Split into parts 1 & 2 > From: JDG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > As I have noted previously, I spent much of last week and weekend > away from the Internet and my usual news sources. (Ironically, I > was helping run an educational event for high school students.) > > Anyhow, as such I have missed much of the Richard Clarke brouhaha, > and despite having read much about it, I still remain somewhat > puzzled by the whole thing. Thus, I was wondering if one of the many > anti-war or left-wing Brin-L'ers here could post a short summary or > set of bullet-points regarding what they consider to be Clarke's most > salient accusations? i.e. what wrongdoing is Clarke accusing the > Bush Administration of? Extra points given for summaries posted in > a Brin-L'ers own words, rather than a link or a re-post.
The controversy isn't about what Mr. Clark said, it's about all the lies and propaganda this administration has put out this week. Too bad this Clown Show is too incompetent to keep it's lies straight. From Rice flip-flopping on what she says happened to Mr. Frist insinuating to congress that Mr. Clark lied under oath (then telling reporters he doesn't know what Mr. Clark said to the congress) to Steven Hadley and Rice and Mcclellan being caught in lies about Sept. 12. The Mendacity's of this crooked lying Administration, show that ShrubCo and their 4thReichKlan congressional allies will do and say anything to retain power. Here's a another taste (this is no means supposed to be comprehesive): Here's some goodies picked up by the Daily howler: <<http://dailyhowler.com/dh032904.shtml>> ----- <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000523.html> > September 11: The Threat to 'Angel' Of all the strange parts of the government's reaction to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the strangest is the claim that Al Qaeda had threatened Air Force One--and that that was why it and George W. Bush were diverted to Offutt Air Force Base that day: Scott Paltrow, Wall Street Journal, March 22 | : As Air Force One left Sarasota, the president intended to return directly to Washington, Mr. Bartlett said. Mr. Bush initially had ignored advice from Vice President Dick Cheney, calling while en route to a White House basement command center, that Washington appeared to be under attack and the president for his own safety should remain away, according to an official in the vice president's office. Once airborne, Mr. Bush spoke again on a secure phone with Mr. Cheney, who relayed a new message that changed the president's mind, White House officials later said. The vice president urged Mr. Bush to postpone his return because, Mr. Cheney said, the government had received a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, "Angel," Mr. Bartlett said in an interview. In a press conference on Sept. 12, 2001, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the threat tipped the scales for Mr. Bush. The president reluctantly agreed to remain away from Washington "because the information that we had was real and credible about Air Force One," Mr. Fleischer said. Although in the days after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials recounted that a threat had been received against Air Force One, Mr. Bartlett said in a recent interview that there hadn't been any actual threat. Word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker, as multiple conversations went on simultaneously, he said. Many of these exchanges, he added, related to rumors that turned out to be false, such as reports of attacks on the president's ranch in Texas and the State Department. As for the Air Force One code name, Mr. Bartlett said, "Somebody was using the word 'angel,' " and "that got interpreted as a threat based on the word 'angel.' " (Former Secret Service officials said the code wasn't an official secret, but a radio shorthand designation that had been made public well before 2001.) The vice president's office gave an account differing from Mr. Bartlett's, saying it still couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made. Days after the attacks, Mr. Cheney had said word of the threat had been passed to him by Secret Service agents. But in interviews, two former senior Secret Service agents on duty that day denied that their agency played any role in receiving or passing on a threat to the presidential jet. An official in Mr. Cheney's office said in an interview that Mr. Cheney had been mistaken in saying the threat came to him via the Secret Service. The official said that instead, Mr. Cheney had received word of the threat from "a uniformed military person" manning the underground bunker. The official said the vice president and his staff don't know who the individual was. And the official said that he couldn't say definitively whether or not a threat had been made. "I'm not in a position to know the answer to that question," the official in the vice president's office said... So there are three stories: (i) Bartlett's that somebody said, "Is there a threat to angel," and Cheney interpreted this as, "There has been a threat to 'Angel'," using that exact secret designation for Air Force One; (ii) Cheney's story number one, that a Secret Service agent told him that there had been a threat to 'Angel'; (iii) Cheney story number two, that a "uniformed military person" whom nobody since has ever been able to identify told him that there had been a threat to 'Angel. We also now have Richard Clarke's account of what things were like on the morning of September 11 when he left the Situation Room for a brief trip to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, where Cheney was, from Against All Enemies: p. 18: In the PEOC the cast was decidedly more political. In addition to the Vice President and Condi Rice, there was the Vice President's wife, Lynne; his political advisor, Mary Matalin; his security advisor, Scooter Libby; Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten; and White House communications director Karen Hughes. The monitors were simultaneously blaring the coverage from five networks....I grabbed Mike