Richard Clark's book tour on 60 Minutes

[Eric]

Here's Steyn's take on Clarke

Bush has nothing to fear from this hilarious work of fiction
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 28/03/2004)
In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't."

So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme.

The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard Clarke, and by the time you read this his 15 minutes should be just about up. Mr Clarke was Bill Clinton's terrorism guy for eight years and George W Bush's for a somewhat briefer period, and he has now written a book called If Only They'd Listened to Me - whoops, sorry, that should be Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror - What Really Happened (Because They Didn't Listen to Me).

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away."

The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism".

Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to **** .

Richard Clarke was supposed to be the expert who could make this argument with a straight face. And, indeed, his week started well. The media were very taken by this passage from his book, in which he alerts Mr Bush's incoming National Security Adviser to the terrorist threat: "As I briefed Rice on al-Qa'eda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before, so I added, 'Most people think of it as Osama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organisations with cells in over 50 countries, including the US.' "

Mr Clarke would seem to be channelling Leslie Nielsen's deadpan doctor in Airplane!: "Stewardess, we need to get this passenger to a hospital."

"A hospital? What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."

As it turns out, Clarke's ability to read "facial expressions" is not as reliable as one might wish in a "counter-terrorism expert". In October the previous year, Dr Rice gave an interview to WJR Radio in Detroit in which she discoursed authoritatively on al-Qa'eda and bin Laden - and without ever having met Richard Clarke!

I don't know how good Clarke was at counter-terrorism, but as a media performer he is a total dummy. He seemed to think that he could claim the lucrative star role of Lead Bush Basher without anybody noticing the huge paper trail of statements he has left contradicting the argument in his book.

The reality is that there is a Richard Clarke for everyone. If you are like me and reckon there was an Islamist angle to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, then Clarke's your guy: he supports the theory that al-Qa'eda operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building".

On the other hand, if you're one of those Michael Moore-type conspirazoids who wants to know why Bush let his cronies in the House of Saud and the bin Laden family sneak out of America on September 11, then Clarke's also your guy: he is the official who gave the go-ahead for the bigshot Saudis with the embarrassing surnames to be hustled out of the country before they could be questioned.

Does this mean Clarke is Enron - an equal-opportunity scandal whose explicitly political aspects are too ambiguous to offer crude party advantage? Not quite. Although his book sets out to praise Clinton and bury Bush, he can't quite pull it off. Except for his suggestion to send in a team of "ninjas" to take out Osama, Clinton had virtually no interest in the subject.

In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, ****?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'"

Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did. And now the same people who claim Bush had no right to be "pre-emptive" about Iraq insist he should have been about September 11.

As for Clarke's beef with Bush, that's simple. For eight years, he had pottered away on the terrorism brief undisturbed. The new President took it away from him and adopted the strategy outlined by Condoleezza Rice in that Detroit radio interview, months before the self-regarding Mr Clarke claims he brought her up to speed on who bin Laden was: "We really need a stronger policy of holding the states accountable that support him," Dr Rice told WJR. "Terrorists who are just operating out there without basis and without state support are a lot less dangerous than ones that find safe haven, as bin Laden does sometimes in places like Afghanistan or Sudan."

Just so. In the 1990s when al-Qa'eda blew up American targets abroad, the FBI would fly in and work it as a "crime scene" - like a liquor-store hold-up in Cleveland. It doesn't address the problem. Sure, there are millions of disaffected young Muslim men, but, if they get the urge to blow up infidels, they need training and organisation. Somehow all those British Taliban knew that if you wanted a quick course in jihad studies Afghanistan was the place to go. Bush got it right: go to where the terrorists are, overthrow their sponsoring regimes, destroy their camps, kill their leaders.

Instead, all the Islamists who went to Afghanistan in the 1990s graduated from Camp Osama and were dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, where they lurk to this day. That's the Clarke-Clinton legacy. And, if it were mine, I wouldn't be going around boasting about it.

telegraph.co.uk

 

[TC]

ERIC: Not knowing who this "Mark Steyn" was who wrote the long article you posted, I typed his name into a search engine. Lo and behold, it turns out that when the website RightWingNews.com ran a survey in 2003 on their conservative readers' favorite journalist, guess who won? That's right, good ol' Mark Steyn! So, you found a right-wing ranter/journalist to join in the Richard Clarke character assasination bandwagon. Quite the accomplishment. (Perhaps I should post some comments by Al Franken to balance things out...) http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger2003.php

By the way, I like how Steyn attempts to minimalize Clarke's capacity and significance by referring to him as some anonymous "mid-level bureaucrat," possibly akin to the guy who determines what the White House menu will be for visiting dignitaries. Actually, his title was "White House Counterterrorism Chief," and he most definitely didn't clean toilets or take out the trash. What he DID do was coordinate anti-terrorism efforts between the federal agencies, but evidently the Bush crowd would now have us believe his job was to make sure the water pitchers were kept full in the meeting rooms.

[ March 28, 2004, 12:06 AM: Message edited by: TC ]

 

[keith]

quote:

---

Originally posted by TC:
ERIC: Not knowing who this "Mark Steyn" was who wrote the long article you posted, I typed his name into a search engine. Lo and behold, it turns out that when the website RightWingNews.com ran a survey in 2003 on their conservative readers' favorite journalist, guess who won?

