to hijacking on Aug. 6, said another source with first-hand knowledge, was speculative and backed by no specific threat report more recent than 1998. But it is also true that Bush and his Cabinet advisers were not yet disposed to respond to al Qaeda as a first-tier national security threat. The alerts of the early and mid-summer -- described by two career counterterrorist officials as the most urgent in decades -- had faded to secondary concern by the time of Bush's extended Crawford vacation. As late as Sept. 9, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto when the Senate proposed to divert $600 million to counterterrorism from ballistic missile defense. "I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a problem," Bush said of Osama bin Laden in a Dec. 20 interview with The Washington Post. "I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency." One major U.S. government error before Sept. 11, according to some counterterrorist officials, was the FBI's failure to share its field reports from aviation schools. A senior FBI official attended Clarke's urgent White House meeting on July 5. He committed the bureau to redoubling contacts with its foreign counterparts and to speed up transcription and analysis of wiretaps obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among other steps. But when a field agent in Phoenix reported suspicions of a hijacking plot just five days later, the FBI did not share the report with any other agency. "I'm fit to be tied," said one top official from another agency. "People are saying we didn't connect the dots. It's awfully hard to connect the dots if people don't give you the dots." The July 10 report from Phoenix was a five-page electronic communication to headquarters outlining links between a group of suspected Middle Eastern terrorists and the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. The agent, whose name has not been divulged, suggested that the FBI should canvass U.S. flight schools for information on other Middle Eastern students. He speculated that bin Laden might be attempting to train operatives to infiltrate the aviation industry. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has acknowledged that the bureau should have responded more aggressively to that report. But the FBI did not share it within the interagency Counterterrorism Security Group, which had a "threat subgroup" meeting three times a week. According to sources, the Phoenix report reached no further than FBI headquarters and the New York field office. "Even today I get dozens of reports a day from the CIA and none from the FBI," said a government counterterrorism official. "When an FBI SAC [special agent in charge] sends in a message, it never leaves the bureau. In fact, they can still get in trouble if they show it to you." Mueller testified last week that the bureau is cooperating comprehensively with other agencies. He said none of the men under investigation in Arizona have been linked with the Sept. 11 attacks, and that the memo would not have led investigators to unravel the plot. The last concrete hijacking threat report, sources said, came in 1998. A son of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up tunnels and other New York City landmarks, was reported to say then that the best way to free his father from a U.S. prison might be to hijack an American plane and exchange the hostages. In the 10 weeks before Sept. 11, most of the thousands of intelligence leads pointed to an attack on Americans or their properties overseas. "Most of the al Qaeda network is anticipating an attack," said a highly classified analysis at the end of June. "Al Qaeda's overt publicity has also raised expectations among its rank and file, and its donors. We have increased security at U.S. facilities, warned Americans, threatened the Taliban, stretched intelligence collection efforts, caused the arrest of some of those al Qaeda members we have located, and placed consequence management teams on alert." On June 22, the military's Central and European Commands imposed "Force Protection Condition Delta," the highest anti-terrorist alert. The next day the State Department ordered all diplomatic posts to convene emergency action committees. The CIA, including the Rome station chief, said the most probable targets included the U.S. Embassy in Italy, the Genoa summit of the Group of Eight leaders in July, and the Vatican -- a threat that caused Bush to change the venue of his meeting with Pope John Paul II to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome. On July 3, Tenet made an urgent special request to 20 friendly intelligence services, asking for the arrest of a list of known al Qaeda operatives. As late as July 31, the FAA urged U.S. airlines to maintain a "high degree of alertness." All those alert levels dropped by the time hijackers armed with box cutters took control of four jetliners on the morning of Sept. 11.
