the response to clarke....

[Z]

www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

long, but very good and thorough for anyone interested. the contradictions of the admin's sycophants on this is breathtaking.

[showcase]

The Post carried an interesting discussion about how much Dr. Rice et al are hurting themselves by trying to attack Clarke's credibility...

At the same time, some of Rice's rebuttals of Clarke's broadside against Bush, which she delivered in a flurry of media interviews and statements rather than in testimony, contradicted other administration officials and her own previous statements.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before 9/11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban; the CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats; and Rice's assertion this week that Bush told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies.

National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack defended many of Rice's assertions, saying that she has been more consistent than Clarke.

This is not the first time in her tenure that Rice has been questioned over disputed national security claims by the administration. Making the case about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in September 2002, she said that aluminum tubes the United States intercepted on their way to Iraq were "only suited for nuclear weapons programs." But at the time, the U.S. intelligence community was split over the use of the tubes, and today the majority view is that the tubes were for antiaircraft rockets.

Rice so far has refused to provide testimony under oath to the commission that could possibly resolve the contradictions. On Wednesday night, she told reporters, "I would like nothing better in a sense than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25177-2004Mar25.html

I think it's ridiculous for Rice to talk to every reporter who will listen in order to bad-mouth Clarke and his credibility, even if it means impugning her own credibility, only to tuck tail and run between the legs of "executive privilege" when questions are posed.

One might argue "well, how could one expect anything less from the senior leadership in this Administration," but I for one do: Rummy and Fleischer spent the last few years raising brazen prevarication to a high art, whereas Rice's performance over the last week is pathetic by comparison. Standards certainly appear to be slipping at the White House these days...

[nychoya3]

www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_21.php#002769

It doesn't get much lower than this. Novak implies that Clarke is a racist, somehow. Coulter, I don't take her seriously. But Novak has a column in the WP!

[showcase]

Here's two more government employees who will be fed to the lions if their comments start getting wider play...

[Outgoing Deputy National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick], who stayed through the first four months of the Bush administration, said, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" a strong focus on trecordism. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke and the CSG [the Countertrecordism Strategy Group he chaired] were doing." General Hugh Shelton, whose term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff began under Clinton and ended under Bush, concurred. In his view, the Bush administration moved trecordism "farther to the back burner."

The dumb thing is that I don't think that any president, Dem or 'Pub, would have handled things much differently. Things were going swimmingly pre-9/11, and the doctrine de jour was always proportional response. Sounds like the warning signs were becoming a bit more pronounced, but there wasn't a smoking gun. Given this rather equivocal context, it seems peculiar that the Administration would go once again with its predictable response ("Release the hounds!"), which has only fanned the flames of late. Seems to me that if they had tried to develop the context from the get-go rather than waging war against the opposing messenger, there would be less to talk about on this issue than there is now that they've decided to circle the wagons instead.

Just another chapter in the ongoing saga entitled the dumbing-down of public policy, as brought to you by the Bush Administration.

[thebin]

Here is another political writer in the Washington Post, this one outstanding and brilliant in every way Coulter is not, who thinks Clarke's memory selection stinks to high heaven. Don't make me vomit any of you by telling me later that you can't believe how dirty the GOP campaigns. This poltization of 9/11 and its aftermath makes me sick.

Sept. 11, Lies and 'Mistakes'


By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A23


It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of countertrecordism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.

The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the trecordist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing trecordists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country."

What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened."

It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top countertrecordism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest?

Clinton had one justification after another for going on the offensive: American blood spilled in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the embassy bombings of 1998, the undeniable act of war in the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Response: A single, transparently useless, cruise missile attack on empty Afghan tents, plus a (mistaken!) attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.

As Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen testified, three times the CIA was ready with plans to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Every time, Clinton stood them down, because "we're not quite sure."