---

How silly of us to forget that right wingers tell lies, but left wingers are paragons of virtue.

These commission hearing have indeed descended into partisan nonsense, as was easily predicted. The hearings should all be private, with full transcripts released when and only when a final report is released. That puts an end to grandstanding, and creates time to really investigate the testimony and not do a trial by the media.

Keith.

 

[TC]

"The hearings should all be private, with full transcripts released when and only when a final report is released."

You're kidding, right? Only the most important hearings in our time, and you'd like them to be held behind closed doors where God-knows-what can be manipulated by those in control of the committee?

This is what the House Select Committee on Assassinations said in 1979 about the original Warren Commission (JFK's murder): "The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. This deficiency was attributable in part to the failure of the commission to receive all the relevant information that was in the possession of other agencies and departments of the Government. (HSCA Report, p. 256)" http://ourworld.cs.com/mikegriffith1/failed.htm

Sound similar to the matter at hand here in 2004? A closed-door 9/11 commission? NO THANKS!!!

[ March 28, 2004, 12:35 AM: Message edited by: TC ]

 

[Eric]

"The hearings should all be private, with full transcripts released when and only when a final report is released."

"You're kidding, right? Only the most important hearings in our time, and you'd like them to be held behind closed doors where God-knows-what can be manipulated by those in control of the committee?"

Actually, TC, the hearings should be done post the "Global War on Terrorism". That's how it was done for Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, that would mean waiting a good 10-15 years cause thats how long this war will probably last... and maybe longer. BTW, some of my friends views would curl your hair. These are experienced ex military officers who feel that the issue of who will win this war is still very much in doubt. They expect a draft and think the odds of nukes getting tossed around is about 90%. In the interests of fairness, I'll post a piece by Stratfor that I consider mediocre although it does make some good points.

 

[Eric]

The guy who runs this is a Democratic party honcho. The piece is too forgiving of FDR, ignoring the fact that FDR Had to "clean house" cause it was FDR who was in office since 1933. Ignores various strategic and operational failings of the military during WW2 due to FDR's failure to support the US military during the interwar years, as well as ignores what GW has done that is wildly sucessful. Going outside the existing pool of Clintonian Generals and naming retired General Peter J.Shoomaker is one big one. I don't have time to totally tear this apart, but it's point that the investigations now are bad as well as the fact that nobody in the West (thats you guys not in the USofA) took, and even now, takes the threat all that seriously, is "right on."

Sorting Through the Accusations
Summary

The United States is in the process of picking apart the intelligence and political failures that led up to the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. This is an unprecedented process. Normally such reviews occur after the war has ended. In this case, the review was made necessary by the president's failure to clean house after Sept. 11. That said, the truth of the matter would appear to be more complex than the simplistic charges being traded. The fact is, in our view, the Bush and Clinton policies were far more similar than they were different. We are not quite certain who we have insulted with that claim.
Analysis
Conducting a highly public inquiry and debate over the origins of a war while that war is being conducted would appear to be one of the most self-destructive exercises imaginable. No reasonable person could argue that mistakes were not made prior to Sept. 11, 2001, any more than it could be argued that mistakes were not made before Dec. 7, 1941. There is no question but that the intelligence system failed to predict the event and that it was supposed to.

But just as the Pearl Harbor inquiry was carried out after the war, so as not to interfere with the war effort, it would seem reasonable that the Sept. 11 inquiries should take place after the war is over. Officials and former officials hurling charges against each other in a public display of disunity does not seem to serve the national interest. There were secret investigations and discussions before World War II ended, but the public report by Congress was not released until July 1946 and not really undertaken in earnest until after the war ended.

It has been argued that the unlimited nature of this war makes waiting for the end impossible. But this war is not unique in appearing to be potentially endless. Only with the benefit of hindsight can one make the argument that previous wars would be temporally contained. As British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey so poignantly stated in 1914 -- at the start of World War I, the shortest of the 20th century's major conflicts -- "The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The review could have waited.

However, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that George W. Bush set himself up for this, although not in the way his critics charge. One of the things that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did was to clean house after the Pearl Harbor attack. This housecleaning was not necessarily fair. Adm. Husband Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), for example, was fired even though a strong case could be made that he was less responsible than others for Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, Pearl Harbor happened on his watch and he was gone.

It went deeper than that. Roosevelt wanted to signal that something had gone terribly wrong not only with one person but also with a generation of leaders. Relatively junior commanders Chester Nimitz and Dwight Eisenhower were catapulted into senior command positions. Not all of the old leaders were replaced -- consider Douglas MacArthur or George Marshall -- but there was a broad enough housecleaning that no one could escape the fact that the war had changed everything. You could argue that Roosevelt did this to protect himself, but if so, he was doing his job.

President Bush did not clean house after Sept. 11. He kept the same team in place with some very minor second-tier shifts. There was no whirlwind of activity designed to bring in a fresh, wartime team using streamlined procedures. He went with the team he had. There was a defensible case to be made for this. The country was in a state of shock, and an upheaval in the intelligence and defense communities was perceived to be an unnecessary follow-on shock to public morale. Moreover, the battle was joined, and changing commanders in the middle of the battle was dangerous.

Finally, there was a political aspect. The man who was institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA Director George Tenet. He was 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after all, a Clinton appointee.

