Yep. He's still bitter about NOT getting the #2 position in the Department of Homeland Security.

“Some will say it's because Clarke is a partisan hack, which isn't really credible -- he did serve under three Republican presidents.”

The fact that he served under three Republican presidents is a minor point. We already have proof that Richard Clarke is a liar. This is no longer under dispute. Thus, why is he still being taken seriously? The man is receiving an incredible amount of dollars for his book and the liberal establishment will make sure he gets a lot of foundation money. From a cold marketing standpoint, Clarke needed to attack President Bush to bring in this sort of loot.

And here's the nut:

It's worth remembering that Clarke was correct in his assessment of Al Qaeda

The rest of your post is trimmings on this turkey.

If you read chapter two, you realize that Clarke comes very close to saying that, in hindsight, the U.S. never should have gotten involved in the Middle East in the first place.

I'm thinking in particular of this line from p. 38:

If the Soviet Union poured troops into Iran, could they get to the Persian Gulf before U.S. forces could stage a D-Day-like landing? Yes, the Soviets could beat us there because we had no forces in the area and no realistic plan or capability to project forces to the Persian Gulf, but then neither did the Soviets. The first part of that answer resonated with both the Carter and Reagan administration leadership; the latter part was ignored.

I think the lesson he drew from the Reagan administration is not limited to the one he admits to explicitly--you have to hit back when attacked--but it also includes the idea that maybe it's wise never to get involved in the first place.

It's only a flirtation...but I think it underpins his opposition to the Iraq distraction.

I thank Instapundit for highlighting the following article:

“At the very least, what he said in August 2002 must have been factual. Otherwise, Clarke has revealed himself to be an opportunist who will lie at the direction of his superiors.”

Rich Lowry

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/21772.htm

Richard Clarke has been caught lying. We are not talking about a man who is honestly mistaken about a few points. No, Clarke is a full blown liar. Let’s not allow ourselves to be confused on this matter.

The Time article indicates that, before 9/11, the Bush administration decided to buy Clarke's plan for driving Al Qaeda from Afghanistan without buying Clarke. That must have hurt, though it was all mooted by 9/11.

I expect that Clarke's real legacy will be, whenever party control of the presidency changes, the swift and complete termination of all national security staff holdovers from the prior administration. Or even all non-civil service staff for every agency.

Here's a thought -- why not figure out if the facts, as presented in the book, are true or not?

Some of the book is analysis and opinion. Forget that, and just start with the facts.

As Dan so successfully demonstrates, Clarke's "page x" can apparently be reworked to give pretty much any message one wants to give.

Of course, phrases like "had the gall" are obviously required to add the necessary taint.

“I expect that Clarke's real legacy will be, whenever party control of the presidency changes, the swift and complete termination of all national security staff holdovers from the prior administration. Or even all non-civil service staff for every agency.”

This is indeed a sad day for American democracy. In the past, an incoming administration often kept holdovers from the previous one. Richard Clarke has violated a cardinal rule: you do not slime the administration you worked for---which is still in power! You are normally obligated to wait a few years until writing your book.

Richard Pipes recently wrote his magnificent, VIXI: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. The sales of this work will not even begin to equal that of Clarke’s. Why is this the case? Richard Pipes has waited almost a quarter of a century to reveal the often embarrassing aspects of the Reagan White House. He did the decent thing and therefore his bank account will be much smaller.

The guy just simply is not reliable in either his recollection, or interpretation, or both. Take the passage on his impression that Condi Rice didnt know who Al Qaeda was. Now we know that Rice gave a lengthy radio address on Bin Laden and how to deal with his organization before the 2000 election. So the question becomes, why did Clarke assume Rice's ignorance, and why did he choose to write about it in a high profile book. I think Dan is on to the answer. Clarke has a big ego. He didnt like answering to Rice, he felt he should have the ear of the president, so in he essentially disdained her. Keep that attitude in mind while reading this book. It makes everything in it and everything that has happened since make a lot more sense.

While I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, I think Dan has nailed Clarke. How he was treated by the Administrations he's served probably has something to do with his views today.
Personally, I'm not sure that all this navel gazing about what we did prior to 9/11 is all that important. Americans had a different mindset and world view. Serious anti-terrorism efforts were viewed much as we still regard scientists who worry about asteroids hitting Earth.
"Oh yes,that could happen and it would be horrendous, we really should be making plans to defend against that. What's for lunch?"

The debate and analysis should be on what's working and not in our post 9/11 policies. And that's how the Bush Administration be judged in 2004.

However this business with Clarke may be there s what I could consider to be another issue, here... the real elephant in the room... the one the left dare not approach, lest their mantra on the point be exposed for the garbage it is...

That elephant being that treating the problem of terrorism as a *criminal* act, doesn't deter it.

Dan;

...he was a registered Republican in 2000, served under three Republican presidents...

Same could be said for John McCain. I'm not sure what value this adds, therefore.

Dan sums up my thinking on Clarke: his strategy of "enforcement" (going after one guy at a time) failed as 9/11 showed. In the CYA world of DC, Clarke has to hold someone else ultimately responsible.

The problem is that NOBODY took terrorism seriously. NOBODY got the threat. But in this boomer-navel-gazing society, someone else has to be responsible. We'll get what we deserve from these hearings, sad to say.

We already have proof that Richard Clarke is a liar.

A la Kathleen Willey? What I find incredible is the personal attacks that ignore the substance of what Richard Clarke alleges. Is this the nuts & sluts defense?

Fact is, Reagan didn't retaliate after the Marine barracks in Lebanon were blown to smitherenes, but retreated every bit as meekly as Clinton did after Somalia. Bush didn't retaliate over Pan Am 103, or after the film of the Marine colonel swinging from a rope, and W. ignored terrorism in favor of SDI.

Clinton didn't do anything after the first WTC bombing. Clinton didn't do much after the embassy bombings in Africa, and when he did he was accused of "wag the dog", or have you forgotten that?

The Cole bombing was just weeks before the 2000 election and any response to it should have been carried out by W. after assuming office. To pin that one on Clinton is pretty weak since the facts weren't even known until after the election.

Face it, they've all done a pretty bad job. Only Clarke has admitted it and apologized to those he failed. Clinton and W. should be the next to apologize.

These sort of direct comparisons of re-worked bullets is really important, because so much of politics (whether at the national level, or in a small office of some widget company) is about personal relationships and individual egos. Unfortunate but true. And this is such a complicated issue in which it's hard to know if anyone was "right" or "wrong": maybe no one was. I think it's very important to hold public officials up for public scrutiny because accountability is important, but on the other hand, it's much easier looking back than looking forward. Can we really blame 9/11 on anyone except Al Quaeda?

Does anybody disagree with me concerning the “mainstream” media? What would the headlines say this morning if Richard Clarke was strongly defending President Bush? Would they not be highlighting the contradictions in his book and testimony? Does the bear crap in the woods?

The liberal establishment is going hysterical over the proven liar Richard Clarke. My guess is that they see him as perhaps the last chance to destroy President Bush. His poll number were going up---and suddenly have dropped in the last few days. This is no doubt due to Richard Clarke’s accusations. The evidence is now indisputable concerning Clarke’s lying ways. He will soon disappear and the liberals will be left empty handed. Their investment in Clarke may be similar to the gambler in Las Vegas who is betting his life savings on the next roll of the dice.

Reading the previous Clark thread, and now Dan’s new post, it might be interesting to play a “substitution game” as Dan has done with the bullet points.

If one substitutes “being disloyal” for “telling a lie” and “traitor” for “liar”, things make a lot more sense.

Original: Not keeping one's lies straight is self-destruction.
Substitution: Not being loyal is self-destruction.

Original: Kat: I've outlined the "liar" claims in a few of my posts in this thread. While I'm not saying that Clarke is a liar or lying, I am questioning why he would say one thing while working for the administration and then say another thing when not working for the administration.
Substitution: Kat: I've outlined the "TRAITOR" claims in a few of my posts in this thread. While I'm not saying that Clarke is a TRAITOR or is DISLOYAL, I am questioning why he would be LOYAL while working for the administration and then BE DISLOYAL when not working for the administration.

Get it? Two more examples:

Substitution: Let's say assume that Clarke is NOW being DISLOYAL. Let's assume that what he said in August 2002(released by Fox News, but NBC's Andrea Mitchell was on the same conference call) was just LOYALTY on behalf of the administration to deflect any doubts about the actions being taken by the administration to combat terror.

Substitution: My question above was written two days ago. I have yet to receive a good answer. What do I think of Richard Clarke now after giving his accusations a fair hearing? This man is a DISLOYAL scum bag! We are constantly finding more DISLOYALTY and outright DISLOYAL ACTS in his book and testimony. Why is he behaving this way? The liberal establishment pays its whores very well. Clarke will earn enormous sums of money on the book---and receive countless speaking engagements and foundation grants.
I rarely call anybody a TRAITOR. It is usually best to stay away from such harsh rhetoric. A person can often be wrong but still well meaning. You can even be sued in a court of law for slander. The benefit of the doubt should normally be given to one’s fellow human beings. After all, none of us are God. But the evidence is piling up quickly to prove without a doubt that Richard Clarke is both a dishonorable individual and a TRAITOR.

All we are seeing is “pounding the table” by attacking Clarke’s motives. Since he is disloyal to the President, he must have a bad motive. Since he has a bad motive, he must be a liar. If you accept this premise - that being disloyal to President Bush makes one a “liar” - than this debate is easy. All one must do is repeat the liar charge often enough, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE HAS YET SHOWN THAT THERE WERE ANY LIES.

Dan’s post is a more sophisticated variation of this method. He substitutes Clarke’s ego for Clarke’s veracity. “Since Clarke was a thin-skinned egomaniac, his motive must be that he wants to bolster/save his reputation. Since he has a selfish motive, he can’t be trusted.”

This is still not a substantive refutation of what Clarke is saying. I’m beginning to think there isn’t one.

By the way, Dan, Clarke was immediately rehired under Bush I.

Nice try, though.

Just a point.
During Clarke's recent interview with Larry King, he claimed that the president who dealt best with foreign policy was Bush 1. Maybe he got his talking points in order to sound more disinterested; maybe he didn't bear a grudge for the Secretary of State's actions. But he did say it.

