ATTACK WARNINGS IGNORED!
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| Sun, 09-19-2004 - 12:02pm |
From Vanity Fair July 2004
Interview with Richard Clarke
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Re: Conversation with Rice:
He says he told her that al-Qaeda was <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />America’s No. 1 threat. In the book he writes that it seems she hadn’t heard the term before. Rice’s defenders pointed out that she spoke about Osama bin Laden in a radio interview in October 2000. “She obviously knew about bin Laden,†Clarke now says. “But it’s not just Condi. A lot of people….didn’t get the phrase ‘al-Qaeda.’â€
According to Clarke, Rice told him that she couldn’t see why the N.S.C. (National Security Council) should be worrying about things like “getting equipment and training to firemen around this country.��� (in case of a terrorist strike)
She told Clarke that she wanted him to focus on breaking up the N.S.C.’s Office of Transnational Threats, which he headed, and spinning out some of the jobs and getting back to the old N.S.C. model. She also told him that he did not need to go to the Principals’ meetings any longer. (this was a guy who had been the Counterterrorism Czar since 1992 or so and had been in the field for 30 years)
Clarke says the reduction of his responsibilities (which did not affect his paycheck) was significant because it sent a signal to the bureaucracy that counterterrorism was no longer as important as it had been in the Clinton administration.
Re: De-emphasizing counterterrorism
In fact, Clarke and his staff felt that counterterrorism was being shoved to the bottom of the agenda: “I was being told by people in the Pentagon they couldn’t get money. People in the Justice Dept were telling me they couldn’t get money….I was told terrorism was no longer on the priority list for the attorney general for priority issues.â€
Over at Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had not replied to Clarke’s request for a briefing meeting in January. Rumsfeld was also attempting to scale back the D.O.D.’s (Department of Defense) special ops, war on drugs, and peacekeeping…..all the operations Clarke considered an essential part of fighting al-Qaeda on its own turf.
Re: Clarke’s memo to cut off Afghanistan
Clarke’s now famous January 2001 memo advocating a series of actions to “roll back†al-Qaeda, including cutting off its financing, helping such organization as the Northern Alliance fight it in Afghanistan, and breaking up international cells, seemed to languish, ignored, in people’s in-boxes. Finally it was discussed at the end of April, in a meeting of deputies chaired by Hadley, who wanted to reach a consensus among all the departments and agencies before formalizing policy. Clarke describes Hadley as a “very precise lawyer…You could light a nuclear bomb off under him and his hair wouldn’t get singed.†Reaching a consensus was bound to take time. The C.I.A., for instance was against Clarke’s suggestion to resume using the Predator, an unmanned plane, to spy on and possibly target al-Qaeda missile camps in Afghanistan, in part because a Predator had crashed the year before.
Re: Warnings to the president about planned attacks on the US
Meanwhile, in May and June the C.I.A. was getting increasingly scary intelligence reports that al-Qaeda was planning something big. Clarke sent Rice and her N.S.C. colleagues additional memos. At the same time, George Tenet was personally briefing the president about the reports.
Clark leans forward, “I’m not sure everybody has grasped this…Tenet on 40 occasions
in these morning meetings mentioned al-Qaeda to the president. Forty times, many of them in a very alarmed way, about a pending attack. And as far as I can tell from what has been said at the commission, on one of these occasions, one out of 40, the president must have said something like ‘Well, what are we going to do about it.’â€
On August 6, Bush received the page-and-a-half-long presidential brief from the C.I.A., the title of which was “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.†Significantly, Clarke and his team were not shown it.
Finally, on September 4, when the principals were back in the capital from traveling and their summer vacations, they held a meeting, in which most of Clarke’s ideas were provisionally accepted as policy. As the world knows, it was too late. Seven days later al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil.
