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 small taste (this is no means supposed to be comprehesive): <<http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=40520>> Condoleezza Rice's Credibility Gap A point-by-point analysis of how one of America's top national security officials has a severe problem with the truth March 26, 2004 Download: DOC, RTF, PDF Pre-9/11 Intelligence CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02 FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01] CLAIM: In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the Administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04] FACT: According to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04] CLAIM: "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high�we were at battle stations." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'" Meanwhile, the Bush Administration decided to terminate "a highly classified program to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04; Newsweek, 3/21/04] CLAIM: "The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"] CLAIM: "Our [pre-9/11 NSPD] plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: 9/11 Commissioner Gorelick: "There is nothing in the NSPD that came out that we could find that had an invasion plan, a military plan." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: "Right." Gorelick: "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" Armitage: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11." [Source: 9/11 Commission testimony, 3/24/04] Condi Rice on Pre-9/11 Counterterrorism Funding CLAIM: "The president increased counterterrorism funding several-fold" before 9/11. � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/24/04 FACT: According to internal government documents, the first full Bush budget for FY2003 "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the Administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism." [Source: New York Times, 2/28/04; Newsweek, 5/27/02] Richard Clarke's Concerns CLAIM: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11. [Source: CBS 60 Minutes, 3/24/04; White House Press Release, 3/21/04 CLAIM: "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: "On January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice." � 9/11 Commission staff report, 3/24/04 Response to 9/11 CLAIM: "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04] 9/11 and Iraq Invasion Plans CLAIM: "Not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." [Source: Washington Post, 1/12/03. CBS News, 9/4/02] Iraq and WMD CLAIM: "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/18/04 FACT: The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04] 9/11-al Qaeda-Iraq Link CLAIM: "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." � National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04 FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "we don't know" if there is a connection. [Source: BBC, 9/14/03] ------ <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000551.html> > Questions to Ask Condoleezza Rice Q: You stated that the proposals for attacking Al Qaeda that Richard Clarke submitted to you in January 2001 were a "laundry list," and that it took eight months of work to turn that "laundry list" into a coherent plan. Isn't that claim false? Wasn't the plan the NSC Principals discussed on September 4 in its essentials the same plan that Richard Clarke had proposed on January 25? Follow Up Q: In retrospect, don't you deeply regret that you did not give Richard Clarke the NSC Principals meeting he asked for at the very start of the administration? Follow Up Q: Why have you worked so hard to exaggerate the differences between what Clarke proposed on January 25 and what the NSC Principals discussed on September 4? Q: Do you regret requiring that Richard Clarke report to the NSC Deputies committee rather than chairing the NSC Principals committee? Didn't this greatly slow down policy development? Wouldn't things have been better if you had let Clarke do what he wanted to do--play the same role he played in the Clinton administration? Follow Up Q: What benefit was gained from forcing Richard Clarke to jump through bureaucratic hoops set for him by people like Wolfowitz who believed that Saddam Hussein was a much more important foreign policy concern than Osama bin Laden? Q: You have stated that in the summer of 2001 the Bush administration was at "battle stations". When the Clinton administration was at battle stations in the run-up to January 1, 2000, the NSC staff led by Richard Clarke shook the trees by having daily cabinet-level meetings on the terrorist threat, and demanding that cabinet officers probe deeply into their organizations looking for important but unrecognized information. There was no corresponding effort in the summer of 2001, was there? Follow Up Q: When you say that the Bush administration was at "battle stations" before 911, aren't you misleading people who know what Richard Clarke's idea of "battle stations" is? Follow Up Q: Do you regret not giving Richard Clarke the authority in the summer of 2001 to do what he wanted to do--to "shake the trees" of the departments in an attempt to uncover information of unrecognized importance? Q: Richard Cheney has claimed that before September 11, 2001, Richard Clarke was "out of the loop" on important counterterrorism matters. What important matters relevant to counterterrorism was Richard Clarke--the administration's counterterrorism coordinator--not informed of before September 11? Follow Up Q: Whose policy decision was it that the counterterrorism coordinator would not be allowed to coordinate--would not be informed of--important aspects of counterterrorism? Follow Up Q: [If Rice backs Cheney] Wasn't this keeping the counterterrorism coordinator from having the information he needed to do his job a really stupid idea? Follow Up Q: [If Rice contradicts Cheney] So you are saying that Richard Cheney is not trustworthy? Q: Richard Clarke's counterterrorism proposals were taken to the NSC Principals on September 4, 2001. But isn't it correct that there was no agreement on how to fund Clarke's proposals reached at that meeting? Follow Up Q: When--if 9/11 had not happened--would the next NSC Principals' meeting on this issue have been scheduled? Q: In early 2002, to prepare for the war in Iraq, important elite American combat units were withdrawn from Afghanistan. Didn't this have a significant impact retarding out hunt for members of Al Qaeda? Follow Up Q: If these units weren't important, why were they sent to Afghanistan in the first place? Follow Up Q: Aren't the steps we are taking now along the Afghan-Pakistan border steps that we should have taken in the spring of 