“We already have proof that Richard Clarke is a liar.

A la Kathleen Willey? What I find incredible is the personal attacks that ignore the substance of what Richard Clarke alleges. Is this the nuts & sluts defense?”

I am not engaging in personal attacks. One merely needs to quote Richard Clarke. His own words doom him:

"When you are special assistant to the president and you're asked to explain something that is potentially embarrassing to the administration, because the administration didn't do enough or didn't do it in a timely manner and is taking political heat for it, as was the case there, you have a choice," he said.

One "choice that one has is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were, and that is what I did."

http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014732.php

Condoleeza Rice had lunch with Richard Clarke. He never once told her of his concerns. No, this man is a liar.

“If one substitutes “being disloyal” for “telling a lie” and “traitor” for “liar”, things make a lot more sense.”

Nope, Richard Clarke is not merely “being disloyal.” That is an entirely secondary and perhaps even irrelevant charge. It can safely be put to the side and ignored. The evidence is now indisputable that Clarke is a liar! The quotes are there for anyone to see.

"When you are special assistant to the president and you're asked to explain something that is potentially embarrassing to the administration, because the administration didn't do enough or didn't do it in a timely manner and is taking political heat for it, as was the case there, you have a choice," he said.

One "choice that one has is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were, and that is what I did."

Sounds like many a legal brief I have read - the facts are the same, but the presentation if the facts leaves the impression the writer wishes to leave.
Dans FP article uses facts to support a conclusion. Someone else could use the same facts to argue a different onclusion. Neither is a liar - they just present the facts differently.

Try again DT.

In Clark's testimony he pointed out that America needs to see body bags before it responds. The fact is no electable U.S. politician was going to risk war without the threat at home being made clear. Voters don't like having their family members killed for "foreigners" or "oil".

This fact of democratic politics cuts both ways. There is a limit to how far ahead we can get in dealing with threats, and there is a limited distance we can go after the threat is made clear. Indeed, the thrust of the opposition's stance to Iraq is that Saddam wasn't a threat to our shores (i.e, the threat is too far removed).

Simple question.

Why won't Condi testify?

Toast, your making a lousy assumption. Being loyal to the president is not a career beaurocrats job. Doing his job for the American people is. If he was lying to defend the Bush administration, the 'good soldier' argument does his credibility no good.
Again, ask yourself if the situation was reversed right now. If Clarke was out there being a 'good soldier' and protecting president Bush by saying the opposite of everything he said years ago, would you still be defending him? Or would you be calling him a liar? That knife cuts both ways.

Look here's the bottom line. Clarke is a Roschach Test. People who think Bush is a good president and honorable man look at Clarkes track record and accuse him of incoherance at best, and lying at worst. People who think Bush is a lousy president and a manipulative thug look at Clarke and hear him making accusations that ring true to them. The incongruities are just minor details to those people. Stubborn minor details.
Dont judge a man's credibility based on the fact that you agree with what he is saying. Thats a dangerous game. From an objective point of view, I believe its fairly conclusive that Clarke either was blowing smoke then or is blowing smoke now, or most likely of all his opinion has changed in the interrum. Its also fairly conclusive that a lot of what is saying now has validity, if not his rabid characterizations. Bush didnt do enough to combat Al Qaeda. We all agree with that, even Bush. I dont understand the need to retroactively turn the Clintons into a terror fighting machine that the record simply doesnt support, including Clarkes own past views. Neither do I understand the hyperbole Clarke expresses against this president, specifically ignoring the number of terrorist this president has captured and killed, financing we've dried up, and bases we've overrun (it was Bush that pressured the Yemenese into arresting the Cole bombers for instance).
From what i've seen so far, this book is more an attack on Bush's agressive war against terror than anything helpful about the 911 investigation. But again, if you dont like Bush, everything this guy says is music to your ears.

Does anybody disagree with me concerning the “mainstream” media? What would the headlines say this morning if Richard Clarke was strongly defending President Bush? Would they not be highlighting the contradictions in his book and testimony? Does the bear crap in the woods?

The importance of this point should not be missed.
and along those same lines,Ann Coulter points out some contrasts in coverage:

"(Gary) Aldrich was mentioned on fewer than a dozen TV shows during the entire year of his book's release ... many with headlines like this one on CNN: 'Even Conservatives Back Away From Aldrich's Book.' That's almost as much TV as Lewinsky mouthpiece William Ginsburg did before breakfast on an average day."
...
"But a "tell-all" book that attacks the Bush administration gets the author interviewed on CBS' "60 Minutes" (two segments), CNN's "American Morning" and ABC's "Good Morning America" with an "analysis" by George Stephanopoulos, no less. In the first few days of its release, Clarke's book was hyped on more than 200 TV shows. "

She goes on to point up that:

In contrast to Aldrich's book, which was vindicated with a whoop just a few years later when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, many of Clarke's allegations were disproved within days of the book's release.

Oh, yeah.. THAT liberal media, huh?

So Drezner bought the book too. This marketing job has been FANTASTIC! Congrats to Simon & Schuster and their corporate cronies at CBS on doing a such a good job for Viacom!

Why won't Condi testify?

Separation of Powers. Is that so difficult to understand?

One correction:

Clarke wasn't a registered Republican in 2000. He voted in the Virginia Republican PRIMARY (for McCain) in 2000. Virginia doesn't have party registration.

(From what I can infer, he voted for Gore in the general, so if you had to classify him, it would be as a McCain democrat.)

“So Drezner bought the book too. This marketing job has been FANTASTIC! Congrats to Simon & Schuster and their corporate cronies at CBS on doing a such a good job for Viacom!”

I can’t blame Dan Drezner for purchasing this book. We are all caught in a Catch 22 where one is obligated to be as fair as possible to Richard Clarke. This is may be galling, but that’s the way it is. My guess is that he earns around $3 royalty for each book sold. This man will receive at least $500,000 for getting this work published. Once again, how much would Clarke have earned had he not blasted President Bush? The financial motive is most certainly there.

"Dont judge a man's credibility based on the fact that you agree with what he is saying. Thats a dangerous game."

Um, Mark, I think that was my point. People are attacking his credibility because they disagree with his interpretation of the facts he is presenting.

"From an objective point of view, I believe its fairly conclusive that Clarke either was blowing smoke then or is blowing smoke now, or most likely of all his opinion has changed in the interrum.Its also fairly conclusive that a lot of what is saying now has validity, if not his rabid characterizations."

From an objective POV (if you can claim objectivity, I can claim objectivity :), I see no inconsistancy in the facts of what he said then and what he is saying now. I see vast differences in the interpretation of what he said then and what he is saying now. Feel free to accept or reject his interpretation of the facts, and substitute your own interpretation. What I object to is the characterization of his interpretation of the facts as a lie.

"People are attacking his credibility because they disagree with his interpretation of the facts he is presenting."

Some are. Some are raising very legitimate questions about why his position has radically changed, as well as why he hasnt brought this to light sooner in the last critical year of foriegn policy.

"I see no inconsistancy in the facts of what he said then and what he is saying now."

I find that almost impossible to believe unless you're just not paying attention. Care to spin this into making sense?

""Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."
---
"CNN is reporting that Condi Rice just held a press conference to release an unclassified portion of an email sent to her from Dick Clarke just after September 11 in which he states that he worries the Bush Administration might be accused of not doing enough to prevent September 11, and listing actions that the Administration had taken against terrorism and Al Qaeda to combat that perception."
---
""What I don't understand is if you had these deep feelings and deep concerns … in the Bush administration that you didn't advise the [Sept. 11] joint inquiry," said former White House counsel Fred Fielding. "

You are arguing that there is no inconsistancy in that? Please advise. Cuz I cant make the puzzle peices fit together.

“Um, Mark, I think that was my point. People are attacking his credibility because they disagree with his interpretation of the facts he is presenting.”

Not true. It is not the “interpretation of facts”---but the contradictions of Richard Clarke’s accusations. He is caught saying one thing and then another.

Separation of powers? Snort.

Congress has oversight of the executive branch.

The concept of "Checks and balances" does not mean "no checks and balances."

It means "some checks and balances."

Moreover, there's plenty of precedent:

Now, there is a constitutional issue involved. But Rice is trying to get people to think that members of the White House staff never testify. And that's not even close to true. In my hand I have a 2002 Congressional Research Service study that lists a whole slew of presidential aides and advisors who've testified in the past.

Indeed, it lists two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor who've given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997.

Interestingly, the CRS study lists five examples of cases where presidential aides refused to testify. It's not clear whether this list is supposed to be exhaustive. And in most cases presidential aides are simply not even asked to testify at all, for reasons of comity between the branches if nothing else. But of the five listed four are from the Nixon administration. And each of those were before the Watergate investigation really got under way. A whole slew of Nixon aides had to head up to the Hill in 1974 after things started to go south for them -- so perhaps we haven't heard the final word on this matter.

In any case, there's a high bar for testimony from a National Security Advisor. But it's happened before. And more than once. If they wanted her to testify, she could testify. What they want is for her to be able to lacerate her critics, discuss whichever parts of her advice to the president would be helpful to her politically at the moment, and freely declassify documents which she or the White House believes will hurt her enemies.

*Condoleeza Rice had lunch with Richard Clarke. He never once told her of his concerns. No, this man is a liar.*

And or course, your proof for this is the "fact" that Rice is NOT lying, eh? Solid.

Bithead - Ann Coultier -? Am I not just as well served to get my politics from Al Franken?

Toast:

I agree with you and our host that the facts presented are going to be the key on evaluating this tome.

But attacking Clarke's credibility seems absolutely fair, because most of what is getting into the press are his opinions and perceptions. And the best interpretation one can put on his actions is that he didn't figure sharing those opinions and perceptions were important back in 2002 and 2003, when the Iraq adventure could have been prevented. Guess that Homeland Security job meant more to him.

I don't know if Clarke's apology yesterday extends to the families of the 500 dead soldiers. Because, if he truly felt the way he says he did, he owes them one.

OK. Enough venting. I do look forward to a good analysis of what's in the thing, because regardless of moral dubiousness of the presenter, the facts may be important. Hopefully, our host will do the work for us, because I sure do NOT want to provide this guy any royalties -- at least until I have a sense that motive for the writing of this book was something more than the lure of the big dollars and spite.

""Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

This is a conclusion – not a fact. Feel free to reject it. I have already said I think this is hyperbole.

"CNN is reporting that Condi Rice just held a press conference to release an unclassified portion of an email sent to her from Dick Clarke just after September 11 in which he states that he worries the Bush Administration might be accused of not doing enough to prevent September 11, and listing actions that the Administration had taken against terrorism and Al Qaeda to combat that perception."

This is an E-mail out of perhaps hundreds selected by a person who will not testify who also has a keen interest in discrediting Mr. Clarke. One interpretation is that Clarke is trying to tell Dr. Rice in a way that doesn’t call her a fool (I’m being helpful to you! :) that the administration needs to do more.

---
""What I don't understand is if you had these deep feelings and deep concerns … in the Bush administration that you didn't advise the [Sept. 11] joint inquiry," said former White House counsel Fred Fielding

It's my understanding that this was directed at Clarke’s opposition to the Iraq war, and Clarke has said that he was not asked about the Iraq war. If you know differently, I’d like to hear about it.

Look, I'm not buying the argument that the Clinton administration was doing things right against terror and the Bush team changed course and muffed it. I agree that they all missed it. Would a Kerry administration have done better than the Bush or Clinton administrations pre-9/11? I doubt it.
I do think, however, that the Bush team was too focused on other things pre 9/11 and reacted post 9/11 by attacking the wrong target. Thats an opinion, not a fact.

The Republican RWC attacks on Clarke are morally unjust, and typical of the right wing attack machine.

When the Republican RWC was attacking Clinton, Decocrats never attacked any of his accusers or prosecutors in a personal way meant to impugn their integrity.

Bush lied, Clinton didn't. Bush is incompetent, Clinton had the most competent foreign policy and anti-terrorism approach in modern history.

Could the timing of the book release have had anything to do with it's relative sales value?

Going back in time and looking ahead: IF he had waited until after his testimony to release it, and IF the Bush Admin successfully trashed his credibility, wouldn't the book have then been relatively worthless?

See how business is voting:

Bushes poll numbers go down after Clarke's righteous rebuke, and the stock market responds with the biggest upswing of the year.

Wonder whom they want for president?

Dan, the DFL tried very hard to clobber Starr.

While there are serious issues about Clarke's change in tone and whatever substantive difference exists between the facts he asserted in the past and does today...

At the same time the WH doesn't do itself any favors with its line of attacks.

It really has been a nuts and sluts defense, within a broader AAA style "throw it all up there" approach.

So maybe careful factual refuation isn't the administration's style. But the fact that their leading attack was really so much BS (he was in the loop, he was out of the loop, etc.) that it tells me the White House does not have the facts on its side to the degree the right side of media assets. You really only have to look at their reactions.

Plus Condi Rice through all this looks like she's playing politics the Todd Bertuzi way, bringing personal attacks down from high up in the peanut gallery.

She needs to testify. Clarke went under the microscope and under oath.

If she got to testify she would, I think, help the administration by giving it equally weighty response time.

But she doesn't, and I don't think its improper to infer from that, and the rather unbecoming WH response, that Clarke really struck a nerve.

And the reason for that, well, I think it's because his story is the truth, and certainly more truthful than the WH's.

How is it possible for any self-respecting journalist to accept Clarke's assertion that the Clinton administration put a high priority on terrorism after reading just this part of the August 2002 briefing?

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.

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.

A lot of talk, little action. The hallmark of the Clinton administration's approach to terrorism, as to many other issues. The notion that they were much touogher on terrorism that Bush is betyond ludicrous.

Dan:

The tenor of Clarke's remarks are bullets like this:

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Why is it morally wrong to attack back? Wouldn't you question, and question the motivation of your accuser if he said you "maybe" could have prevented the deaths of 3000 people, if you weren't negligent?

The truth tends to come out in a vigorous discussion of events. Clarke knowingly has started one. Let the process work, let the Bushies make their explanations, so that the explanations may be refuted. Your assumption -- Clinton good, Bush bad, may actually be the truth that emerges.

Sorry for the confusion, AM

The posts were meant to be sarcastic.

I guess they mimicked the thinking of some on the left too closely for the distinction to be clear.

I agree with your post.

TexasToast,

Ask Martha Stewart about 18 USC 1001.

Rice can tesify before the commission as long as the President signs off on it. She can also testify publicly before the commission by resigning. Each of these acts are unlikely to occur. Rice has already met(not sure if she testified) privately with the commission.

The difference between Berger's testimony in 1997 and the potential for Rice today is Berger was testifying based on his views not when he was National Security Advisor but when he was Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. At the time of his testimony Berger was the National Security Advisor, but that is moot to the issue he was testifying.

In my blogpost today I went back to 1998 after the White House ordered cruise missile strikes in the Sudan and Afghanistan that were a result of a meeting of top White House NS officials. Richard Clarke was one of the officials recommending these actions. However, in my post I highlight the responses of some Arab leaders to the cruise missile strikes. Here's the takes.

A Taliban spokesman called the attack a "demonstration of enmity for the Afghan people."

The Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council issued a statement saying that "the terrorist crimes practiced by the United States against the Iraqis in particular, and the Arabs in general, are continuing," adding, Iraq is "ready to cooperate with any Arab and international countries to confront the U.S. hostile policies," the statement said.

Moammar Gadhafi said his country would support Sudan "in the fight against this aggression."

"Any American aggression against any Arab country is not only aggression against them but against Islam," said Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. "The United States says it is fighting against terrorism by individuals, but the United States itself represents state terrorism."

No President did this, until after 9/11.

lost in all of this :

One of Clarke's points, explicitly stated in the book and testimony is: GWB weakened the WOT by invading Iraq.

my question:

why are the opinions of a apparatchik like Clarke on a global - strategic issue of that magnitude taken so seriously -- his opinion on it is not necessarily more interesting than, well, mine -- it's 'above his pay grade' ..

Drezner's piece seems better considered than most of the commenters' attacks on Clarke.

Everyone makes mistakes, and that hasn't disqualified incumbent presidents in the past. What is more relevent is Bush's & Kerry's views on future US role in the world and Iraq. Kerry talks about progressive internationalism. Bush sees the world as America's sandbox.

thx praktike.

She refused to testify about 9/11, even though there was precedent. She selectively relases classified information when it bolsters her case.

And even if there was no precedent, 9/11 happened and 3000 people died. We went to war because of this. Answering questions about what happened, under oath, is her responsibility as a public servant, and as an American citizen.

Dave C:

anyone who says:
'..Bush sees the world as America's sandbox. '

is, to put it kindly, living in fantasyland.

"It's my understanding that this was directed at Clarke’s opposition to the Iraq war, and Clarke has said that he was not asked about the Iraq war. If you know differently, I’d like to hear about it."

Actually this was in reaction to Clarke's original testimony before the closed door 911 committee. Im not sure when that happened. But according to the panelist, Clarkes testimony then is completely different in tone than it is now. Thats why he got the reaction he did from several memebers of the committee. This is a critical point against the mans credibility, if when he was called in from of the 911 committee, he either decided defending Bush and/or his job was more important than getting the truth out. That is assuming that he didnt believe what he was saying at those hearings. Maybe he did and has since changed his mind. It has to be one or the other.

As far as your interpretation of the Rice email and Clarkes interviews, doesnt seem plausible to me. Why is there not a single piece of evidence, an interview, an email, a conversation, anything at all supporting the view that Clarke felt Bush was completely dropping the ball especially compared to Clinton. _All_ the evidence points the opposite way.

Here's Clarke from a Wash Post story (subscription):

Assessing U.S. counterterrorism policy to date, Clarke said it's no accident that there have been so few terrorist attacks on American soil.

"The fact that we got seven out of the eight people from the World Trade Center [bombing], and we found them in five countries around the world and brought them back here, the fact we can demonstrate repeatedly that the slogan, 'There's nowhere to hide,' is more than a slogan, the fact that we don't forget, we're persistent -- we get them -- has deterred terrorism," he said.

This is Clarke talking about the response to the first WTC bombing. Was that a strong response? Heck no it wasn't. This guy is grinding an axe. This kind of behavior is totally unacceptable in war time. His big argument is that the 2nd Iraq war weakened the response to terrorism, specifically, Al Queda. Yet Clarke, himself, linked AQ and Iraq in 1999:

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

Iraq harbored terrorists and funded terrorists. To argue that going after Iraq diminished the war on terrorism is nonsense. Already Lybia has capitulated, and because of that we know about the extent of Iran's programs, and the treachery of the Pakistani scientist and the North Koreans. Iran and Syria both border on revolt for democracy. I think the war on terrorism is going pretty wellso far given all the complexities involved.

There is enough blame to go around for everyone. This partisan crap accomplishes nothing. It doesn't matter which side is doing it. 9-11 would likely have happened no matter who was President. Even Clarke admits that. He's just mad because he didn't get to become the savior of the world.

Separation of Powers, Executive Privilege, etc. Whatever. I know there's precidence, but pressuring Rice to testify sets a new, less desireable precidence. What comes around...

Besides, much of the 9/11 inquiry has become a worthless, partisan circus. Democratic panel members were tossing Clarke utterly valueless softball questions geared towards highlighting the more damning of his assertions, while Republican members were unbelievably appalled at issues equivalent to how Clarke parts his hair or whether he installs his toilet paper properly. The gamesmanship had as much significance to Wed's investigation as the testimony. It's just another sorry aspect of our severely divided nation.

Mickslam: The National Security Advisor isn't a "public servant". The role is quite reserved in its relation to public scrutiny. It's reserved to Presidential discretion whether or not the NSA testifies or not. Ms. Rice can testify, but she would have to resign first which is something she said she would not do. She had said that she will do what the President requests her to do.

The question that should continually be raised and not forgtten is... "How many lying partisan hacks have infiltrated this administration, how can we root them out, and how can we discredit them before the go public?" Ok, so its three questions. I think Clarke is #6, #7? But whose counting. Let the attack dogs rome.