Frenzel. "How's it going over here?" I asked. "It's fine," Major Frenzel whispered, "but I can't hear the crisis conference because Mrs. Cheney keeps turning down the volume on you [in the Situation Room] so she can hear CNN, and the Vice President keeps hanging up the open line to you [in the Situation Room]." And there's Richard Clarke's account of his conversations on the morning of September 11 about what George W. Bush should do: pp. 6-7: I picked up the open line to the PEOC. I got a dial tone. Somebody had hung up on the other end. I punched the PEOC button... When Major Fenzel got on the line I gave him the first three decisions we needed: "Mike, somebody has to tell the President he can't come right back here. Cheney, Condi, somebody. Secret Service concurs. We do not want them saying where they are going when they take off... pp. 18-19: I moved in and squatted between Cheney and Rice. "The President agreed to go to Offutt," Cheney informed me. His manner implied that it had been a hard sell... Think about (i) the focus of people inside the PEOC on the networks, (ii) the lack of attention paid inside the PEOC to the Situation Room information channel, and (iii) the fact that the Situation Room is the operational decision-implementation center to which information flows. Think about the sequence of events: A consensus decision is reached inside the White House that George W. Bush should not return to Washington immediately. Cheney takes on the task of persuading George W. Bush to go along. Cheney calls Bush, and tells him the Secret Service and the Situation Room want him to stay away from Washington. Bush balks--he wants to be back in his proper place as fast as possible. Cheney thinks about his failure, and calls again--this time with the story about 'Angel.' Bush agrees to go to Offutt. Isn't the balance of the probabilities that Cheney decided upon a lie that he thought would scare George W. Bush into doing what he wanted him to do, and thought (correctly) that the normal Fog of War would keep him from being called on it? Is there any other way to explain why the "news" about the "threat to 'Angel'" flowed only upwards from Cheney to Bush, and not downwards from Cheney to the PEOC to the Situation Room? ----- <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000521.html> > George W. Bush Wants to Do More Than Swat Flies Ah. Here is the context of George W. Bush's pre-911 "can't we stop 'swatting flies' and eliminate al Qaeda?" comment. In Richard Clarke's view, Bush's remark did not have any effect on administration policy--did not raise al Qaeda's salience at all in the minds of the NSC Principals--and was in fact largely a reaction to his own (and George Tenet's) unsuccessful attempts to get the Bush administration to take the al Qaeda threat seriously. Let's roll the tape: From Richard Clarke (2004), Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press: 0743260244), pp. 230-238: At the start of the George W. Bush administration, Clarke tries to set his plan for attacking al Qaeda in motion by getting it approved by the Bush National Security Council: Within a week of the Inauguration I wrote to [Assistant to the President for National Security] Rice and [Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security] Hadley asking "urgently" for a Principals... meeting to review the imminent al Qaeda threat. Rice tells Clarke that he must go through the Deputies NSC Committee first. The Deputies Committee exists to frame the issues--to reach consensus not on what policy should be, but on what the live policy options are, and to work the options up into a sufficiently fleshed-out form that decisions can be made on good information and that decisions can be rapidly followed by implementation: Rice told me that the Principals [NSC] Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been "framed" by the Deputies.... [M]onths of delay.... Being able to take things to the Principals directly, bypassing the Deputies, had been important to Clarke. It meant that he and his counterterrorism staff and security group framed the issues, and that the departmental bureaucracies had no opportunity to block and delay before the issues appeared before the Cabinet Secretaries: Finally, in April, the Deputies [NSC] Committee met on terrorism for the first time. The first meeting... did not go well. Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, began... by asking me to brief.... I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with al Qaeda. "We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator." Paul Wolfowitz... fidgeted and scowled.... "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man".... .... Hadley suggested a compromise. We would begin by focusing on al Qaeda and then later look at other terrorism.... Because dealing with al Qaeda involved its Afghan sanctuary... Hal dley suggested that we needed policy on Afghanistan in general and on the related issue of U.S.-Pakistani relations, including the return of democracy in that country and arms control with India. All of these issues were a "cluster" that had to be decided together. Hadley proposed that several more papers be written and several more meetings be scheduled over the next few months.... .... The delay in the Deputies Committee continued.... .... Roger Cressey and I rewrote... a draft National Security Presidential Decision Document for the President's signature. Its goal: eliminate al Qaeda. Some in the Deputies Committee suggested that we say instead "significantly erode al Qaeda." What had happened was that the Deputies Committee--headed by Hadley--had refused to treat al Qaeda as a sufficiently important issue to be moved to the front burner: it was to stay on the back burner, away from the Principals' notice and away from decision-making time, while the whole South Asian Policy Stew was cooked. Richard Clarke did not like this. So he hatched a plan. He and George Tenet would react to the Deputies and Hadley's blocking their plan to attack al Qaeda by going around the NSC process. They would use Tenet's daily briefings of George W. Bush as a way to get their view of the situation into George W. Bush's head: George Tenet... and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would... find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk... waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would insure that the President's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda. President Bush... noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. It worked. George W. Bush demanded action: Rice... asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days."