Powerline has some useful perspective: -- The press is abuzz with reports that former Clinton staffers are set to testify before the September 11 commission next week that "they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act." The Clinton officials expected to so testify include Sandy Berger, Madeline Albright and Richard Clarke. Where to begin: the mind boggles at such shamelessness. To state the obvious, in late 2000 the Clinton administration was STILL IN OFFICE. If there were steps that needed to be taken immediately to counter the al Qaeda threat, as they "bluntly" told President Bush's transition team, why didn't they take those steps themselves? More broadly, of course, the Clinton administration was in power for eight years, while al Qaeda grew, prospered, and repeatedly attacked American interests: *1993: Shot down US helicopters and killed US servicemen in Somalia *1994: Plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila *1995: Plotted to kill President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines *1995: Plot to to bomb simultaneously, in midair, a dozen US trans-Pacific flights was discovered and thwarted at the last moment *1998: Conducted the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed at least 301 individuals and injured more than 5,000 others *1999: Attempt to carry out terrorist operations against US and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations was discovered just in time by Jordanian authorities *1999: In another millenium plot, bomber was caught en route to Los Angeles International Airport *2000: Bombed the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 US Navy members, and injuring another 39 So what, when they had the power to act effectively against al Qaeda, did these Clinton administration officials do? Little or nothing. Their most effective action was to bomb what turned out to be an aspirin factory in Sudan. They had the opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden, but decided not to do it because they were not sure their lawyers would approve. For these people to criticize the Bush administration's efforts to protect Americans against terrorism, long after their own ineptitute had allowed al Qaeda to grow bold and powerful, is contemptible. Of these Clintonite critics, the most important appears to be Richard Clarke. Clarke has written a book called Against All Enemies which will appear tomorrow--coincidentally, just in time for the 2004 election campaign. Clarke is being interviewed on 60 Minutes as I write this--a cozy corporate tie-in, as Viacom owns both CBS and the publisher of Clarke's book. Clarke's charges against the Bush administration have already been widely published. Like his former boss Sandy Berger, he decries the Bush administration's failure to heed his "warnings" while Clarke and his fellow Clintonites were still in power. And he claims that Bush ignored terrorism "for months"--unlike his former boss, Bill Clinton, who ignored it for years. But most of the attention flowing Clarke's way has centered on his claims about what happened when he was working inside the Bush administration after January 2001. Clarke was President Clinton's counter-terrorism coordinator; he was demoted by the Bush administration to director of cybersecurity. But before that demotion, he says that Bush's foreign policy advisers paid too much attention to Iraq. Then, after September 11, Clarke says that President Bush asked him to try to find out whether Iraq had been involved in the attack: 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.'' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection," and in a very intimidating way. Clarke seems to view this request as a manifestation of a weird obsession. But Clarke must know that Iraq was involved in the Islamofascists' 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center. So it was hardly unreasonable for President Bush to want to know whether Saddam was behind the successful effort in 2001 as well. Assuming, of course, that the conversation ever took place. Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy, says that: "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." More generally, Clarke accuses the administration of spoiling for a fight with Iraq and claims that Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, was talking about Iraq immediately after the September 11 attacks. This is exactly the same claim that was made by the rather pathetic Paul O'Neill. The most basic problem with this claim is that while the administration endorsed the act of Congress that made regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States, it didn't attack Iraq for a year and a half after September 11, and then only after Saddam had definitively thumbed his nose at a series of U.N. resolutions. So, Richard Clarke's criticism of President Bush comes down to this: before September 11, like everyone else in the United States (including Clarke), he did not make al Qaeda terrorism his number one priority. Everything else he says is self-serving nonsense. But let's pursue a little further the question, who exactly is Richard Clarke? What do we know about him? First, we know that before September 11, he was professionally committed to the idea that al Qaeda represented a new form of "stateless terrorism" that could never cooperate with a country like Iraq: Prior to 9/11, the dominant view within the IC was that al Qaida represented a new form of stateless terrorism. That was also the view promoted by the Clinton White House, above all terrorism czar, Richard Clarke. To acknowledge that Iraqi intelligence worked with al Qaida is tantamount to acknowledging that all these people made a tremendous blunder--and they are just not going to do it. We now know that this dogma was false, and Iraq did in fact support and collaborate with al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. But there is no one as resistant to new information as a bureaucrat who has staked his career on a theory. Second, we know that Richard Clarke was very willing to justify pre-emptive attack, on the basis of imperfect