We're not quite sure -- a fitting epitaph for the Clinton anti-trecordism policy. They were also not quite sure about taking bin Laden when Sudan offered him up on a silver platter in 1996. The Clinton people turned Sudan down, citing legal reasons.

The "Frontline" interviewer asked Clarke whether failing to blow up the camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a "pretty basic mistake."

Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the countertrecordism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."

This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that "fighting trecordism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.

Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al Qaeda.

Clarke gives Clinton a pass and instead concentrates his ire on Bush. For what? For not having preemptively attacked Afghanistan? On what grounds -- increased trecordist chatter in June and July 2001?

Look. George W. Bush did not distinguish himself on trecordism in the first eight months of his presidency. Whatever his failings, however, they pale in comparison to those of his predecessor.

Clinton was in office eight years, not eight months. As Clarke himself said in a 2002 National Security Council briefing, the Clinton administration never made a plan for dealing with al Qaeda and never left one behind for the Bush administration.

Clarke says he pushed very hard for such critical anti-al-Qaeda measures as aid to and cooperation with Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. By his own testimony, the Clinton administration then spent more than two years -- October 1998 to December 2000, the very time the Sept. 11 plot was hatched -- fruitlessly debating this and doing absolutely nothing.

Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself.

[nychoya3]

What in god's name do you mean by politicization? Shouldn't terror be a political issue? Bush sure thinks so. It seems to me that his conduct in the war on terror is THE political issue in this campaign. If you want to talk about politicizing 9/11, let's talk about his TV ads with the bodies. Or the crap that he'll roll out in NYC at the convention. The questions that are being asked are uncomfortable for everyone. Clarke acknowledged his failure. Why can't the administration? Why can't Condi testify in public?

Folks should really read Clarke's book before they bash him. He talks at length about things that Clinton did, as well as the things he failed to do. That Clarke doesn't like the Bush administration is obvious. But he makes specific and (presumably) rebuttable criticisms. If he was wrong or lying, than the Bush attack dogs might have something to grab on to. But they've done nothing but impugn his motives and character. That reeks of desperation.

[showcase]

George W. Bush did not distinguish himself on trecordism in the first eight months of his presidency. Whatever his failings, however, they pale in comparison to those of his predecessor.

Interesting, but who's running for reelection again? It is just Bush, right?

I think this whole "well, they were worse" enterprise is just plain dumb. It won't bring anyone back who died that day, and a "definitive" take on who screwed up more in the past won't make the US safer in the future. Rather, the Commission should (and I think will, to the best of its abilities) look to distill the lessons of 9/11 without preference or prejudice. Unfortunately, some of those lessons may reflect poorly on Bush's strongest message for reelection, so the Republican Jump Circle Defenders launch into kill the messenger mode.

I'm just glad senior Bush Administration officials like Rice are making themselves vulnerable to the same type of criticisms they're leveling at Clarke (and parroted in Republican echo-chambers like Krauthammer's column). I think it's high time this White House swallowed some of its own medecine.



Durned typos...

[thebin]

There shouldn't be any politicization of this event period. Putting 400,000 regular Army troops in Afghanistan would have made for nice targets, but would have done NOTHING to finish off Al Qaeda faster than is currently happening. This whole "Iraq distracts from Al Qaeda hunt" notion is totally bogus, its a non-starter once you look at the evidence for it, or lack thereof. This is a military that was structured for decades to fight two medium size wars at once. It didn't even do that! Iraq, undertaken after Afghanistan was more or less secured as much as is possible with zero infrastrucure, did nothing, NOTHING, to distract from the special forces roaming the area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that fact undercuts the immoral lie that Clarke posits in a very disengenous way.