The problem with this strategy was that, rather than deflect inquiries, it made them unavoidable. After Dec. 7, those directly and visibly responsible for Pearl Harbor -- excepting the president and his key political appointees -- were removed from the chain of command. After Sept. 11, those most directly and visibly responsible remained in the chain of command. If there were mistakes made, then the people who made those mistakes were still in control of huge parts of the war effort. The question of whether these people were competent could not be avoided.

To put it a little differently: Unlike Roosevelt, Bush failed to armor himself against his political enemies. While Roosevelt, who had a lot more political weight in 1941-1942, successfully deflected political attacks by combining a sense of national emergency with a sense that he was taking steps to deal with the problem, Bush kept his team intact. That meant it was essential to examine their performance -- and their culpability, if any -- prior to Sept. 11.

Bush argued that the United States was in a war, but he never shifted his administration into a wartime mode. Failure -- real or perceived -- was never punished. Bush's one administrative innovation, Homeland Security, moves at a snail's pace. The armed forces did not undergo massive expansion, and the intelligence community was not torn apart and rebuilt in an emergency measure.

The war began with a massive surprise attack. Bush said there was a war going on, but somehow Bush never appeared to be reconfiguring his team for war. It undermined his ability to demand a pass until after the war was over because he sometimes did not act as if a war were going on. This has been noticed. Many Americans do not consider the Bush administration's "war on terror" to be a war at all.

What is most ironic is that an administration regarded as being so highly politicized has been, in fact, so politically incompetent. It is as if the administration never understood that this moment was coming and never prepared for it. It is particularly amazing because the charges against Bush administration -- at least in the way they have been framed -- are so weak. The administration is essentially being charged with two things: first, that it came into office obsessed with Iraq, to the extent that it was considering invading Iraq from the very first meetings it had on national security. Second, it is charged with failing to heed intelligence warnings about al Qaeda, downplaying the threat and therefore not taking actions that might have prevented the attack. Implicit in both these charges is the notion that Bush policies were fundamentally different from Clinton policies -- and that the Clinton policies were superior.

There is no question but that the Bush administration had a focus on Iraq and considered invading Iraq. The explanation that has been given is that this was the desire to complete Bush Senior's job. The actual answer does not require strained readings of Sigmund Freud. The fact is that the Bush administration was simply continuing the Clinton administration's policies on Iraq, virtually without change.

The very first briefings Bush was given when he took office had to have been about Iraq. That is because U.S. and British aircraft were carrying out constant combat operations over Iraq, patrolling the no-fly zones. These missions had been carried out from the end of Desert Storm -- during the administration of President George H. W. Bush -- throughout the Clinton years, under U.N. mandate. The Clinton administration at times intensified these attacks. In December 1998, for example, it carried out Operation Desert Fox in response to Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country. The Clinton administration also attempted on various occasions to overthrow Hussein through covert operations; Clinton also continued sanctions on Iraq.

None of these efforts were effective in bringing about change, but Clinton did not discontinue the combat operations, sanctions or desultory covert operations. Although it was generally felt that these were unsuccessful, Clinton was trapped by a lack of alternatives. He did not want to mount a full invasion. At the same time, he did not want to halt the ineffective actions against Hussein and signal American weakness, undermine the regional alliance and embolden Hussein. The patrols continued, as did occasional bombings of Iraq.

Given that the United States had been involved in combat operations in Iraq for more than a decade, one would hope that the first topic on President Bush's foreign policy agenda would have been Iraq. What else would it have been? Bush shared the view of the previous two presidents that halting operations was not possible and bringing Hussein's government down was a major U.S. foreign policy goal. The new administration obviously conducted an early review of how to bring closure to the U.S. Iraq policy.

In this review, it would have been noted that the Clinton policy had failed to achieve the stated goals. Continuing the policy of ineffective combat and covert operations coupled with sanctions was soaking up U.S. military and intelligence resources without achieving any goal. Bush accepted Clinton's premise that simply walking away was not an option. That left only intensified military options, the most certain of which would be an invasion.

Anyone thinking about Iraq in the spring of 2001 knew that the Clinton policy could not continue indefinitely. Obviously one faction was going to argue that since the United States could not walk away, the only solution was an invasion. That appears to be what several people thought, including Donald Rumsfeld. What is most noteworthy is that they were -- for the time being at least -- overruled. There was no invasion, nor any buildup in the region for an invasion. Bush decided, essentially by default, to continue Clinton's Iraq policy.

Now that may have been a defensible position, all things considered, or one could charge that Bush was continuing a failed foreign policy begun by his father. But charging that the Bush administration was unreasonably obsessed with overthrowing Hussein -- given the context which the Clinton and Bush Sr. administrations had created for them -- is truly stretching things.

If the Bush administration was obsessed with anything, it was China. When Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, he said that the new focus of U.S. defense policy would be Asia, and plans were rapidly drawn for redeploying forces there. The dominant event between Bush's inauguration and Sept. 11 was the crisis with China over the downing of the EP-3 aircraft over Hainan Island. Asia was reinforced. Iraq was not.