... But even with George W. Bush's demands for a plan, Rice delayed: Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.... And al Qaeda moved its operational assets into position for the September 11 attack: By late June, Tenet and I were convinced a major series of attacks was about to come.... .... During the first week in July I convened the C[ounterterrorism ]S[ecurity ]G[roup].... Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree.... "You've just heard that CIA thinks that al Qaeda is planning a major attack on us So do I.... [M]aybe it will be here.... Tell me, tell each other, about anything unusual." Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools.... None of that information got to me or the White House.... Finally, on September 4, the Principals NSC Committee meets to approve Clarke's anti-al Qaeda plan: "put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator": On September 4... the Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda that I had called for "urgently" on January 25 finally met... a non event. Tenet and I spoke passionately about the urgency and seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. No one disagreed. Powell laid out an aggressive strategy for putting pressure on Pakistan.... Rumsfeld... looked distracted... took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq.... CIA had said it could not find a single dollar... to transfer to the anti-al Qaeda effort. It demanded additional funds.... The only heated disagreement came over whether to fly the armed Predator over Afghanistan to attack al Qaeda. Neither CIA nor the Defense Department would agree to run that program. Rice ended the discussion without a solution... But the meeting ends with no consensus: nobody wants to take charge of flying the Predator, the Pentagon is dragging its feet, and both State and the CIA see the big task as getting more money, not as figuring out a way to use their existing resources to get al Qaeda. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ In Clarke's account, the context of George W. Bush's "swatting flies" remark is clear. It was a response to Clarke's and Tenet's attempt to go around the NSC process and brief Bush on the al Qaeda threat directly, and it had little impact on policy planning: the NSC Principals Meeting on al Qaeda is still delayed for more than three further months, and ends unsatisfactorily from Clarke's point of view. If there is one thing clear from reading Against All Enemies, it is that Clarke is f***ing apeshit. I've never seen anyone so apeshit. Clarke had thought he was leading a successful counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda, and then at the start of 2001 these idiot neocon Cold Warriors came in and messed everything up with bureaucratic bull****. Because the Bush administration blocked his plans, September 11, 2001 happens and 3,000 Americans die. And then the White House takes 911 as a poiltical football and runs with it. And then it uses 911 as a phony excuse to launch a war on Iraq that--in Clarke's estimation--greatly strengthens al Qaeda. And I had thought that Paul O'Neill was mad at and disgusted with the George W. Bush administration... ---- <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000517.html> > ---- <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000516.html> > Reading Against All Enemies Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom is reading and commenting on Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. He's going slowly and thoughtfully... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Also going slowly and thoughtfully are Mark A. R. Kleiman: Slime & defend hits Richard Clarke: "Just checked in with one of my pro-war, pro-Bush national security expert friends. Here's what I learned: 1. Clarke is the real deal. 2. What he says is convincing. 3. What he says makes the Bush team look very bad. 4. What Cheney says about Clarke is a pack of lies. My friend's parting comment: 'Do I really still have to be for these guys?'" Phil Carter also has things to say: "Regarding the Vice President's comments, I think Laura Rozen gets it right. Don't you think it's odd that the White House counter-terrorism czar would be out of the loop when it came to meetings about counter-terrorism policy? And doesn't it say something about the war with Iraq that the counter-terrorism advisor was not part of the decisionmaking process?... To me, it says... Ron Suskind's reporting is right -- this White House really is run by its political offices... the opinions of professional policy people are probably less valued in this White House... terrorism per se was not the raison d'etre for Operation Iraqi Freedom -- and that it never was a significant part of the decision to go to war. White House spokesman Scott McClellan still isn't rebutting any of the assertions made by Mr. Clarke -- he's merely trying to impeach his credibility. The White House has yet to make a defense of its actions on the merits.... The only credible White House charge is the one about why Mr. Clarke didn't speak up sooner. But maybe he did... he resigned in March 2003 from the White House, just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was being launched. What message do you think Mr. Clarke intended to send by his resignation?" It is certainly true that there are enormous synergies between Against All Enemies and The Price of Loyalty. They describe the same craven political White House. ---- And more from Mr Delong at <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/>> _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