But if you want to make this about who will do better against trecordists, Bush or Kerry, and leave Clinton's enormous failures aside, fine. Fair enough. I am extraordinarily confident, no, absolutely positive, that Bush is the man to do what is needed to destroy al Qaeda's fleeing rats, the ones he hasn't already had killed that is. And I am at the same time petrified of what Kerry and his stated preference to change the war on terror back into a Clinton-esqe police/intel action on trecord will do for our national security. What on Earth can Kerry claim, with a straight face, to have over Bush in the war on terror? Is he going to forget about calling his fellow Vietnam vets rapists and live the old days, jumping in a PT boat and driving it up the Mekong Delta looking for Osama? Or to take his more recent record to heart, will he make too much of his decisions based upon getting his neighbors from his $8 million villa in Italy (that he sold to George Clooney before tossing his hat in the ring) to hate America a little less? I fully expect that Kerry's priority in foreign policy would be getting people to like us more while doing the 1990s version of intel/missile strikes. NO THANKS.

[Z]

to follow up on that point, bush is running for re-election, clinton isnt. i'm more than willing to assign the appropriate blame to wjc's admin. i'm not willing to pretend that clinton's nonfeasance absolves the current admin for its own substantive failings.

[Z]

whoops, missed your post showcase. didnt mean to steal your thunder.

bin, an honest question: you, as a fellow new yorker, honestly feel like bush's homeland security approach, which has done NOTHING to shore up security on nyc's subways and trains, is airtight? the question isnt whether we can handle multiple wars/fronts, its about whether we can allocate resources to wars which have no appreciable effect on terrorism while also protecting the nations most vulnerable locales.

[thebin]

I am scarred every time I am on a NYC subway- which is about 12 times a week. And more scarred for my wife, who also rides the subway a dozen or so times a week. And Bush couldn't do anything about that if you genuinely wanted to give him the lattitude to try, because what you are asking for is impossible to begin with and further, if you really wanted to try to do something real about it would involve invoking methods and laws that would have every Manhattanite screaming "Bush is a fascist" at the top of their lungs. (Some of that would even be legitimate.) We are not secure in NYC or DC, let's face it- we never will be again. And there is NOTHING theat Homeland Defense can do about that short of shredding the constitution- not in an imaginary, hysterical way people talk about PATRIOT ACT, but really Editeding all over our basic freedoms. He is not about to do that, not until maybe there is a really MASSIVE attack, much bigger than 9/11- which I think will happen before I am old in NYC or DC or both. There are too many holes in the nets. I have resigned myself to that. I wouldn't dare blame that unfortunate reality on a hypothetical president Gore or Kerry even indirectly, and would ask you to consider the merit of blaming it on Bush in any way. Let's face it, without tossing the Bill of Rights in the garbage can and or comandeering trillions of dollars from other programs, there is NO POSSIBLE way to make the biggest targets in the world, our diverse and compact cities, dafe. NONE. And you should know that. The Fourth Armored Infantry division isn't about to man the NYC subway. Not just yet. Not till its too late anyway.

[Z]

well, i disagree with the idea that public transit in major metro areas are unprotectable. the money used to wage war in iraq could easily support the admittedly massive expense involved in reworking security on mass transit systems. i don't "blame" bush for not securing them per se, but i do fault him for making an absurd capital commitment to a war which has done nothing to make me, or anyone else in this country, safer, when that cash could have made real differences at home.

[Z]

NB: my attitude would be completely different had the case for war presented to the nation been genuine, as i, even as an ardent critic of bush, believed it was in the run up to the invasion. that's what makes these subsequent revelations about the admin's distortions even more infuriating to me.

[thebin]