So too with the charge that Bush had failed to take al Qaeda seriously. To be more precise, there had been a persistent failure -- in both the Clinton and Bush administrations -- to take al Qaeda and radical Islamists seriously. Part of the fault lay directly with the CIA and the manner in which it collected intelligence and analyzed it -- but Bush's CIA director was the same as Clinton's. Blaming Bush for unique neglect of al Qaeda for eight months, after Clinton's eight years, is hard to fathom. Indeed, part of the fault lies with some of the terrorism experts now critical of Bush. When their record is examined, many did warn about al Qaeda, but over the course of their careers they had issued similar warnings about so many groups that it was hard to distinguish the real from the fantastic. It was a profession that had cried wolf too many times.

The Bush failure was the same as the Clinton failure. Both administrations looked at al Qaeda as the heir of the Palestinian terrorist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. They would set off a few bombs, kill no more than a few dozen people, hijack planes and represent an irritant and a nuisance far more than a strategic threat. Their rhetoric was extreme, but no more extreme than that of other groups that never were able to match rhetoric with action.

The misevaluation of al Qaeda was a systemic failure that ran from the CIA to the American public. We recall no public outcry for increased expenditures on intelligence and counterterrorism in the 1990s. Nor was there massive public unrest when -- after attacks against Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the East African embassies or the USS Cole in Yemen, all of which claimed American lives -- a major effort to destroy al Qaeda was not undertaken. As a nation, the United States calmly accepted the danger. For the Clinton administration to claim that it had devoted major resources and made a great effort to hunt down and destroy al Qaeda is simply not true. To their credit, both former Defense Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeline Albright testified this week that their efforts against al Qaeda were both thin and constrained by public disinterest. In its policy of inaction, the Clinton team was simply tracking the American public's mood.

There are two charges that can be legitimately leveled against George W. Bush. The first is that, in spite of knowing that the Clinton policy on Iraq was ineffective, he neither ended the containment of Hussein nor moved to destroy him. Bush carried on Clinton's policies unchanged. The second charge is that Bush did not increase the level of effort taken to destroy al Qaeda, but essentially followed the Clinton administration's policy of watching and hoping for a low-risk, low-cost moment to act -- a moment that Osama bin Laden was too smart to give them.

In our view, the most serious charge that can be made against Bush is not that he continued -- unchanged -- key Clinton policies before Sept. 11, but that he did not drastically reshape his administration for war after Sept. 11. He left in place the man who was responsible for the failure to understand, locate and destroy al Qaeda under President Bill Clinton and inexplicably left him and others in place, even after his failures became manifest on -- and after -- Sept. 11.

This was, in our view, a serious error in judgment. It may be an unforgivable one. But to hold Bush's eight months in office as having been more responsible for al Qaeda's emergence than Clinton's eight years in office -- not to mention the Carter and Reagan administrations' responsibility for encouraging militant Islam -- strikes us as strange reasoning. Sept. 11 was planned, and it was being implemented while Clinton was president. Bush simply adopted wholesale -- and extended -- Clinton's errors.

This is not an argument for Clinton or Bush. Given the mood of the country, it is unlikely that any president would have done much differently. Had either man proposed invading Afghanistan prior to Sept. 11, both would have been labeled as certifiably insane. The problem was rooted in the mind-set that had enamored the American people after the end of the Cold War: a belief that the world had become a safe place to live and that those who said otherwise were alarmist cranks.

Sept. 11 was a systemic failure of the nation, for which both Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty. Bush's errors in judgment did not occur before the war, but after the war began. The current attempt to prove some spectacular failure by Bush before the war makes political sense, but it is intellectually incoherent and misses the places where Bush made genuine errors. Bush did fail. He failed to hold the intelligence community responsible for its failures, tear it apart and rebuild it. He failed to find a Nimitz to run the CIA. We regard this as an enormously serious charge against him. For the rest, he shares responsibility with his predecessor -- and with the rest of us.

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
26 March 2004

 

[Terry]

"How silly of us to forget that right wingers tell lies, but left wingers are paragons of virtue."

Both of those labels lie equally well to achieve their purported aims.


Black and white, yeah just like oil analysis !!!!


There are people with power and people who are struggling for control and power. Whatever you choose to describe them as isn't as simple as left and right wingers.

Politics is about aligning with others to get your interests heard and hopefully acted on.

The Dems and Reps in the US may have platforms that are significantly different in writing but in function we get the same babble and similar effect. Both parties are failing US, the people, because we don't vote and Corporations maneuver the outcome by buying and influencing the players.

WE all get used as cannon fodder for both of the limited points of view you list.

The citizens in the WTC's and now in Madrid are the very visible fodder of the terrorists taking advantage of the failed National Security mechanisms that both the "left and right" provided us.

Clark is the first guy that I have heard apologize for that fact. And he worked for both failed parties presidential admins.

 

[keith]

quote:

---

Originally posted by TC:
You're kidding, right? Only the most important hearings in our time, and you'd like them to be held behind closed doors where God-knows-what can be manipulated by those in control of the committee?

---

Don't fool yourself. Nothing of significance will be discussed, because all of that is classified. **** Clark's private testimony is reported to be radically different than his book tour testimony for example.

I have only learned one thing so far - there was no plan to get Bin Laden that was passed from Clinton to Bush. Actually, that is not really news, but it totally exposes one of the democrat lies repeated often since 9/11.

Enjoy the circus, it will accomplish nothing. I doubt the commission will generate information to help us prevent future attacks, and if it did, that shouldn't be public.