TexasToast

Read these 2 Clark quotes:

"Richard Clarke, the country’s first counter-terrorism czar, told me in an interview at his home in Arlington, Virginia, that he wasn’t particularly surprised that the Bush Administration’s efforts to find bin Laden had been stymied by political problems. He had seen such efforts fail before. Clarke, who retired from public service in February and is now a private consultant on security matters, has served every President since Ronald Reagan. He has won a reputation as a tireless advocate for action against Al Qaeda. Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan."

--Richard Clarke, per the August 4th 2003 issue of the New Yorker.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

--Richard Clarke, on 60 Minutes, March 21, 2004.

These cannot both be true; they could both be false, but they cannot possibly both be true. Richard Clarke is a liar. This is just the most obvious spot - there are plenty of others.

Another example:

Clinton was good on terrorism, while Bush was not AND Bush didn't discontinue what Clinton did and in fact expanded the budget for it by a factor of 5.

When 2 things said by the same person are contradictory, it is not necessary to know which (if either) is true to know that the person is a lying (or has mental problems).

Since most of Clarke's attack on Bush is based entirely on his own word, his credibility is absolutely vital. Examples like this show that he HAS no credibility and should therfore not be taken seriously.

Could he be telling the truth now? Sure - but there's no reason to think so (or to think not). His accusations are not necessarily true or false, merely irrelevant.

What's relevant is credible charges from a credible person, or credible evidence. Clark has offered neither.

And I can say that from either side of the aisle - if I hate Bush or like him, I want to know the truth, and Clarke is no longer useful in regards to finding the truth.

To see Bush was not serious on terrorism pre-war is not that difficult. Google and Lexis are your friends. As noted on TPM, do a lexis search for anyone in Bush's Cabal and Al Queda (date limit to pre 9/11). You'll basically get no hits. Repeat search with Bush Cabal memeber and Iraq ... many, many hits. Now repeat search with Clinton cabal member and Al Queda, again many many hits. We report, you decide.

This story has been confirmed from multiple independant sources. This administrations fascination and at the same time incompetence with dealing with Iraq has been noted in many many places.

How many holes does it take to sink this ship?

>>>>See how business is voting:

Bushes poll numbers go down after Clarke's righteous rebuke, and the stock market responds with the biggest upswing of the year.

Wonder whom they want for president?>>>>

I'm sure it had nothing to do with the 4th quarter GDP stats coming out this morning.

But I guess you're right, since the start of the Democratic primary season (with Kerry emerging as the winner), the stock market has dropped to 12 month lows. I wonder who Wall Street is afraid will win in November.

Whatever

Anon:

your faith in quantifying reality via Google/Lexis is charming in its adolescent simplicity ..

also, the 'story' (uh, what story?) has been 'confirmed' ! in 'many, many places' !!!

well, then I guess that just settles it !

Someone is lying....Clarke or Rice. Cheney or O'Neill. Rove or DiIulio. Wilson or Rumsfeld. What are the probabilities that the Admins are all telling the truth?

TexasToast,

I went after Clarke because his past whoppers made me suspicious he was doing it again. Note that I defended Clinton's foreign policy in past threads to the point of saying he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for Bosnia & Kosovo, and said in the previous Clarke thread that I thought he was right in not going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan because we'd have had to take down Pakistan to do it (as in turn Pakistan into a mildy radioactive province of India).

I've now read more of the 9/10/01 Bush admnistration plan to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (apparently devised by Clarke during the Clinton admninistration and tabled). It was bloody dangerous.

Only 9/11 gave the US the credible resolve to force Pakistan to abandon the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Even then the Pakistani forces in Afghanistan fought the Northern Alliance until they were shattered by American air attack, and then they flew home from bases there which the USAF left alone on orders. Only the Pakistani forces flying home left with lots of Al Qaeda on board.

Look, the ISI had a ****ing alliance with Al Qaeda! They shared control of Afghanistan through the Taliban, and Al Qaeda provided support for terror in Kashmir. The ISI's chief allegedly sent $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the US to support 9/11, and was personally in D.C. on 9/11. I suspected for months afterwards that 9/11 was coordinated from the Pakistani embassy courtesy of diplomatic pouches, etc. Musharraf looked the other way at all this. He knew they were up to something but not what, and was loathe to look under rocks.

Only the most dire threats from Colin Powell flipped Pakistan after 9/11. Musharaff knew then that Pakistan's existence was on the line. IMO there was a lot more involved than the necessity of our access to Afghanistan through Pakistan - we had the goods on the ISI and Musharraf knew it.

IMO the ISI was far, far more involved in 9/11 than any other foreign govt. group. Talk about factions is beside the point - what counts is results.

IMO Saddam did have a hand in 9/11, but indirectly and without knowledge that a major attack was planned. There is significantly more evidence of Iraqi involvement in the prior WTC bombing than in 9/11. The evidence concerning Iraqi involvement 9/11 is weak and inferential at best. The 9/11 hijackers seem to have been trained by Al Qaeda trainers who themselves were trained at Salman Pak, Iraq. See:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/archive/article/0,,4296646,00.html

I also suspect the anthrax used on us was of Iraqi origin. That we haven't been able to duplicate the stuff is clear and convincing evidence that the weaponization process was devised by a foreign power. Occam's Razor says the most likely suspect for that is Iraq.

But IMO Pakistan's ISI was far more involved in 9/11 than Saddam Hussein. Clinton, Tenet and Clarke knew there was a significant relationship between Al Qaeda and at least potent factions in the ISI such that Pakistan would obstruct American efforts to drive Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. We plain lacked the political will and credibility to break that relationship prior to 9/11.

Hindsight shows Clinton was right in turning down Clarke's plan, which means we had to take the hit oon 9/11.

Scrambling... its so cute. you sound like a thousand little Rushes. Rumsfeld doesn't think Clarke's a liar, but I guess ya'll know better. Strange how you'll torture logic to get to the point where you don't have to confront specific allegations... Say, Condi's managerial incompetence- forcing Deputy meetings to wade through every detail of counter-terrorism, so that a Grand Strategy can be developed. You need to get your game on and stop whining.

anon,

With all due respect, if I did a nexus search for Mohammed Atta pre 9/11, I would come up with no hits.

Likewise, how many articles were written in the 8 months prior to 9/11 about terror attacks? Not many. Why? No terror events that were newsworthy. But there was the plane downed in China, the N Koreans acting up/us changing our policy, the ABM treaty, the Iraqis continually shooting at US planes in the Gulf, etc etc.

During the Clinton administration, there were numerous real attacks against America by Al-queda. So there were obviously going to be stories about it. And did you limit your search on Bush and Iraq to Jan 20-Sept10 2001? If not, might you not be finding Bush I stories?

Your little nexus search proves absolutely nothing.

anon,

With all due respect, if I did a nexus search for Mohammed Atta pre 9/11, I would come up with no hits.

Likewise, how many articles were written in the 8 months prior to 9/11 about terror attacks? Not many. Why? No terror events that were newsworthy. But there was the plane downed in China, the N Koreans acting up/us changing our policy, the ABM treaty, the Iraqis continually shooting at US planes in the Gulf, etc etc.

During the Clinton administration, there were numerous real attacks against America by Al-queda. So there were obviously going to be stories about it. And did you limit your search on Bush and Iraq to Jan 20-Sept10 2001? If not, might you not be finding Bush I stories?

Your little nexus search proves absolutely nothing.

Anon: What does Josh Marshalls child's game prove really? How is one to quantify 8 months versus 8 years? Elaborating on other topics. Say I did a search for Nevada University basketball team before the beginning of the NCAA tournament and then did a search 1 week into the tournament. I'd have way more results 1 week in than I would going back 10 years as Nevada defeated two teams as the underdog. Prior that the general public could have cared less about the Nevada basketball program that is until it the public was excited about it.

I'm the first to admit when I had first heard the name "The Base" before I had heard of Al Qaeda. Each was typically irrellevant to me at the time as terrorism was something I viewed as a CIA/FBI problem. I had never accepted the view that anyone could STOP terrorism. Israel kind of, sort of, defintely proves that acceptable theory.

"As noted on TPM" is a cliche for "Bush Sucks". It's the same result you get when you filter out the quotations from a Molly Ivins column.

wishiwas2 raises an interesting question (long ago in the thread) about the curious incident of the timing of this book's release, coinciding ALMOST PERFECTLY with the media blitz of the long-simmering 9/11 commission testimony. Anyone else smell something funny here? Question: who determined the scheduling of the 9/11 commission's "big week" here in DC? How long have the bigwigs (inc. Clarke) been set to appear and who had access to that knowledge?

I'm not big on conspiracy theories but it does strike me as, shall we say ORCHESTRATED to do the most damage to Bush on his most self-described strongest suit at a time when Kerry desperately needs to create an opening?

Another question (since I live inside the beltway): how far is this story carrying beyond these environs? My guess would be "not much" but I could be wrong. Any evidence out there either way?

By the bye, Tom Holsinger is dead on: this spells the end of any "holdovers" in critical posts. Of course, the fact that Clarke held on through so many administrations, doing his chicken little routine to no discernible effect, is testament to how LITTLE power he actually wielded.

My armchair analysis of the guy: in his own mind he was the true president, the only person who could ever be trusted with a subject of such gravity. His apology, on behalf not only of himself but of every government official of the past 20 years, for failing to prevent 9/11 demonstrates how omnipotent he actually believed himself to be. On a kinder note, no human being should ever be asked to bear the psychological burdens this man took upon himself for many years. I'd be a bit crazy too were I in his shoes.

Anon: One of the problems with Josh Marshall's survey of Lexis results is the fact that during the Clinton Administration there were criminal indictments, convictions and sentencing that produces many a repeating story in the media.

Furthermore, the Iraq to Bush Cabal search should be compared to Iraq to Clinton Cabal search because you'll probably find MORE hits during the Clinton years than you will with Bush.

Time and events are relevent to these searches and well that doesn't really matter to Josh Marshall. Plus, how many reporters in the first quarter of 2001 were still recovering from Election 2000 syndrome?

". Google and Lexis are your friends. As noted on TPM, do a lexis search for anyone in Bush's Cabal and Al Queda (date limit to pre 9/11). You'll basically get no hits"

Particularly if you spell Al Qaeda wrong.

Doesn't matter how you spell it; it still doesn't show up at all in the oh-so-urgent-about-CT President Clinton's final address to Congress on National Security Strategy. You'd think that would be something he'd want to pass on.