Well if you were an honest left winger (I don't know if you consider yourself one or not) you might say that the US had a moral obligation to do the right thing, and liberate 25 million people this once, even if it couldn't take on the entire world's tyrants. Maybe you don't care enough about them to make these large sacrafices. Fair enough. Then you might put on your realist thinking cap and say, you know, these tyrants who breed trecordists in the Arab world are not working out for us now that the Soviets are no longer a threat. Maybe we need to do something concrete to help spawn democracy and rationality in that region that so desperately needs to have its own Reformation. Sounds like a MASSIVE project, one that might not get done in our life time, but its SOMETHING that we can do rather than writing off that whole part of the world as consigned forever to backwards ass tyranny and underground religious fascism.
In that way, the removal of Saddam can be seen as a valid attempt to make our children and grandchildren safer, it is not a small idea about here and now. It is a very big idea. Like all big ideas, it might well fail. But many of us are happy to see a man in the White House have the stones to embark upon such a good big idea- even one farught with danger and expense. The days of lobbing missiles at Sudanese aspirin factories and empty Afghan tents were a lot cheaper and a lot safer- but they were not effective methods of dealing with trecordism then, and certainly not anymore.

[showcase]

The thing with the whole "moral imparative" justification for Iraq is that it is just as vulnerable as any other. I hear it get trotted out fairly often, but it never sold with me because:

1. As Z notes, we hardly have infinite resources, so there must be prioritization;

2. It is a bold gamble, and one that COULD work, but it's a HUGE investment in a highly SUSPECT potential outcome. It COULD result in the first genuine Arab democracy, or it COULD result in Iran Redux. The huge investment and speculative dividend reinforces the validity of Z's initial objection; and

3. While the Administration's "Iraq Gambit" (for lack only of a better term) would have been a solid plan pre-9/11, when funds were available and there wasn't a manifest higher priority, it NEVER could have been sold to anyone outside the Bush Administration. It was a fine, pie-in-the-sky kind of concept pre-9/11 that no one, left or right, would have even attempted to sell on 'humanitarian' grounds. 9/11 gave the Administration the political capital necesary to pursue this speculative venture. Now, if the political capital had come from something else, it would have been an interesting exercise in realpolitique. Spent on Iraq, however, I think it fair to say that the political capital Bush accrued after 9/11 appears to have been misappropriated.

[showcase]

Z said:

whoops, missed your post showcase. didnt mean to steal your thunder.

Thanks, but it ain't my thunder, just an obvious objection. Glad I'm not the only who noticed it.

[Z]

thats not the question here bin. this is quite an old debate (and not one im attempting to rehash), but the fact is this was not sold to the american people as a war about humanitarianism. yes, it was a complimentary justification, but not the causa belli (sp?). if that was really what this was about, then the admin had a duty to frame it as such an allow for a real discussion about whether or our military should be implemented for such a purpose.

and to answer your question, yes, i am generally in favor of US international humanitarian intervention. but there is a time and a place for everything. our nation is quite literally under the constant threat of attack, the best response to which is still being explored. its simply not the time to be making multibillion dollar humanitarian interventions wholly unrelated to the war on terror a pressing priority.

[Z]

what is "trecordism" and what are "trecordists?"

[showcase]

Z said:

what is "trecordism" and what are "trecordists?"

Here's Admin's answer:

Subject: Re: Question re: "trecord"
Admin
Administrator

Posts: 22

« message sent on: 20.03.04 at 20:11:05 » <br>
This must be a board-owner issue. It's not something I have access to change.

[Z]

this excerpt from josh marshall addresses the supposedly damning declassified clarke background briefing, but speaks to the larger issue of the admin's approach to this tempest in general.

"In any case, the larger point I think is this: Career civil servants working for a given White House do tend to follow that White House's spin when they're giving background briefings. That's hardly a surprise. It's somewhat in the nature of the enterprise.

Luckily we don't have to rely on what Clarke said then or what he's saying now.

He's now come forward, speaking for himself, with a long list of detailed claims and accusations about the White House's inattention to the terrorism issue during the first eight months of the administration and their desire to wrench the war on terror into a second Iraq war after 9/11.

If Clarke's claims are factually wrong they should be easily rebuttable -- given that the White House has all the relevant documents and evidence at its disposal. Yet, thus far, they've scarcely made an attempt and have focused all their fire on attacking Clarke personally -- that he was liar and a boob and both out-of-the-loop and responsible for everything that went wrong.

That pretty much tells you the whole story."