intelligence, when the attacker was Bill Clinton: I would like to speak about a specific case that has been the object of some controversy in the last month -- the U.S. bombing of the chemical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger wrote an article for the op-ed page of today's Washington Times about that bombing, providing the clearest rationale to date for what the United States did. He asks the following questions: What if you were the president of the United States and you were told four facts based on reliable intelligence. The facts were: Usama bin Ladin had attacked the United States and blown up two of its embassies; he was seeking chemical weapons; he had invested in Sudan's military-industrial complex; and Sudan's military-industrial complex was making VX nerve gas at a chemical plant called al-Shifa? Sandy Berger asks: What would you have done? What would Congress and the American people have said to the president if the United States had not blown up the factory, knowing those four facts? Is it really a crazy idea that terrorists could get chemical or biological weapons? Well, no, it's anything but a crazy idea. But Clarke seems to have gotten a very different attitude toward that possibility once a Republican became President. Third, we know that Clarke bought into the now-discredited "law enforcement" approach to counter-terrorism: if people are making war on us, arrest them! Long before our embassies in Africa were attacked on August 7, 1998, the United States began implementing this presidential directive. Since the embassies were attacked, we have disrupted bin Ladin terrorist groups, or cells. Where possible and appropriate, the United States will bring the terrorists back to this country and put them on trial. That statement is not an empty promise. No, it wasn't an empty promise. Clinton's promise of due process for terrorists explains why bin Laden is alive today, along with many of his confederates. So it is not hard to see why Richard Clarke, a discredited and demoted bureaucrat, would be bitter toward President Bush and the members of his administration who have carried out a successful anti-terrorism campaign, far different from the one endorsed by Clarke and the Clinton administration. But is Clarke only a bitter ex-bureaucrat, or is there more to his attack on President Bush? Let's consider both Clarke's personal history and his current employment. Clarke now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; here is his Kennedy School bio, which notes that the capstone of his career in the State Department was his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. Another professor at the Kennedy School is Rand Beers, who is evidently an old friend and colleague of Clarke's, as Beers' Kennedy School bio says that "[d]uring most of his career he served in the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs." So Clarke and Beers, old friends and colleagues, have continued their association at the Kennedy School. Indeed, they even teach a course together. And, by the most astonishing coincidence, their course relates directly to the subject matter of Clarke's attack on the Bush administration: "Post-Cold War Security: Terrorism, Security, and Failed States" is the name of the course. Here is its syllabus: Between them Rand Beers and Richard Clarke spent over 20 years in the White House on the National Security Council and over 60 years in national security departments and agencies. They helped to shape the transition from Cold War security issues to the challenges of terrorism, international crime, and failed states...Case studies will include Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Colombia, and Afghanistan. Challenges of counter-terrorism and homeland security will also be addressed. Why do we find this particularly significant? Because Rand Beers' bio says: He resigned [his State Department position] in March 2003 and retired in April._ He began work on John Kerry's Presidential campaign in May 2003 as National Security/Homeland Security Issue Coordinator. There you have it: Richard Clarke is a bitter, discredited bureaucrat who was an integral part of the Clinton administration's failed approach to terrorism, was demoted by President Bush, and is now an adjunct to John Kerry's presidential campaign.
basso, Doesn't it just get a little too convenient to keep bending over backwards to attack people's character if they disagree with the administration? Isn't it just faintly possible that some of what Clarke is saying is absolutely true? So now, he's willing to perjure himself, after a distinguished career serving four presidents, just to make a little money and get back at Condi? It doesn't meet the Occam's razor criterion at all. (Not that Rush Limbaugh gives a flying **** about the truth).
How does this make anything clearer basso? Please articulate the details of the scheme which you allege. And how does the TOP ADVISER IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ON TERROR being "not in the loop" make the Bush administrationn look good? It just validates his charges that they are mishandling the war on terror.
Well, I did until the thread got locked! That was maybe the only thread I've ever started in GARM, and it was okay until you aired our costume laundry for all to see. PS -- I am not a bigot! Some of my best friends wear marsupial costumes, I think.
This is almost as brilliant a retort as Condi's. And what relationship is there with Good Morning America? What financial gain does he get by talking to the 9-11 Commission?
basso, Do you see the problem with calling someone who worked for Reagan, Bush the first, Clinton, and Bush the second a "Clintonite?" Are you actually claiming that he worked his way up through the bureaucracy over the course of two decades only to self destruct by becoming so partisan that he couldn't see straight? If so, how does that jibe with the fact that he openly criticized EVERY SINGLE administration that he worked for, not just the Bush WH? BTW, I am nominating you, basso, for the lead supervisor's position in the new Department of Ostriches.