The Taliban are crushed, Saddam is gone, 60% of Al Qaeda is gone, we have a new department of Homeland Security, federal airport screeners, Patriot Act, and on and on. Let's keep busy with winning the war. All this attention to finding someone to blame for 9/11 is diverting resources. It is pure election year BS and I am disgusted with the whole show, both republican and democrat.

How about putting resources into a commission to determine how best to remove and keep out illegal aliens?

We already know what led to 9/11 - many years of ignoring the rise of Islamic terrorism. If you play at being a punching bag long enough, eventually you get knocked out.

Keith.

 

[Forkman]

quote:

---

don't bother letting the facts get in your way... why start now? [/QB]

---

Yes TC, why start now. Its never stopped you in the past. Perhaps if you could pull your "facts" from something other than a thinly veiled left-wing sources that purports to actually present "news"... then maybe I'd actually consider the veracity of your claims.

Way to avoid addressing the rest of the post as well TC. Labman hit the nail on the head with the "intellectual honesty" part. I've yet to see you acknowledge anything a Dem/lib has done as wrong and simply redirect the discussion into a "Oh yeah well what about (insert Rep/con)." I'll readily admit when a Rep/con has done something wrong... but not just based on whatever spin your sources like to apply to the situation.

I hear James Carville is looking for an apprentice TC... you might want to check into that. You'd be very successful following in his footsteps. I've never seen a Dem/lib pundit since him that is so successful at dodging any criticisms of his own party while continuing to lob firebombs at the other.

 

[labman]

quote:

---

Originally posted by TC:
snip....

Clarke's capacity and significance by referring to him as some anonymous "mid-level bureaucrat," possibly akin to the guy who determines what the White House menu will be for visiting dignitaries. Actually, his title was "White House Counterterrorism Chief," and he most definitely didn't clean toilets or take out the trash. What he DID do was coordinate anti-terrorism efforts between the federal agencies snip....

---

Good job TC! At last we know who in the Bush administration failed to coordinate intelligence, connect the dots, and stop 911.

 

[needtoknow]

Eric's and Terry's last posts have been two of the best I've seen here in a while.

 

[SSlube]

Transcript: Clarke Praises Bush Team in '02

Wednesday, March 24, 2004


WASHINGTON — The following transcript documents a background briefing in early August 2002 by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to a handful of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle. In the conversation, cleared by the White House on Wednesday for distribution, Clarke describes the handover of intelligence from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration and the latter's decision to revise the U.S. approach to Al Qaeda. Clarke was named special adviser to the president for cyberspace security in October 2001. He resigned from his post in January 2003.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Second point is that the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office — issues like aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh, changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, in late January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

The sixth point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.

Over the course of the summer — last point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.

And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.

QUESTION: When was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: Well, the president was briefed throughout this process.

QUESTION: But when was the final September 4 document? (interrupted) Was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: The document went to the president on September 10, I think.

QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2002] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the — general animus against the foreign policy?

CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me.

JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

ANGLE: OK.

QUESTION: Are you saying now that there was not only a plan per se, presented by the transition team, but that it was nothing proactive that they had suggested?

CLARKE: Well, what I'm saying is, there are two things presented. One, what the existing strategy had been. And two, a series of issues — like aiding the Northern Alliance, changing Pakistan policy, changing Uzbek policy — that they had been unable to come to um, any new conclusions, um, from '98 on.

QUESTION: Was all of that from '98 on or was some of it ...

CLARKE: All of those issues were on the table from '98 on.

ANGLE: When in '98 were those presented?

CLARKE: In October of '98.

QUESTION: In response to the Embassy bombing?

CLARKE: Right, which was in September.

QUESTION: Were all of those issues part of alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

QUESTION: So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.

QUESTION: 'Til late December, developing ...

CLARKE: What happened at the end of December was that the Clinton administration NSC principals committee met and once again looked at the strategy, and once again looked at the issues that they had brought, decided in the past to add to the strategy. But they did not at that point make any recommendations.

QUESTIONS: Had those issues evolved at all from October of '98 'til December of 2000?

CLARKE: Had they evolved? Um, not appreciably.

ANGLE: What was the problem? Why was it so difficult for the Clinton administration to make decisions on those issues?

CLARKE: Because they were tough issues. You know, take, for example, aiding the Northern Alliance. Um, people in the Northern Alliance had a, sort of bad track record. There were questions about the government, there were questions about drug-running, there was questions about whether or not in fact they would use the additional aid to go after Al Qaeda or not. Uh, and how would you stage a major new push in Uzbekistan or somebody else or Pakistan to cooperate?

One of the big problems was that Pakistan at the time was aiding the other side, was aiding the Taliban. And so, this would put, if we started aiding the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, this would have put us directly in opposition to the Pakistani government. These are not easy decisions.

ANGLE: And none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was ...

CLARKE: No, that's not true. In the spring, the Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away from the Taliban. So that's really how it started.

QUESTION: Had the Clinton administration in any of its work on this issue, in any of the findings or anything else, prepared for a call for the use of ground forces, special operations forces in any way? What did the Bush administration do with that if they had?

CLARKE: There was never a plan in the Clinton administration to use ground forces. The military was asked at a couple of points in the Clinton administration to think about it. Um, and they always came back and said it was not a good idea. There was never a plan to do that.