Afghanistan and the Taliban are mentioned a couple of times, as is bin Laden. But never with any immediacy associated with addressing them.

*wishiwas2 raises an interesting question.. ..about the curious incident of the timing of this book's release...*

Although, it was in reference to the revenue impact, not the political fallout.

I'm sure nobody sees the books timing with the 9/11 commission as coincidence. But it would have been fun to hear the discussion with the publishers last year. There was a good argument to make that releasing it AFTERWARDS could benefit sales if his testimony proved explosive, but at the risk of a successful effort to discredit his testimony. Releasing it BEFORE shows respect for this Admin's spin abilities.

Just playing the business.

Overall, there's nothing terribly significant in what Clarke is saying. So everyone failed to guess that we were dealing with barbarians again, and they murdered 3000 people.

So whose fault is it? Bin Laden's and his cronies.

Can we do better now that we know what we're up against? Of course. I can't see why we don't just give everyone involved a pass on this one. I mean Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes. For Pete's sake, let's get on with the task at hand.

Whatever, Slarti:

Globally, as a result of more porous borders, rapid changes in technology, greater information flow, and the potential destructive power within the reach of small states, groups, and individuals, the United States finds itself confronting new threats that pose strategic challenges to our interests and values. These include the potential use and continued proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their means of delivery, proliferation of small arms and light weapons, threats to our information/cyber security, international migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons, and the ability to disrupt our critical infrastructure. As a result, defense of the homeland against WMD terrorism has taken on a new importance, making coordinated Federal, state, and local government efforts imperative. The Domestic Preparedness Program has received significant resources to address immediate threats to our security. Ongoing efforts on National Missile Defense are developing the capability to defend the fifty states against a limited missile attack from states that threaten international peace and security. Prevention remains our first line of defense to lessen the availability of weapons of mass destruction being sought by such aggressor nations. To that end, we continue to work with Russia to control possible leakage of former Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons materials and expertise to proliferant states.

From the first section.

What part of that is supposed to be a rebuttal? I'm a bit slow; you'll have to point it out to me.

Are assistant professors of political science normally supposed to ignore the factual criticisms and make circumstancial ad hominem claims?

Deoxy:

If you are going to use inconsistent statements like those as evidence of lying, every politician at every level of government is a liar. Just look at the jokes about the Bush team’s defense to Clarke’s charges. It’s a regular “circular firing squad”. Good grief.

Tom

I don’t have any argument with what you just posted. Clarke may deserve to be criticized for pushing for military action against AQ in a pre-9/11 world. My “beef” is with claims that Clarke is a liar based on silly arguments like DT’s or Deoxy’s. If someone would argue substantively that “Clarke was wrong and here is why”, then we might have a meaningful discussion. But we have post after post of “He’s a liar because he made some inconsistent statements in his past.” That is just not persuasive.

I’m waiting for Drezner to start a thread on Iraq as an essential part of the WOT or a distraction. That should be interesting.

Hey Toast:

There's a third possibility on Iraq -- neither essential nor a distraction. (I think I fall in that category.)

Kudos to Dan D for actually taking the bull by the horns and reading the book.

(In stark contrast to the greek chorus of Instawannabes who decide that the book is full of uncomfortable ideas and seek out any reason they can to ignore it. He's disgruntled. He's a Kerry supporter. He was out of the loop. He missed a bunch of meetings. All he wanted to do was have meetings. He contradicted himself. He's only in it for the money. Whatever.)

I am curious to see what he has to say about whether/how the decision to invade Iraq undermined the military effort to defeat Al Qaeda.

Curiosity is good. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say about it, regardless of whether what you say is what I want to hear. That's what keeps me coming back to your site - if all I wanted was comfortable confirmation of what I believe already there are plenty of other places to get that.

A well made point about Somalia..especially on the tenth anniversary of the last troops leaving Mogadishu...Your timing is eerie.

Ok, I guess it's possible that Clinton did consider Al Qaeda to be urgently threatening as Clarke claims. I just think it's a more than a little odd that that urgency utterly fails to appear anywhere in Clinton's parting comments to Congress on security strategy. It is telling, though, that the strategy contained scant mention of tracking down and exterminating terrorists. Perhaps something changed between December of 2000 and now?

TexasToast,

Compare Clarke's recent statements to journalists, particularly the televised ones, concerning incidents with his descriptions of the same events in his book. Then compare his accounts in 2001 and 2002 of those same incidents. His different accounts of the same incidents become more and more exaggerated over time.

IMO Mr. Clarke very much enjoys his 15 minutes of fame.

And Kerry will dump him later.

Joe Wilson here we come.

Next week Oprah will channel Carl Sagan, who will advise us that the invasion of Iraq was the final tipping point for global warming.

"someone would argue substantively that “Clarke was wrong and here is why”, then we might have a meaningful discussion. "

Wrong about which part? That Bush was deeply involved in expanding and revamping our anti-terror policy or that Bush was completely ignoring it?
Or that Clintons policy hadnt evolved since 98 and that he turned down several chances to be more agressive against OBL, or that CLinton's number 1 priority was terrorism?
Sorry, its hard to argue with Clarke unless you know which Clarke to argue with.

Condi Rice did talk with the commision - she has only refused to testify in public. Hmmm, what's the difference? No TV sound bites. If the commision wants to do its job, which should be looking into helping the anti-terror process and intellegence proceedures, then they don't need public testimony. If they want to indulge in blaming people and partisan point scoring, public testimony is a must.

And what's with the whole "I voted Republican in the 2000 primary"? I voted for Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primary, and hell would have to freeze over before I'd vote for him for President. Missouri (where I live) is just like Virginia - you walk in, and they ask which ballot you want. The way he phrases it, he obviously voted for McCain -- and why not, Gore already had the Democratic nomination sown up. So what he's really saying is that he didn't want Bush to be President, but he's saying it in such a way to try to fool you into thinking he's a Republican. Otherwise, he could say he voted for Bush.

KFM - lighten up and have some fun.

That Clarke said supportive things about Bush while he was working for Bush is no surprise; as he said himself, that's politics.

Makes you wonder how candid Condi, Colin, Rummy et al are really being right now, doesn't it? After all they're still working for the President...

Clarke's been around for a long time, he's the only administration official who has actually admitted that 9/11 was a failure, and apologized for it. On the other hand, we have Coni Rice refusing to testify (while getting her face on every TV talk show can find), Bush fighting tooth and nail against even having a 9/11 investigation....and if you want to talk about contradictory statements and lies, lets get out the WMD files, or Bush's election speeches (we are not in the business of nation building, my ass....)

I know who I believe on this one.

Yes, of course. I can see it now. Since Clarke lied while in the service of the government, everyone else must be doing it too. Why didn't I think of that?

Of course, if one can be induced to lie once, who's to say what can induce one to lie again? Hell if I know.

If the Administration wants to put this to rest, then let's declassify all the files and memos involved and the President announce that he *expects* all his aides to testify under oath to the 911 commission.

This Adminstration wants to have it both ways. To selectively leak documents to discredit their opponents, and at the same time use Executive privledge to shield inquiry into their own position.

Whatever minor inconsistencies in Clarke's positions, he has presented evidence that is breath taking in its implications and if true - and I have not seen the evidence refuted - implies this Administration actively subverted the WoT into Iraq the day after 911.

What is happening there is a breach of public trust that goes beyond reasonable doubt if it can be verified and into treasonous territory. That is far more important than the admittedly imperfect inconsistencies in Clarke's background and performance.

If the *evidence* holds, then President Bush betrayed the trust of America as a deliberate and premeditated act fully aware that he was ignoring the actual terrorist threat.

There are two points on the Clarke Affair that stand out.

The first is the disparate media treatment of Bush whistle blowers like Joe Wilson and Richard Clarke versus Clinton whistle blowers who were proven correct by events like Gary Aldrich.

The second is how provably false Clarke's statements are versus what the Media's latest "Great White Hope" made them out to be

This is from Frontpagemag.com via the blond bomb throwing harpy Ann Coulter (...even a stopped clock can be right twice a day):

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=12732

When an FBI agent with close, regular contact with President Clinton wrote his book, he was virtually blacklisted from the mainstream media. Upon the release of Gary Aldrich's book "Unlimited Access" in 1996, White House adviser George Stephanopoulos immediately called TV producers demanding that they give Aldrich no airtime. In terms of TV exposure, Aldrich's book might well have been titled "No Access Whatsoever."

"Larry King Live" and NBC's "Dateline" abruptly canceled their scheduled interviews with Aldrich. Aldrich was mentioned on fewer than a dozen TV shows during the entire year of his book's release – many with headlines like this one on CNN: "Even Conservatives Back Away From Aldrich's Book." That's almost as much TV as Lewinsky mouthpiece William Ginsburg did before breakfast on an average day. (Let's take a moment here to imagine the indignity of being known as "Monica Lewinsky's mouthpiece.")

But a "tell-all" book that attacks the Bush administration gets the author interviewed on CBS' "60 Minutes" (two segments), CNN's "American Morning" and ABC's "Good Morning America" with an "analysis" by George Stephanopoulos, no less. In the first few days of its release, Clarke's book was hyped on more than 200 TV shows.

In contrast to Aldrich's book, which was vindicated with a whoop just a few years later when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, many of Clarke's allegations were disproved within days of the book's release. Clarke claims, for example, that in early 2001, when he told President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about al-Qaida, her "facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before." (If only she used botox like Sen. Kerry!)

Sean Hannity has been playing a radio interview that Dr. Rice gave to David Newman on WJR in Detroit back in October 2000, in which she discusses al-Qaida in great detail. This was months before chair-warmer Clarke claims her "facial expression" indicated she had never heard of the terrorist organization.

The Condi Rice comment by Clarke is what clued me he was just another lying partisan Democratic hack.

It's too bad it takes another partisan hack like Ann Coulter to notice it in the published public media.

"Still, it's hard not to believe that Clarke's evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke."

But if Clarke's job was to head counter-terrorism efforts, then how well the president treated Clarke is almost the same as how well they fought the war on terror. Your objection is a little like reducing Charles De Gaulle's attitude towards Vicy to the personal animosity of a spurned Tank enthusiast.