When asked why he had not requested to brief the president himself-- as Rice had testified—Clarke maintains he did, back in January, but Rice told him Bush would not be briefed unless there was a new policy he needed to make a decision on. “They’re very protective of this president.†Clark says. “He meet son a regular basis with only about a half-dozen senior White House people, who as a result wield tremendous influence.
Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President. -- Theodore Roosevelt.

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Again....no credibility.
What he said when his book was coming out was the John Kerry in him coming out....flip-flop.
The same happened when Clinton was in office, and the Republicans were so gung-ho on ousting him too....they became fanatical about it. Now it is the Democrats turn.
<< He didn't say the words "I lied", but he did say he had a choice between telling the truth and resigning, he chose not to resign, therefore by his own statement we can only conclude that he chose NOT TO TELL THE TRUTH. >>
No. Again. That's exactly NOT what he said. He said he had THREE choices - resigning, lying, spinning (which he calls putting "the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were") and he chose the third. Did you just skim this stuff, reading like, every fifth word?
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/24/bn.00.html
CLARKE: Actually, I think you have three choices. You can resign rather than do it. I chose not to do that. Second choice is...
THOMPSON: Why was that, Mr. Clarke? You finally resigned because you were frustrated.
CLARKE: I was, at that time, at the request of the president, preparing a national strategy to defend America's cyberspace, something which I thought then and think now is vitally important. I thought that completing that strategy was a lot more important than whether or not I had to provide emphasis in one place or other while discussing the facts on this particular news story.
The second choice one has, Governor, is whether or not to say things that are untruthful. And no one in the Bush White House asked me to say things that were untruthful, and I would not have said them.
In any event, the third 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.
I think that is what most people in the White House in any administration do when they're asked to explain something that is embarrassing to the administration.
•••
As for saying that spinning is the same as "Clintonesqe backpedaling" - you can't be serious that only Bill Clinton and the Democrats spin anything. Believe me, I'd love it if White House spokespeople all of a sudden told us exactly how they personally felt on the issues, but it ain't gonna happen. Everyone knows and expects them to put the best face on things. Everyone knows there's a certain amount of BS involved in doing so. The people who actually believe the spin are the scary ones, the idealogues, and they're the ones I don't trust.
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The people who actually believe the spin are the scary ones, the idealogues, and they're the ones I don't trust.
These same people not only believe it but they repeat it word for word as a robot, repeating the propaganda the Bush machine puts out. It is truly scary. I fear we are headed for a dictatorship and loss of this Republic. I know this sounds paranoid but if you look at history we are headed down that road.
"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.
I'm referring to all those on the left who are doing backflips, handsprings and all other kinds of contortions trying to persuade others of Clarke's sparkling integrity.
"The second choice one has, Governor, is whether or not to say things that are untruthful. And no one in the Bush White House asked me to say things that were untruthful, and I would not have said them.
In any event, the third 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." >
Truthfully, I do read most of the stuff I read on here very hastily in between chasing a toddler, folding laundry and trying to cram some food in my face before someone wakes up from their nap, so I admit I did miss choice number three. So ok, you are correct, he DOES distinguish between lying and "putting the best face on things", which in his view apparently means "saying the exact opposite of what you really think". Which is different from lying. Ok, now I understand his position perfectly, LOL!
But I will concede your point, HE did not actually say he lied. But he did lie, of course.
Look, everyone spins no question. I'm talking about the minute semantic hairsplitting which is vintage Clinton-the "depends on what your definition of is, is" and the "I don't count oral sex as sex". I put "Did not pass a plan down" equals "there was a plan, but it wasn't passed down because they wouldn't accept it" in with that category of things that technically, semantically may be true but are basically intended to deceive. You're not going to convicne me that Clinton wasn't actually lying when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", and you're not going to convince me that Richard Clarke's equivocating was any more honest.
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Thanks for pointing that out, though I've already read it and responded to it, and no, nothing will change my mind unless you're going to tell me that someone slipped me a Mickey and I didn't actually hear him on that tape directly contradicting his 9/11 testimony.
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