(Break in briefing details as reporters and Clarke go back and forth on how to source quotes from this backgrounder.)

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

QUESTION: It was not put into an action plan until September 4, signed off by the principals?

CLARKE: That's right.

QUESTION: I want to add though, that NSPD — the actual work on it began in early April.

CLARKE: There was a lot of in the first three NSPDs that were being worked in parallel.

ANGLE: Now the five-fold increase for the money in covert operations against Al Qaeda — did that actually go into effect when it was decided or was that a decision that happened in the next budget year or something?

CLARKE: Well, it was gonna go into effect in October, which was the next budget year, so it was a month away.

QUESTION: That actually got into the intelligence budget?

CLARKE: Yes it did.

QUESTION: Just to clarify, did that come up in April or later?

CLARKE: No, it came up in April and it was approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.

QUESTION: Well can you clarify something? I've been told that he gave that direction at the end of May. Is that not correct?

CLARKE: No, it was March.

QUESTION: The elimination of Al Qaeda, get back to ground troops — now we haven't completely done that even with a substantial number of ground troops in Afghanistan. Was there, was the Bush administration contemplating without the provocation of September 11th moving troops into Afghanistan prior to that to go after Al Qaeda?

CLARKE: I can not try to speculate on that point. I don't know what we would have done.

QUESTION: In your judgment, is it possible to eliminate Al Qaeda without putting troops on the ground?

CLARKE: Uh, yeah, I think it was. I think it was. If we'd had Pakistani, Uzbek and Northern Alliance assistance.

 

[keith]

**** Clark's testimony to the 9/11 commission:

"Last time I had to declare my party loyalty, it was to vote in the Virginia primary for president of the United States in the year 2000. And I asked for a Republican ballot."

Later that same week, **** Clark to Tim Russert, Meet the Press on March 28th:

MR. RUSSERT: "Did you vote for George Bush in 2000?"
MR. CLARKE: "No, I did not."
MR. RUSSERT: "You voted for Al Gore?"
MR. CLARKE: "Yes, I did."

One man has made a shambles of the 9/11 commission with his stupid book tour grandstanding and partisan flip flops.

EDIT: after the media furor over the recent Bush campaign ad that dared to show an image of WTC for almost half a second, this will surely be all over ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/MSNBC tonight:

9/11 families protest Clark's book profiteering

Keith.

[ March 29, 2004, 12:23 PM: Message edited by: keith ]

 

[Ron Jeremy]

Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head once again...

Bush has nothing to fear from this hilarious work of fiction
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 28/03/2004)


In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't."



So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme.

The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard Clarke, and by the time you read this his 15 minutes should be just about up. Mr Clarke was Bill Clinton's terrorism guy for eight years and George W Bush's for a somewhat briefer period, and he has now written a book called If Only They'd Listened to Me - whoops, sorry, that should be Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror - What Really Happened (Because They Didn't Listen to Me).

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away."

The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism".

Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to **** .

Richard Clarke was supposed to be the expert who could make this argument with a straight face. And, indeed, his week started well. The media were very taken by this passage from his book, in which he alerts Mr Bush's incoming National Security Adviser to the terrorist threat: "As I briefed Rice on al-Qa'eda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before, so I added, 'Most people think of it as Osama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organisations with cells in over 50 countries, including the US.' "

Mr Clarke would seem to be channelling Leslie Nielsen's deadpan doctor in Airplane!: "Stewardess, we need to get this passenger to a hospital."

"A hospital? What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."

As it turns out, Clarke's ability to read "facial expressions" is not as reliable as one might wish in a "counter-terrorism expert". In October the previous year, Dr Rice gave an interview to WJR Radio in Detroit in which she discoursed authoritatively on al-Qa'eda and bin Laden - and without ever having met Richard Clarke!

I don't know how good Clarke was at counter-terrorism, but as a media performer he is a total dummy. He seemed to think that he could claim the lucrative star role of Lead Bush Basher without anybody noticing the huge paper trail of statements he has left contradicting the argument in his book.

The reality is that there is a Richard Clarke for everyone. If you are like me and reckon there was an Islamist angle to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, then Clarke's your guy: he supports the theory that al-Qa'eda operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building".

On the other hand, if you're one of those Michael Moore-type conspirazoids who wants to know why Bush let his cronies in the House of Saud and the bin Laden family sneak out of America on September 11, then Clarke's also your guy: he is the official who gave the go-ahead for the bigshot Saudis with the embarrassing surnames to be hustled out of the country before they could be questioned.

Does this mean Clarke is Enron - an equal-opportunity scandal whose explicitly political aspects are too ambiguous to offer crude party advantage? Not quite. Although his book sets out to praise Clinton and bury Bush, he can't quite pull it off. Except for his suggestion to send in a team of "ninjas" to take out Osama, Clinton had virtually no interest in the subject.

In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, ****?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'"

Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did. And now the same people who claim Bush had no right to be "pre-emptive" about Iraq insist he should have been about September 11.

As for Clarke's beef with Bush, that's simple. For eight years, he had pottered away on the terrorism brief undisturbed. The new President took it away from him and adopted the strategy outlined by Condoleezza Rice in that Detroit radio interview, months before the self-regarding Mr Clarke claims he brought her up to speed on who bin Laden was: "We really need a stronger policy of holding the states accountable that support him," Dr Rice told WJR. "Terrorists who are just operating out there without basis and without state support are a lot less dangerous than ones that find safe haven, as bin Laden does sometimes in places like Afghanistan or Sudan."