Now, Clarke may have been a staunch advocate in private of going after Al Qaeda. I'll grant that even though his public statements that made the media were mostly for his belief that cyberterrorism was the future of terrorism.

He appears to have a legitimate belief that the war on Iraq detracts from the fight against terrorism. There are some odd questions (like how he linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and the Sudan pharmaceutical plant that Clinton attacked, and how at that time he stated that Iraq had advanced biological weapons programs, and said that the suspicion of Al Qaeda getting WMD was enough to warrant action), but that belief is fine and worthy of debate.

What's extremely odd is the way that his opposition to the war in Iraq (and combined with his own personal career prospects) have led him to completely change his take on events which happened prior to invading Iraq. He's completely contradicting himself in many areas-- many of which he's already made public statements to the contrary about.

If he limited himself to "this is why I think that going after Iraq is wrongheaded," he would have a much stronger case, I think. Perhaps wrong, but a stronger case.

Rick-- except that Bush raised counter terrorism concerns to more of an issue for the NSC, and demoted Clarke personally to be in charge of only cyberterrorism concerns-- the very thing that most of his public statements had focused on. It's not like there was no one in charge of counterterrorism, merely that Clarke was no longer in charge of all of it. Partially because after 9/11 it became even more of a concern at higher levels for higher ranking officials, and partially because (rightly or wrongly) Clarke seemed like a guy who pre-9/11 had focused on the wrong threat, the cyber threat.

Well, let's see.
Clarke's book comes out to nearly two weeks of 'news' hype. The left tells us how Clarke's statements prove President Bush is the devil himself.

Reveal Clarke as one of a string of liars, and suddeny, Clarke's credibility is of no interest. that we should take his word for it. INdeed, we hear that no matter what, the 'evidence' should be taken seriously because Bush is the Devil himself.

Amazing.

Is it possible that Richard Clarke's statements in 2002 are almost the exact opposite in 2004 because in 2004 he UNDER OATH?

Did anyone see the Larry King interview with former Healthsouth CEO Richard Scruchy? He answered all the questions that Larry King asked on CNN. The following Monday he was testifying UNDER OATH and the members of Congress asked the exact same questions to Scruchy even using the Larry King video of the question and the answers. He took the fifth on all of them.

Clarke, if he wanted to, could have just said no to the public testimony and kept it in private. The Commission would have all the information they need, but Simon & Schuster wouldn't have their unending media PR.

TexasToast,

Note that above I said to you:

"Ask Martha Stewart about 18 USC 1001."

It may get official real soon.

http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014753.php

"UPDATE: Roll Call notes that more people are questioning Clarke's truthfulness. Here's an excerpt that's not on the free page:

House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that former White House anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, the author of a new book critical of President Bush’s handling of the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, may have lied in testimony to his committee, and said he plans to explore whether Congressional action on the matter is warranted.

Clarke’s “testimony to our committee is 180 degrees out of line with what he is saying in his book,” Goss said. “He’s either lying in his book or he lied to our committee. It’s one or the other.”"

And you said in a prior thread that I was pounding on the table in stating:

"Not keeping one's lies straight is self-destruction."

GLOAT

Although I am very sympathetic to Dr. Dan's psychoanalysis of Richard Clarke, I think a bit more weight should be given to the fact that 3,000 people died on 9/11.

Clarke may well be thinking that, if only the underqualified Condi Rice had not moved him down in the ladder, and if only other members of the new Admin had listened to him, those lives might have been saved. Clarke had been in the terror biz a long time, and surely felt that he knew more about it than the current crop of newbies.

Now, Clarke told the Commission that, if his recommendations from January 2001 had been adopted, 9/11 would not have been averted. But he also talked about going on high alert over the summer, with daily principals meetings to shake the trees, like Clinton did in the old (and successful) days prior to the millenium.

Anger, guilt, frustration - maybe these are even more powerful motivators than a sense of having been professionally slighted.

That said, I loved Clinton's strategy paper. Hard to find the clarion call to arms against terror, but I am sure it is in there somewhere.

And I apologize for being so thick, but this struck me:

Whatever minor inconsistencies in Clarke's positions, he has presented evidence that is breath taking in its implications and if true - and I have not seen the evidence refuted - implies this Administration actively subverted the WoT into Iraq the day after 911. [Oldman, 5:02]

It might help the rest of us if this "evidence" (as opposed to opinion) were highlighted. Or is this really referring to the 9/12 "Give me a memo fingering Saddam... oh, for heaven's sake, I'll type it myself" meeting?

Tom

I’m supposed to be surprised?

All that shows me is that he hurt them pretty badly in his testimony. That apology was a political masterstroke. I still haven’t seen any factual refutation – only attacks on credibility. Have you?

If “lies” to Porter Goss are the “lies” advanced on this board, they can investigate all they want. Lehman made the same argument yesterday, and Clarke batted it aside rather handily.

They are pulling out ALL the stops. I would suspect that Mr. Clarke knew they would come after him with the kitchen sink, and they haven’t disappointed.

PS Rumsfeld was trying to be “Uncle Don” on the NewsHour. What a performance.

brennan stout writes: "Clarke, if he wanted to, could have just said no to the public testimony and kept it in private. The Commission would have all the information they need, but Simon & Schuster wouldn't have their unending media PR."

But that would not have served the citizens of the US as well as public testimony.

He seems to be concerned about that.

Dan has a point. To outward appearances Clinton and Bush pursued terrorism policies that were virtually identical, though Clinton administration officials seem to have agonized more over doing little to thwart al Qaeda and managed to put their agonizing on the record. To the extent Clarke is less harsh in his criticism of Clinton than of Bush it may indeed have a great deal to do with the fact that Bush and his senior officials either ignored his advice or put him off, while their counterparts in Clinton's administration listened to him with respect and sympathy before ignoring his advice and putting him off.

The other reason Clarke's criticism of Bush is harsher is that he feels the Iraq war is a major diversion of resources away from the pursuit of al Qaeda and an incitement to new terrorists. Suffice to say for now that I don't really agree with this point of view, though I think we must acknowledge the costs of the Iraq operation are much higher than we, or at least the Bush administration, thought they would be thirteen months ago. I'd like to throw out a question.

Clarke has stated publicly that he thought Bush and his team "obsessed" with Iraq. Assuming they were, why?

I see several possibilities, none of them completely convincing.

1. Remorse over the unilateral cessation of hostilities after four days of the first Gulf War in 1991. That decision by the first Bush administration did lead in short order to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis who rose against Saddam and were crushed while the enormous American army assembled in the desert at such great cost stood by. But neither Bush, nor Powell or Cheney (who were as they say in the room when the decision was made) have ever spoken of this as a mistake, let alone as a motivation for seeking to put things right.

2. Desire to terminate an untenable American position in the Middle East by removing the cause for it. According to this line of thought, if you don't need to contain Saddam Hussein, you don't need troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions against Iraq, or any of the other things likely to inflame Arabs. Obviously this assumes you don't need to take over from a completely collapsed Iraqi government, but in fairness the motive long cited by Islamists for terrrorism against the United States was what we did to contain Saddam and long predated our action last year to remove him.

3. Concern over weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi relations with terrorists. It appears now that the intelligence behind this concern was badly wrong, and the real concern was not whether Iraq had conspired with al Qaeda before but whether it might do so in the future. That administration officials, and the President himself, have gone quiet on WMD inevitably raises suspicions that their concern on this point was at a minimum not the product of deep thought or conviction, though I think for many administration officials it probably was.

4. Enthusiasm for Mideast transformation. This is the neoconservatives' great cause; terrorism and anti-Americanism will be overcome by the establishment of democracy in the Arab world, which in turn will be ignited by a massive display of American military power and political commitment. One can see in the writings of Paul Wolfowitz an endorsement of this view, but for other administration officials it has the air of an ex post facto justification now that Iraqi WMDs seem not to have been the threat once feared.

With respect to the neoconservatives in the Bush administration the possibility must also be considered that this Mideast transformation looked desirable because it might benefit Israel. Besides Saddam's patronage of Palestinian terror gangs, a school of Israeli thought had held for many years that Arab countries would be less hostile to Israel if they were not run by dictators. A Palestinian state whatever its borders would not after all provide a single Morrocan job, educate a single Egyptian child or liberate any of the Arab world's political prisoners, and there is some logic behind the idea that Arab democracy would allow Arabs to focus their efforts on running their own affairs rather than being continually agitated about Israel and the Palestinians.

The question is not whether people like Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were loyal to more than one master -- there is no evidence for this -- but whether they absorbed too completely the reasoning that identifies Israeli interests with American ones, and identifies terrorism against Israelis with terrorism against Americans. Using this reasoning it is a short step from cutting off Iraqi funding of Palestinian terror gangs to reaching a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, while establishing in Iraq a democratic example the struggle to emulate which would absorb Arab energies for generations to come, serving Israeli and American interests both. That this reasoning leaps over some pretty large empirical obstacles (non-Iraqi Arab financial support for Palestinian terrorism, the difficulty of reconciling liberal democracy with Islam and Arab culture) does not detract from its appeal to Israelis desperate for hope that their siege may have an end at last. To Americans deeply committed on an emotional level to Israel and seeing no difference between American and Israeli interests it may have a similar appeal. The history of many neoconservatives suggests that we ought to take this possibility seriously. But neoconservatives are only one group within the administration, though an influential one.

5. Manipulation of American officials by Iraqi exile groups. It's happened before, as the recent obituaries for Madame Chiang Kai Shek reminded us. In general, though, exile influence sems to have contributed more to administration optimism about how easy it would be to overthrow and replace Saddam than to the determination among Bush and his team that this must be done.

6. Personal grievance. The psychological currents in the Bush family will probably end up being the foundation for several dozen academic careers, so it's hard to say whether the 1993 iraqi attempt to assassinate the first President Bush in Kuwait confirmed George W. Bush in a conviction that Saddam had to be overthrown. He did mention it once, though.