stephen hayes in the weekly standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/894kpvcp.asp -- On Richard Clarke Richard Clarke blames the Bush administration for September 11, but what does he think about President Clinton? by Stephen F. Hayes "FRANKLY, 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." Those are the words of Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official in the Bush and Clinton administrations. Clarke appeared on CBS 60 Minutes last night to trash the Bush administration and its handling of the war on terror. The timing was propitious. Clarke has a book out today and he is testifying before the September 11 Commission later this week. Expect to hear a lot more about Richard Clarke and from Richard Clarke in the coming months, especially as the presidential campaign intensifies. Clarke's testimonials are, in a word, bizarre. In his own world, Clarke was the hero who warned Bush administration officials about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda ad nauseam. The Bush administration, in Clarke's world, just didn't care. In Clarke's world, eight months of Bush administration counterterrorism policy is more important than eight years of Clinton administration counterterrorism policy. "He's creating this new reality to cover his own legacy of failure," says one senior Bush administration official. In fact, Bush administration officials who worked with Clarke say his warnings about bin Laden were maddeningly vague. Everyone knew bin Laden was a serious threat. Clarke's job, before he was demoted to his position as cyberterrorism czar, was to propose policies to address that threat. But his chief policy recommendation--arming the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan--was already under consideration and in any case would have done little to prevent a September 11 attack already in its final planning stages. After his demotion, Clarke constantly badgered Bush officials in order to get an audience with President Bush to discuss cyberterrorism. CLARKE HAD FEW WORDS OF CRITICISM for President Clinton on 60 Minutes, despite having worked at the senior levels of his administration. At least he's consistent. Consider an interview with Clarke from PBS's Frontline: Clarke initially defends President Clinton, but an astute interviewer from Frontline with obvious knowledge of the chronology following the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, presses him: FRONTLINE: Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes? CLARKE: The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat--we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved . . . FRONTLINE: But didn't you push for military action after the [al Qaeda bombing of the USS] Cole? CLARKE: Yes, that's one of the exceptions.. FRONTLINE: How important is that exception? CLARKE: I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier. FRONTLINE: Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been? CLARKE: Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained"--well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen--the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened. FRONTLINE: So that's a pretty basic mistake that we made? CLARKE: Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. None of these decisions took place in isolation. There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals. The "conveyor belt" was, of course, never destroyed. But that fact seems not to matter to Clarke, who nonetheless suggests that the Bush administration bears most of the responsibility for September 11. THERE ISN'T MUCH THAT'S FUNNY in discussions of war and terrorism. But Clarke's back-and-forth with 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl on the Clinton administration's response to Iraq's 1993 assassination attempt on President George H.W. Bush offers a brief moment of levity. The assassination attempt came just three months after President Clinton told the New York Times's Tom Friedman that being a Baptist and a believer in "deathbed conversions" he was willing to give Saddam a fresh start. Saddam dispatched a rag-tag group of intelligence operatives to assassinate his nemesis. They failed. And when the FBI determined that Saddam's intelligence service was behind the plot, President Clinton ordered a handful of Tomahawk missiles to destroy the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. It was a flaccid response to the attempted assassination of a former head of state. But Clarke doesn't see it that way. Along with the strikes, Clarke says, the Clinton administration sent "a very clear message through diplomatic channels" that further Iraqi terrorism would be dealt with more severely. Clarke calls this "a very chilling message." IN HIS INTERVIEW with Stahl, Clarke goes to great lengths to suggest that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. At one point in the interview, Clarke makes a stunning declaration. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." Leave aside the fact that Clarke was a key player in the decision to strike the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998. That strike came twenty days after al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Clinton administration officials repeatedly cited Iraqi support for Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation and al Shifa in their defense of the targeting. Disregard, too, the fact that when the Clinton Justice Department blamed bin Laden for those attacks, the indictment specifically cited an "understanding" between Iraq and al Qaeda, under which the Iraqis would help al Qaeda with "weapons development" in exchange for a promise from bin Laden that he wouldn't work against the Iraqi regime. More important, Clarke's assertion is directly contradicted by CIA director George Tenet. In a letter he wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 7, 2002, Tenet cited numerous examples of Iraqi support for al Qaeda. Tenet wrote: "We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." Clarke should answer several questions when he appears before the September 11 Commission this week. Among them: (1) Is George Tenet wrong about Iraqi support for al Qaeda? (2) Why did the Clinton administration cite an "understanding" between bin Laden and Iraq in its indictment of bin Laden for the 1998 embassy bombings? (3) Did Iraq support al Qaeda's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction in Sudan? (4) Clinton administration officials, including Clarke's former boss Sandy Berger, stand by their decision to target al Shifa. Does Clarke? (5) What did the Clinton administration do to get the Iraqis to turn over Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi harbored by the regime after mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attacks? Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
Basso...keep 'em coming. Responding to this thread with quotes from biased sources? Shouldn't you know better by now? Q: How do you scare the crap out of a Neocon? A: Show them the truth!
Viacom clearly put Clarke up to this in order to get back at Echostar, parent of Dish Network, with which it is clearly having disputes about CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon & MTV subscription fees. Viacom was clearly cooperating with Echostar's comptetitor, Comcast, which recently tried to takeover Disney, parent of Cap Cities/ABC. Since there's bad blood between Comcast and Disney, Comcast let Clarke go on Good Morning America, to secretly devalue Cap Cities ABC (once Hadley comes back and proves that Clarke is a liar) and so to allow Comcast's bid to look more competitive. A stronger Comcast means a weaker Echostar, which of course, weakens their bargaining position in their fee dispute with Viacom. Accordingly, it's a win win situation for both. It's all there in black and white, I don't even need Drudge or basso to explain it too me