Just so. In the 1990s when al-Qa'eda blew up American targets abroad, the FBI would fly in and work it as a "crime scene" - like a liquor-store hold-up in Cleveland. It doesn't address the problem. Sure, there are millions of disaffected young Muslim men, but, if they get the urge to blow up infidels, they need training and organisation. Somehow all those British Taliban knew that if you wanted a quick course in jihad studies Afghanistan was the place to go. Bush got it right: go to where the terrorists are, overthrow their sponsoring regimes, destroy their camps, kill their leaders.

Instead, all the Islamists who went to Afghanistan in the 1990s graduated from Camp Osama and were dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, where they lurk to this day. That's the Clarke-Clinton legacy. And, if it were mine, I wouldn't be going around boasting about it.

 

[Forkman]

Here's something else interesting related to this.

quote:

---

WASHINGTON - In a reversal, the White House said Tuesday it has agreed to allow national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify in public and under oath before the Sept. 11, 2001 commission. In addition, President Bush and Vice President **** Cheney have agreed to testify before the entire commission, not just the two co-chairmen, according to a letter obtained by NBC News. Their testimony will, however, remain private.

---

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4623066
But wait a minute what's this????

quote:

---

Clarke Refused to Testify in 1999, Citing Same Reasons as Condi

Former Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke refused to testify before the Senate Y2K Committee in 1999, citing the same rule invoked by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in recent days...
... "Last night, into the evening, we were notified that the legal staff of the National Security Council had determined that it would be inappropriate for Mr. Clarke to appear. I have just spoken to him on the telephone. The rule apparently is that any member of the White House staff who has not been confirmed is not to be allowed to testify before the Congress. They can perform briefings, but they are not to give testimony. And that in response to that rule, Mr. Clarke will not be coming."

---

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/29/172749.shtml

Interesting.

 

[Pablo]

This is NOT an attack on Clarke, this is about his BOOK, so don't attack me with the "character assassination" label.

Please find and read the Richard Miniter review on page D8 in the Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2004.

Basically the book has numerous factual errors, omissions and many 100% 180° turns from documented interviews that Miniter himself had with Clarke.

 

[needtoknow]

Pablo,
I read the interview and did some research on Richard Miniter. From what I've been able to find so far he is a conservative writer and the darling of the right. I read some of his articles and overviewed several more and all are conservative in purpose, slant, tone and direction. So when trying to assess this point whether his book is "credible" I'm not convinced yet. I even found a charge by Miniter that 911 was Al Gore's fault.

Here's a bit of bio on Miniter
Richard Miniter took a course at the National Jouralism Center (NJC) in the summer of 1994. What is this center. It was founded by conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans in 1977.
NJC is, in the words of current director Ken Grubbs, Jr., "a juggernaut for creating journalists." The NJC provides training and assistance in finding jobs to conservative journalists. It also has long-standing ties to the tobacco industry. Interns at the NJC also receive career advice at seminars featuring speakers from the world of conservative politics and journalism such as columnist Robert Novak, Washington Times political correspondent Donald Lambro, or Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund (himself an NJC alumnus). According to a guide to right wing groups on universities the NJC "is a product of the American Conservative Union". [2]The NJC operated as a project of the Educational Research Institute, headed by Evans, which received funds for the NJC.
The National Journalism Center and Philip Morris
An internal Philip Morris (PM) memo explained the role and benefits to the company of working with the NJC. The group was developed to train budding journalists in free market political and economic principles. As a direct result of our support we have been able to work with alumni of this program about 15 years worth of journalists at print and visual media throughout the country to get across our side of the story ? which has resulted in numerous pieces consistent with our point of view, the strategy paper stated.
end quote

Here's a review I found of Miniter's book which puts it in perspective.