7. The final possibility I see is oil strategy, specifically the idea that rapid reconstruction and development of the Iraqi oil industry would reduce America's heavy reliance on Saudi reserves. Like options 2 and 4 above, taking this strategy seriously as a source of Bush administration conduct requires one believe that administration officials subscribed to views they did not regularly express publicly, and that moreover required their acceptance of wildly optimistic assumptions -- in this case, about how quickly Iraq's oil industry could be developed and how cheaply Iraqi oil could be gotten out of the ground. The fact that administration officials who ought to have known better have in fact accepted wildly optimistic assumptions on other subjects related to Iraq might lead one to believe them capable of doing the same with respect to oil. But prima facie evidence that this was a driving force behind Bush administration "obsession" with Iraq is meagre at best.

Other ideas are invited. We can't discuss the merits of the administration's preference for decisive action against the Baathist regime in Baghdad without a better understanding of the reasons for it, and so far no one seems to be very clear on exactly what those were.

TexasToast:

"I still haven?t seen any factual refutation ? only attacks on credibility."
That's because there are no "facts" to refute, only the word of Richard Clarke, which depends entirely on him being credible.

"If you are going to use inconsistent statements like those as evidence of lying, every politician at every level of government is a liar."

"Inconsistent" is something along the lines of, "I spent 2 days in New York" vs "I spent 3 days in New York". Clarke is not being "inconsistent". He is either lying or he has mental problems.

Example:

Today, I tell you I was born in Canada. Yesterday, I told you I was born in Mexico.

One of those MUST be a lie. Clarke is either lying now or he was lying then. The things he has said are polar opposites. They completely contradict each other.

Lesson in logic:

"X" and "Not X" cannot be true at the same time.

Richard Clarke said that Bush did not discontinue anything Clinton had going regarding terrorism and in fact increased the budget by a factor of five once he had had a chance to digest everything.

Now Richard Clarke says that Clinton did a good job on terrorism, and Bush IGNORED it.

One of those is a lie; he therefore has no credibilty on charges related to terrorism (as he has changed his story 180 degrees). Since the charges he is levelling are entirely dependant on his word, they are worthless.

Now, if there is actually some EVIDENCE of anything he is saying, then sure, let's talk, but until then, "there's no 'there' there".

P.S. go here:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/006248.php

Why do we listen to this guy again?

First, let me preface that I am a democrat, and not a Bush fan by any description. However, I find your blog refreshingly candid and fair.

The reworked bullet points all seemed reasonable to me, even the last. I understand that your first rework was meant to demonstrate a partisan skew to the right as hard tilted as the skew to the left that you perceived in Clarke's original list.

Nonetheless, there was one point in that rework that I thought even more disingenuous than Clarke's own list. You characterized Bil Clinton as, "who again failed to retaliate following the bombing of the USS Cole." Actually, that was Bush. Clinton suspected that it was al Qaeda, but even the strictest line-towing winger has to acknowledge that Clinton could not be expected to retaliate until we knew for certain who the guilty culprit was.

The rest was all totally warranted.

One thing that should be considered though. The Bush administration HAS sicked the dogs on Clarke. Maybe some of what they are saying is true, maybe it is less than fair. But one thing is certain, they hired him into their administration, and he WAS an insider. The same is true of Paul O'Neill. Both men left because of disagreements over how the administration was handling things. (Clarke of his own design, O'Neill was fired.) BOTH men made the same criticism. BOTH men were afterward vilified by the right for (for all you know) their honest opinions. Then there is Joe Wilson and Sibel Edmonds and Susan Lindauer. Not to mention Jessica Lynch - who also took some crap from the right when she said her rescue had been politicized.

One has to wonder who will be the next hero of the right to get the cold shoulder(he said using a way-too-gentle metaphor) when they state an unpopular opinion? David Kay?

ZAthras,
great post. About the last point, re: oil, I think there was a logical subroutine you left out. The oil wealth of Iraq, according to Administration plans, meant that the invasion and initial phases of occupation would pay for itself.

This is what amazed me during the run-up for war. Amid all the grandiose schemes of remaking the middle east were these promises that the war would be cheap and wouldn't require too many troops.

Keep going with your list, but I think that at the end of the day, no *single* explanation will be sufficient. It'll look more like a Venn diagram of intersecting motivations, none of which is in itself entirely convincing.

Two points:

1. I would believe Condi Rice over Mr. Clarke 100% of the time, and

2. With 8 years of Clinton doing nothing and only 8 months of Bush, if I were to believe Clarke, I would deserve the label of "idiot" that he is trying to assign to me. No thank you.

Nonetheless, there was one point in that rework that I thought even more disingenuous than Clarke's own list. You characterized Bil Clinton as, "who again failed to retaliate following the bombing of the USS Cole." Actually, that was Bush. Clinton suspected that it was al Qaeda, but even the strictest line-towing winger has to acknowledge that Clinton could not be expected to retaliate until we knew for certain who the guilty culprit was.

Not quite. That was Clinton because of the policy that led up to it... that of enforcement. THe Cole happened not because law enforcement wasn't all it could be, but because even if it WAS all it could be, enforcement is not an answer to terrorism.

If there's one thing that's come out of the 9/11 hearings, it's the blame game.THe Democrats are desperate to hang something on Mr. Bush... and it's coming down to this: If they're going to pin anything on Mr. Bush.. and it's a bit of blame I can agree with, actually.... it's that he didn't get out from under the failed Clinton policy of 'law enforcement' fast enough.

Now perhaps we have a better understand of all the sour expressions on the Democrats at that hearing.

Richard Clarke = Poster boy for the Peter Principle. He reached a job level that he was not competent to perform, Clinton's terrorism czar.

Richard Clarke = Poster boy for the Peter Principle. He reached a job level that he was not competent to perform, Clinton's terrorism czar.

I'd be inclined to agree, if I thought the position actually had any requirements, within the context of the Clinton administration. This, I suspect, though, is why he was removed when Bush came in... Under Bush it DOES in fact have meaning, responsibility, and purpose.

bithead, your argument seems to be that Clinton should have declared war on terrorism during his term. Otherwise, the law enforcement vs retaliation argument has no legs. But that does not diminish my own point even if I accept the view that Clinton should have declared war on terror (which I don't.) My point was that Clinton could not have retaliated for the Cole because he did not know for certain that it was al Qaeda. Even in war-mode, you don't retaliate against an enemy for something someone else did.

Raz,

I agree. It looks like Clinton was right in tabling Clarke's plan to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after it had secured control of the Taliban, and that 9/11 saved us from a godawful disaster when the new Bush administration revived it.

Clarke's plan would have put us in a direct confrontation with Pakistan without the political clout 9/11 gave us.

bithead, your argument seems to be that Clinton should have declared war on terrorism during his term. Otherwise, the law enforcement vs retaliation argument has no legs

Correct, both counts. Indeed, that seems to be the outcome of the 9/11 hearings... that if Bush had a fault as regards 9/11, he didn't move away from Clinton's failed policy fast enough. Even the Democras on the panel are forced into agreeing that Clinton's actions were ineffective. (And doesn't that seem strange after all their charges of Bush being a war monger, and making up a war?)

Which bottom lines at, if Clinton had been treating AQ correctly, as a war, not an enforcement action, the Cole wouldn't have occurred.

But, bithead, the comment that started this had nothing to do with the possibility that the Cole would not have occurred had Clinton declared war on terror earlier. We are talking about retaliation for the Cole. You cannot premise a point that Clinton should have retaliated on a supposition that he could have prevented it. That's just not logical.

My point is only this. The Cole happened, and Clinton's team investigated to determine blame. It was not until the Bush administration that blame was established, so no matter if we should have already been at war with terror or not, we could not retaliate until AFTER blame was established.

I think that people need to examine what Richard Clarke actually viewed as the "threat" from AlQueda before calling him the "top Whitehouse expert on Terror". It was not a physical attack against the US, but rather a "cyber attack" by hordes of AlQueda equipped with computers. This is all very much highlighted by his interviews freely given trying to get someone to believe that was the credible threat. I have seen no one review his statements given during the PBS Frontline show on Terrorism. It is insightful to review his comments made during that post 9-11 show. What did Richard Clarke do following 9-11?? He went in search of the "internet" http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=576&page=4 and also his comments about his role in history: Richard Clarke mused: "every single time throughout recorded history, without a single exception, mankind learned its lessons the hard way numerous times about the dangers of every single technological advancement. I want mankind to learn just once, the easy way about the horrifying dangers of the Internet while I'm still alive so I can take ex post facto credit for saving a third of humanity from those cyber-terrorists and cyber-wars I constantly screamed about before 9/11." Perhaps Richard Clarke was ignored by both the Clinton and Bush administrations because his message was not credible. He is credited, I believe for coining the phrase "Electronic Pearl Harbor" in the run up to the Y2K non-event in which he repeatedly warned of cyber-terror attacks from the Chinese and Al Queda. I believe you have to delve a little more deeply than what the news media has done so far to determine his credibilty. If he truly believes that he failed his countryman, he should refund all monies from the sales of the book to the 9-11 families and or memorial funds.

Bithead - Ann Coultier -? Am I not just as well served to get my politics from Al Franken?

As others have pointed out; Are we now questioning credibility based on the positions one takes?

Since the above conservatives posted so keenly about Porter Goss, the GOP has been in full retreat. Ooops, Clarke did meet with the President after 9/11. Ooops, maybe there isn't any perjury. Ooops, maybe statements Condi Rice makes to sympathetic talk show hosts not under oath aren't much to refute Clarke's statements made under oath and sometimes hostile examination. (Even Rice's appearances in private before the commission were unsworn, and nevertheless one reason she asked for the second meeting was to retract her whopper that we had no indication at all that AQ was going to use airplanes—interesting how Atty General Ashcroft stopped taking commercial flights in July, isn't it?)

Meanwhile, Tom Holsinger is dredging up the imaginary Mohammed Atta Prague meeting [his link]. Is there a single pro-Bush rumor you guys don't believe? I'll tell you a secret: I knew Clinton was intimate from Monica from the first minute. You guys ought to take another look at who you are defending, because they are hanging you out to dry.

Just to show balance isn't solely a moderate-conservative trait, Brad DeLong has a pretty good version of the bullet points.

I have just finished the book. Dick Clarke is just a self promoting hack. According to his account he was running the crisis during 9/11. Why does anybody give this jerk any credibility. He takes credit for averting the millenium crisis (not an alert customs agent doing her job well) but accuses George Bush for being asleep at the wheel for 9/11. Of course this pompous little man tells us he knew it was coming but nobody would listen to him. If only they had.