2002--steps that we would have taken in spring 2002 if not for the administration's focus on Iraq? Q: Why does George W. Bush believe that Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks of September 11, 2001? Follow Up Q: Did you attempt to disabuse George W. Bush of this belief? Follow Up Q: Why not? ------ <<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000525.html> > It's a Circular Firing Squad of Flying Attack Monkeys! I'm sorry, but Tom Toles's cartoon is insufficient: Tom Toles of Slate: <<http://www.msnbc.com/comics/editorial/tt040324.gif>> It's not enough to say that the Bush administration attacks on the character (for there are no attacks on the substance of his remarks) of Richard Clarke remind one of the flying attack monkeys from "The Wizard of Oz." For what we have here is not just a bunch of flying attack monkeys, it is a circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys. Robert Waldmann hides in the brush with his binoculars and watches the antics of the circular firing squad of flying monkeys that is the Bush administration trying to go on the offensive against Richard Clarke: Richard Clarke has sparked a furious debate. Many have remarked that Kerry is glad to sit it out. Clarke is not sitting it out but he could. The furious debate is between various Bush administration officials presenting wildly contradictory denials Clarke�s claims and wildly contradictory attacks on Clarke. I think the best battles are between one guy and himself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Wilkinson v. Wilkinson: It's good to have an open mind if you're Bush: I think your viewers tonight would be a little alarmed if the president didn't ask about any connection from anybody on any part of the globe, frankly. The president wanted to know who did it and who was responsible. It's bad to have an open mind if you're Clarke: Dick Clarke, on another interview he gave to PBS "Frontline," said that, right after 9/11, all his options were open. He wasn't sure who did it. So, again, we see Mr. Clarke on three sides of a two-sided issue. What the American people need to know is that their government is working diligently to go after al Qaeda. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Colin Powell vs. Himself: What Powell has forgotten is that in national security-speak "roll-back" and "containment" are antonyms: We wanted to move beyond the roll-back policy of containment. And we haven't even gotten to the fact that the "beyond the roll-back" policy that Clarke presented in September 2001 was identical to the "roll-back policy of containment" that Clarke had presented in January of 2001. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ McClellan and Hadley vs. Bartlett and Hadley Clarke is making up lies: HADLEY: We can not find evidence that this [Situation Room] conversation [about links between Al Qaeda and Iraq] between Mr. Clarke and the President [on September 12, 2001] ever occurred. McCLELLAN: Let's just step backwards -- regardless, regardless, put that aside. There's no record of the President being in the Situation Room on that day that it was alleged to have happened, on the day of September the 12th. When the President is in the Situation Room, we keep track of that. Clarke is telling the truth: White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer -- text and audio. "I'm not here to dispute that there wasn't a conversation and the fact that President Bush didn't ask questions about Iraq, I'm sure he did and I'm glad he did..." HADLEY: But the point I think we're missing in this is of course the President wanted to know [on September 12] if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Cheney Vs Wilkinson Clarke was out of the loop: "Well, he wasn't in the loop frankly on a lot of this stuff," sniffed Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh's radio show Monday. Clarke was not only in the loop, he was the loop: Jim Wilkinson, an NSC spokesman, on Paula Zahn Monday night: "I would say, I would remind you that Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the African embassies were bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the USS Cole was bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy in the time preceding 9/11 when the threat was growing." Special bonus question: if Clarke has so out-of-the-loop/so incompetent why did George W. Bush decide in January 2001 that Clarke was the best person in the world to be NSC Director for Counterterrorism and head of the Counterterrorism Strategy Group? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Wolfowitz vs. his own staff: Wolfowitz was never dismissive of the threat from Al Qaeda: "A spokesman for Wolfowitz describes Clarke's account as a 'fabrication.' Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as 'a major threat,' says this official." But Wolfowitz won't deny Clarke's account of the meeting: ROEMER: Mr. Clarke... has a reference in his book to an April 30th deputies meeting, where he claims... that in this meeting, when they were talking about a plan to go forward to go after bin Laden and Al Qaida, that you brought up the subject of Iraq and that you put too much attention on Iraq as a sponsor, as a state sponsor of terrorism and not enough emphasis on Al Qaida as a transnational sponsor of terrorism... WOLFOWITZ: Thanks for giving me a chance to comment. Before I do that, let me just make a comment on the last exchange you had with Secretary Rumsfeld... [44 lines of blather follow] With respect to Mr. Clark and let me say, I haven't read the book yet. I was called by a reporter on the weekend with a quote from the book attributed to me. I tried to get the book. It wasn't available in book stores. It was only available to selected reporters. And I got it yesterday, but I did not have time to read it in the last 24 hours. I'll get to it at some point. But with respect to the quote that the reporter presented as having been put in my mouth, which was an objection to Mr. Clark suggesting that ignoring the rhetoric of Al Qaida would be like ignoring Hitler's rhetoric in "Mein Kampf," I can't recall ever saying anything remotely like that. I don't believe I could have. In fact, I frequently have said something more nearly the opposite of what Clark attributes to me. I've often used that precise analogy of Hitler and "Mein Kampf" as a reason why we should take threatening rhetoric seriously, particularly in the case of terrorism and Saddam Hussein. So I am generally critical of the tendency to dismiss threats as simply rhetoric. And I know that the quote Clark attributed to me does not represent my views then or now. And that meeting was a long meeting about seven different subjects, all of them basically related to Al Qaida and Afghanistan... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Rice vs. Wilkinson vs. Anonymous: Wilkinson: Clarke was too focused, and did not have a broad enough strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda: I want to make a very point here, that all of his ideas he presented were not a strategy. This is a president who wanted a comprehensive strategy to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it hides, where it plots, where it raises money. Rice: Clarke's strategy was too broad and unfocused: This was in fact Dick Clarke's area of responsibility and when I asked him shortly after coming to the White House to give us a strategy for dealing with al Qaeda, because he made a very persuasive brief being the dangers of al Qaeda, what I got was a laundry list of ideas, many of which had been rejected in the Clinton administration in 1998. Anonymous quoted in Time: Clarke's strategy was just right: In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, [Clarke's] proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ And Ryan Lizza has some more examples of this circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys in action: Hadley vs. Cheney: The Bush administration loved Clarke and did everything he asked: STEVEN HADLEY: Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the President came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration--a really unprecedented decision, very unusual when there has been a transition that involves a change of party. We did that because we knew al Qaeda was a priority, that there was a risk that we would be attacked and we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists--and if an event, an attack were to succeed, to be an experienced crisis management team to support the president. Clarke was an incompetent Clinton holdover who was quickly shunted aside: Lizza: But on Monday, once the Bushies had taken a closer look at how devastating Clarke's account was, Hadley's soft approach was abandoned. The new method for overcoming the inconvenient fact that Bush put Clarke in charge of terrorism was to simply write Clarke out of the history of the Bush administration altogether. Instead of Bush's terrorism adviser, Clarke became a weak Clintonite who did little to halt Al Qaeda's rise during the 1990s. If there was one consistent theme to yesterday's attack, this was it. The most intellectually dishonest performance was Dick Cheney's emergency interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Limbaugh wondered how in the world Bush could have made this guy Clarke head of counterterrorism. "Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision," Cheney said. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame." Who could be expected to keep track of such minor details as how long Clarke was kept as counterterrorism czar? Maybe some scenes from Clarke's book would jog the vice president's memory. Clarke was the guy standing in Cheney's office on the morning of 9/11 with Rice in the minutes after the first attack. He's the guy that Condi turned to and asked, "Okay, Dick, you're the crisis manager, what do you recommend?" Later in the day he was also the guy standing in between Rice and Cheney in the White House Situation Room. He was the one whose shoulder Cheney placed his hand on when he asked, "Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?" Cheney might also remember Clarke as the guy who asked Cheney to request authorization from Bush to shoot down any hijacked airplanes. He may also recall him as the man who briefed Bush when the president finally arrived back at the White House. In other words, Cheney neglected to inform Limbaugh's audience that Clarke didn't move to cyberterrorism until a month after 9/11. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Cheney and Rice vs. Hadley: Lizza: "So the only thing I can say about Dick Clarke," Cheney continued on Limbaugh's show, "is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit, and the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?" Rice echoed the memory-hole strategy yesterday, noting on Fox News, "Dick Clarke was counterterrorism czar for a long time with a lot of attacks on the United States. What he was doing was--what they were doing apparently was not working. We wanted to do something different." She didn't get a chance to explain how this statement comports with Hadley's insistence that "one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact" because "we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists." So there's a significant problem with the memory-hole strategy: It requires everyone to suspend their knowledge of one of the most elementary facts of this story... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Rice vs. McClellan: Clarke is much too concerned with scheduling meetings: Rice: "To somehow suggest that the attack on 9/11 could have been prevented by a series of meetings--I have to tell you that during the period of time we were at battle stations," Rice said yesterday. McClellan added, "He's been out there talking about whether or not he was participating in certain meetings. So it appears to be more about the process than the actual actions we have taken." Obviously, the topics the administration chooses to hold high-level meetings on suggest a great deal about its priorities, but Clarke's main point goes beyond that. In his book he argues that cabinet-level meetings during the dangerous period of late summer 2001 actually could have been instrumental in shaking information out of the bureaucracies... We know Clarke is a bad guy because he skipped Rice's staff meetings: McClellan suggests that Rice's staff meetings were essential. "Dr. Rice, early on in the administration," McClellan said yesterday, "started holding daily briefings with the senior directors of the National Security Council, of which he was one. But he refused to attend those meetings, and he was later asked to attend those meetings and he continued to refuse to attend those meetings." Apparently, some meetings are more important than others. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Cheney vs. Rice: Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Richard A. Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism chief, was "out of the loop." On the contrary, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Clarke was very much involved in the administration's fight against terrorism. "I would not use the word `out of the loop,'... He was in every meeting that was held on terrorism," Ms. Rice said. "All the deputies' meetings, the principals' meeting that was held and so forth, the early meetings after Sept. 11." _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