Review of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror"
Reviewed by Peter Bergen
Sunday, November 9, 2003
By far the most serious charge that can be leveled against Bill Clinton is that his administration was derelict in its handling of the al Qaeda threat and therefore deserves much of the blame for the dreadful events of Sept. 11. If these charges were true, Clinton's considerable accomplishments on the domestic economic front and foreign policy successes such as the Dayton peace accords would be utterly eclipsed, while even the harshest appraisals of the Lewinsky matter would be rendered moot. Moreover, a plausible argument that the Democrats screwed up the hunt for al Qaeda would have obvious implications for the election in 2004.
So what is Richard Miniter's case for Clinton's malfeasance? It begins back in 1993, when the World Trade Center was first bombed by a group of Middle Easterners. Despite the ensuing six deaths and the thousands who were injured, Miniter observes, "Clinton never even visited the site to assess the damage." But Miniter torpedoes his own argument by later noting that within a month "Clinton became obsessed with capturing and convicting Ramzi Yousef [the mastermind of the attack]." U.S. officials apprehended Yousef in Pakistan in 1995, and he is now serving a 240-year sentence for his crimes -- hardly an abject failure of policy.
Miniter relies on Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American and major Clinton campaign contributor, as a principal source for the most interesting section of his book, which concerns bin Laden's sojourn in Sudan between 1991 and 1996. According to Miniter, the United States missed several opportunities to garner important intelligence about al Qaeda during this period. Miniter portrays Ijaz as an "unofficial envoy" of the Clinton administration to the Muslim world who claims to have made multiple attempts to interest the Clinton administration in improving relations with Sudan and in entertaining Sudanese offers to hand over intelligence on al Qaeda. These approaches were rebuffed by Clinton officials, who told Miniter that they viewed Ijaz as "a Walter Mitty living out a personal fantasy."
It turns out that those officials' suspicions of Ijaz may have been well-founded. In August, Ijaz told the British newspaper the Guardian that he had learned that the Bush administration had brokered a deal with Pakistan's dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, at the end of the war in Afghanistan. Ijaz said that the United States agreed not to capture or kill bin Laden so as to avoid causing further unrest in the Muslim world. Ijaz told the Guardian that "There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilizing . . . [if bin Laden were captured or killed at the end of 2001]. There would still be the ability to get [bin Laden] at a later date when it was more appropriate." This charge is ludicrous -- and would be tantamount to treasonous behavior by the Bush officials involved if it were true -- and does little to enhance Ijaz's credibility. Moreover, even assuming that the Sudanese offers of intelligence on al Qaeda were sincere, the Clinton administration had good reason to be suspicious of overtures from a
regime that had long sponsored terrorism and was regarded at the time as one of the most tyrannical governments in the world.
Miniter reports the potentially explosive claim that the Sudanese even offered to hand over bin Laden himself to the United States in 1996. Miniter's source on this is a Sudanese cabinet official, Elfatih Erwa. He says he met in March 1996 with a CIA officer in Virginia, where the offer was made to hand over the Saudi exile. Key Clinton national security officials poured cold water on Erwa's story when Miniter queried them about it. Nonetheless, it's worth recalling that Sudan had given up Carlos the Jackal, a notorious terrorist, to the French in 1994, so there might have been an opening with the Sudanese on the matter of al Qaeda that the Clinton administration did not sufficiently exploit.
Miniter also addresses the feckless Clinton administration response to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 that killed 17 sailors and almost sank the destroyer. Based on interviews with Mike Sheehan and Richard Clarke, both key counterterrorism officials, Miniter recounts that the Clinton Cabinet was reluctant to respond militarily to what was quite obviously an act of war perpetrated by al Qaeda. Strangely, it was the Pentagon that was most reluctant to strike back. At the time Sheehan exclaimed: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
However, the manner in which the attack on the USS Cole was handled does more to damage the Bush administration's reputation than it does Clinton's, as his term expired three months after the bombing of the Cole. In June 2001, five months after Bush had been sworn in, al Qaeda released a videotape claiming responsibility for the Cole operation. If the Bush administration needed a casus belli to destroy al Qaeda, here it was, broadcast around the world. Instead, the response was to do absolutely nothing.
Which brings us to the central weakness of Miniter's book. The American inability to truly comprehend the al Qaeda threat was a systematic failure of many institutions, including the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI and the media, failures that cannot be pinned on any one administration. Beyond all that, you, gentle reader, are also at fault. There was no political will to go to war against al Qaeda because there was no public will to do so. The public had made it very clear during the '90s that even small numbers of U.S. military casualties were unacceptable, whether in Somalia or in the Balkans. All that changed with Sept. 11. Now two wars later, at the cost of hundreds of American deaths, thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilian dead and untold billons of U.S. taxpayer money, the Bush administration is still "losing bin Laden" -- two years after Sept. 11. ?
Peter Bergen is a fellow of the New America Foundation and the author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden."
end quote
Can it be proposed that Richard Miniter is promoting a book as has been one of the charges leveled against Richard Clark?

[ April 02, 2004, 10:32 AM: Message edited by: needtoknow ]

 

[Pablo]

wow - attack the reviewer......interesting.

 

[labman]

Who cares about what is in his book? He already had to admit under oath that part of it wasn't true.

 

[TC]

NeedToKnow: You're correct regarding author Richard Miniter. This guy has attempted to directly blame Clinton for the Somalia "Black Hawk Down" deaths, but of course, has had no such criticism over the entire fleet of helicopters being downed in Iraq and resulting deaths. He has about as much credibility as Ann Coulter.

With all the media attention on Clarke under attack by the Bush administration, lost in the media circus is THE FACT THAT CLARKE'S BASIC ALLEGATIONS HAVE BEEN VERIFIED BY AT LEAST THREE HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS WHO SERVED WITH BUSH.

First was Treasury Secretary O'Neil, as we all know.

Don Kerrick, a 3-star general who spent his final four months in the Bush White House before retiring, sent memos to the new administration's National Security Council leadership about Al Qaeda, stating "We are going to be struck again." He said he never received a response. General Kerrick commented, "I don't think it was above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen."

General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until Oct. 1, 2001, said that in the Bush Administration "Terrorism had moved farther to the back burner." Shelton added, "The squeaky wheel was **** Clarke, but he wasn't at the top of their priority list, so the lights went out for a few months." General Shelton summed up Rumsfeld's attitude as, "This terrorism thing was out there, but it didn't happen today, so maybe it belonged lower on the list."

So, that makes at least FOUR distinguished, respected men in leadership posts who served under several presidents, all saying the same thing. ARE THEY ALL LIARS? Bush has been slapped in the face by the truth, and it stings.