Some 9/11 families have taken this man into their hearts because of his apology
at the 9/11 hearings. They should be baying for his blood for hijacking the hearings to promote his on agenda and his book. Read the book and his arrogance is apparent. The apology was arrogant.

I am a new zealander with little interest in US politics so maybe I can see through the BS in this book

I have also recently finished reading the book. While the man is arrogant, that was a function of his job. As co-ordinator for Counterterrorism, he had to push very hard to get agencies to focus on the terrorism problem before it became a problem. All without a budget and only 12 staff members. The CIA, FBI, DOJ, Pentagon, State even the President were constantly being pulled in other directions.

A couple of interesting parts of his book:

* The Millenium plots consisted of four large terrorist attacks, and several more around the world. All were thwarted. This was a huge success for all US agencies, State, FBI, CIA, DOD, Customs and his group. The tip came from Jordan, who had just broken up a plot against their government. This put the FBI and Customs on alert. Customs caught the guy coming across the Canadian border. Canadians raided his cell. The FBI rounded up cells in NY and elsewhere. And so forth. For the first time, there was real co-ordination and he takes credit for some of that. The one plot that was not thwarted, the bombing of a US navy vessel in the gulf, failed because the explosives were so heavy they sunk the boat when it launched. They tried again, sucessfully, one year later.

* The Khobar Towers attack was not Al Quaeda, but Iranian. Oklahoma City was likely connected to Al Quaeda, as Nicholls travelled to the Phillipines when Khaled Sheik Mohammed was there. There's more evidence in the book.

* Bush has failed the US on the war on terror because they are not truly defending the homeland. The money spent on Iraq should have been spent on local governments, preparing fire, police and hospitals for a first response. The National Guard should be ready in case of the worst, they are designed to defend the homeland. Instead they are being sent to Iraq. We need strong alliances with Middle East allies to get the intelligence to thwart further attacks, instead we've alienated them. In some cases, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Iraq War has destabilized those governments even more.

* The Patriot Act is necessary, but was sold and implemented in such a horrible fashion, that many Americans fear it more than the terrorists. There needs to be more independent oversight over the Patriot Act, so people have confidence in it.

* The reason the US could respond so quickly after 911 was because the plan was already there. From the new laws, to detailed maps of Al Quaeda locations in Afghanistan including Tora Bora, to the use of the Predator, the strategy was ready to go. They simply had to put it into action, which no-one had the will to do before 911.

I could go on and on... read the book. He has very important points to make and provides a complete history of the US response to Al Quaeda pre-911.

The DRUDGE REPORT is running a snippet from "MEET THE DEPRESSED":

"CLARKE SAYS VOTED FOR GORE:

[MEET THE PRESS]

RUSSERT: Did you vote for George Bush in 2000?

CLARKE: No, I did not.

RUSSERT: You voted for Al Gore?

CLARKE: Yes, I did. "

It gets better. INSIGHT is running a story that:

....an Insight check of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records shows that his only political contributions in the last decade have gone to Democrats.

Clarke is suspected of using his former post in the Bush White House as a weapon with which to slash and wound the president during his re-election campaign against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). The Kerry campaign's coordinator for national security issues, Rand Beers, has described Clarke as his "best friend." According to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where Clarke and Beers are adjunct lecturers, they teach a course together about terrorism. Clarke's detailed Harvard biography specifically mentions his service under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President Bush, but says nothing about his eight years working for President Bill Clinton.

Go ahead, gang, and tell me how this is ANYTHING BUT a partisan attack by Clarke and the Democrats.

Sounds like the truth. Thats how.

Lets have a declassification party!

And you base that on.... what?

http://www.barrychamish.com

REVENGE OF THE CFR by Barry Chamish

Here is a short list of CFR members who have shoved the Oslo/Roadmap processes down Israel's throat, resulting in thousands of dead Israelis and Arabs in barely ten years, not to mention the total demoralization of Israel and the mass insanity of its Islamic neighbors:

Clinton, Christopher, Baker, Albright, Zinni, Powell, Rice, Kurtzer, Seigman, Bronfman, Tenet, Haass, Friedman, Stephen Cohen, Carter, Armitage, Burns, Wolfowitz, Berger, etc. etc.

Oh yes, and Pipes, but he's pretending otherwise for the time being. That is why he spends much of his waking hours plotting to eliminate my voice. Imagine the nerve of me pointing out that he is a proud member of the little think tank that could wreck Israel and is leaving a trail of blood throughout the Middle East.
Now let us look at just how tied up he is to the CFR establishment:

**

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/mef.php
The Middle East Forum has existed since 1990, but in 1994 it became a nonprofit organization with Daniel Pipes as its director.
MEF is closely linked to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Pipes is an adjunct scholar. Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is senior editor of MEF's Middle East Quarterly, and the institute's Robert Satloff and Samuel Lewis sit on the Quarterly's editorial board, along with Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, and Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa.

** I have thoughtfully provided a list of CFR members. Visit the site and confirm the facts. Now we all know that the Washington Institute For Near East Policy is the Martin Indyk - run monstrosity that became the locomotive for Oslo, so considering his public stance on Israel, Pipes' chair there is suspicious enough, but let's look at his own board:

From the 2001, Membership Roster Of The Council On Foreign Relations **
http://www.stanley2002.org/pfiles/a_f.htm

Robert B. Satloff - CFR
Samuel W. Lewis - CFR
Anthony H. Cordesman - CFR

** Continuing... **

"Virtually all 31 signatories of the MEF report, which was used to persuade Congress to introduce and pass the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act in 2003, were USCFL members, and several became high officials or advisers in the Bush foreign policy team, including Elliott Abrams, Paula Dobriansky, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser."

Elliot Abrams - CFR
Paula J. Dobriansky - CFR
Richard Perle - CFR
Douglas J. Feith - CFR

** Now look at the final name on Pipe's MEF board: why it's that pesky economics teacher from Haifa! Could that mean that the big fish and little minnow are coordinating their attacks against me? And what does the little minnow get for his effort?
You can be sure, there is a reward but it's not membership in the CFR. Searching his name
I came across one other namesake:

Peter Plaut, Managing Director and Head of European Credit Research, BANK OF AMERICA SECURITIES LTD.

He is not merely on the CFR members' list, he is also one of its biggest donors.

http://www.cfr.org/about/pdf/ar_2003/termmember.pdf.

I tried but couldn't prove a family tie to the minnow, But I'll bet you there is and it's close. But even if not, the story of Peter Plaut bears telling. Here's who he is: **

http://www.euromoney.com/?Page=792&P=/creditresearchpoll2004/hyOVERALL

In addition, he was responsible for helping the Korean and Malaysian governments re-establish capital markets access through their highly successful global debt offerings during this difficult time. He was also credited with anticipating the debt and currency crisis in Brazil and other Latin American sovereigns in late 1998.

Mr. Plaut worked at UBS Securities Inc. from 1992 to 1994, as a U.S. and international corporate and bank credit analyst and prior to that was an associate at JP Morgan Securities, Inc.

Mr. Plaut has been in Institutional Investor ranked analyst. In June 1998, he was elected as a term member to The Council on Foreign Relations and currently serves as an active participant in issues concerning U.S. and international economic and foreign policy.

** Lucky old Pete, he gets to bail out countries after the IMF has bankrupted them. And since JP Morgan was a founder of the CFR, naturally he gets to manipulate currencies for his bank while he's at it. But that's not all, look who was in Singapore, Malaysia's financial headquarters, when Pete was sorting out their World Bank debts. Why it was old Tom Plaut. And need we say that he also works for a JP Morgan affiliate?**

http://www.4-paragon.com/forex/key_executives.htm

Thomas F. Plaut
Mr. Plaut brings sixteen years of foreign exchange trading experience to F.X. Solutions. He is a former Member of Senior Management at Credit Suisse A.G. and Global Head of Proprietary Trading at Dresdner Bank A.G. While at Credit Suisse and stationed in Singapore, Mr. Plaut was in charge of all foreign exchange trading activities in the Asian region.

http://www.4-paragon.com/forex/company_profile.htm

FX Solutions currently holds client funds at JP Morgan Chase bank.

** How the Plauts diddle with the tills of nations while their peoples starve. Yes, Peter must be a very important component of the CFR's global economics plan. But then, so is Pipes, diplomatically. Look how the CFR funnels him the money he needs to carry on. **

Funding
Between 1996 and 1998, the Middle East Forum received $130,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the top right wing foundations. (9)

http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/bradley_foundation.htm

Mark O'Keefe
Newhouse News Service
VALUES AND PHILANTHROPY
September 18, 2003
Foundation Excels at Fueling Conservative Agenda
Name a conservative idea -- whether it's school vouchers, faith-based initiatives or the premise that there's a worldwide clash of civilizations -- and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is apt to have its fingerprints on it.

Milwukee Journal Sentinel
April 3, 2003
Bradley Fighting Vehicle
A comprehensive new report makes clear the foundation's import in the feeding and nurturing of the Neoconservative Movement that has led the US to war in the Middle East.
It directly ascribes the war on Iraq to the "playbook" of the neocons, a group of "mostly Republicans," "many of whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation."
A Newly Enriched Foundation Hires Chairman
Things changed dramatically in 1985, when the Allen-Bradley Company was sold to Rockwell International, a leading defense and aerospace conglomerate, for a whopping $1.651 billion. The Foundation benefited heavily from the sale, seeing its assets shoot up overnight from less than $14 million to more than $290 million, catapulting it into the ranks of the country's largest foundations. At that point its name was changed to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to publicly separate it from the company. Flush with new money and an understanding that they were now poised to play a more national role, foundation trustees decided it was time to hire a professional to run the organization. They found their man in New York at the John M. Olin Foundation.

** Now I flip to page 106 of my 2000 CFR Annual Report which lists foundations that offered generous grants to the CFR and right after The Norwegian Ministry Of Foreign Affairs comes, surprise, surprise The John M. Olin Foundation. I said previously that I'd prove Pipes gets his money directly or indirectly from the CFR and I just did.
Now would you trust him with YOUR country? **

end