9/11 Blood on Bush's Hands

[Donutboy 0]

With the more information that comes forward, it's more and more clear why Bush wants to claim executive privilege and refuse information to the 9/11 commission. It's clear why he tried to refuse to even have a commission investigate 9/11 in the first place and it's clear why so many people are upset that he wants to use the 9/11 attacks as a campaign backdrop for his campaign. That's great because the more he uses 9/11 as a backdrop and the more we learn about his ignoring the terrorist threat prior to the attacks, the more his ads will work against him in the long run.

Bush `Ignored Terrorism for Months,' Clarke Tells `60 Minutes'

March 20 (Bloomberg) -- The White House counter-terrorism coordinator at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks said it's ``outrageous'' that U.S. President George W. Bush is running for re-election based on his record in fighting terror.

Richard A. Clarke said in a television interview airing Sunday that Bush ``ignored terrorism for months'' before the 2001 attacks, then looked to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan, the nation harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks.

``I find it outrageous that the president is running for re- election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism,'' Clarke said in an interview with CBS' ``60 Minutes.''

CBS News posted a portion of the interview on its Web site. The White House did not immediately return a call for comment.

Clarke served the last three presidential administrations as a senior White House adviser. He is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting LLC. His book, ``Against All Enemies,'' goes on sale Monday. He will testify before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks on Wednesday in Washington.

In the interview, Clarke said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advocated military action against Iraq soon after the terror attacks of Sept. 11.

``Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq, and we all said, `No, no, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan,''' Clarke said. ``Rumsfeld said there aren't good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.''

Clarke said he believes administration officials wanted to believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Sept. 11 attackers.

``But the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying we've looked at this issue for years, for years we've looked for a connection, and there's just no connection,'' he said.

Clarke is the second former high-ranking administration official to say the Bush team was determined to attack Iraq before terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  

In a book about his tenure in the administration, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Bush's advisers began planning to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Clarke was assistant secretary of state in the administration of Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, and served as President Bill Clinton's coordinator for counterterrorism and the current president's adviser for cybersecurity.

[CarolinaTiger 0]

welcome back DB!!!

you've been gone for awhile...hope all is well.

ct

[Tiger in Spain 0]

It sounds to me like Dick Clark may have an ulterior motive for shooting off his mouth (other than trying to sell his book).

Kerry Connection 'Discredits' Terror Czar Clarke, Say Critics

Newsmax.com

Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

March 21, 2004

Excerpt:

Former Clinton administration terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who has been portrayed in dozens of media accounts as a nonpartisan critic of the Bush White House's terrorism policies, faces new questions about his credibility after a report surfaced on Sunday suggesting he has close ties to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

"One of [Clarke's] very close friends and colleagues for years - a man whom he taught a class with at Harvard, Rand Beers - is one of the top foreign policy advisers to Sen. Kerry," reported ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran.

Moran told ABC's "This Week" that Clarke's close relationship with the Kerry aide "discredited" him in the eyes of critics, with the White House maintaining that "this is essentially a Democrat making these arguments" that Bush dropped the ball in the war on terrorism.

Of Clarke's much-ballyhooed new book, "Against All Enemies," where the security expert charges that President Bush has done "a terrible job" fighting the war on terrorism, Moran noted that "[Republicans] say that this book is an audition for a place in the next Democratic administration."

Beers and Clarke both resigned from the White House within a month of each other last year, shortly before the Iraq war started in March. When Beers made a public show of joining Kerry's campaign, it set off political smoke alarms in Washington.

"I can't think of a single example in the last 30 years of a person who has done something so extreme," Paul C. Light, a scholar with the Brookings Institution, told The New Yorker magazine's Jane Mayer.

"He's not just declaring that he's a Democrat," Light said. "He's declaring that he's a Kerry Democrat, and the way he wants to make a difference in the world is to get his former boss out of office."

While Beers began publicly criticizing the Iraq war almost immediately, Clarke held his fire for a few months. But by last November it was clear he and Beers were on the same page.

"Fighting Iraq had little to do with fighting the war on terrorism, until we made it [so]," Clarke proclaimed to interviewers.

Which President had 3 opportunities to drop Bin Laden and decided not to? It seems to me that Mr Clinton ignored the threat of terrorism for years: WTC 1993, Khobar towers, USS Cole, the Embassy bombings. The hijackers were in the country years before 9-11. The evidence as I see it leads me to believe that the finger of guilt you liberals like to point at GWB should be evenly distributed amonst yourselves as well.

[TitanTiger 21,241]

Counterpoint:

Richard Clarke, Fraud

By PowerLineBlog.com

PowerLineBlog.com | March 22, 2004

The press is abuzz with reports that former Clinton staffers are set to testify before the September 11 commission next week that "they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act." The Clinton officials expected to so testify include Sandy Berger, Madeline Albright and Richard Clarke.

Where to begin: the mind boggles at such shamelessness. To state the obvious, in late 2000 the Clinton administration was STILL IN OFFICE. If there were steps that needed to be taken immediately to counter the al Qaeda threat, as they "bluntly" told President Bush's transition team, why didn't they take those steps themselves?

More broadly, of course, the Clinton administration was in power for eight years, while al Qaeda grew, prospered, and repeatedly attacked American interests:

*1993: Shot down US helicopters and killed US servicemen in Somalia

*1994: Plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila

*1995: Plotted to kill President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines

*1995: Plot to to bomb simultaneously, in midair, a dozen US trans-Pacific flights was discovered and thwarted at the last moment

*1998: Conducted the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed at least 301 individuals and injured more than 5,000 others

*1999: Attempt to carry out terrorist operations against US and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations was discovered just in time by Jordanian authorities

*1999: In another millenium plot, bomber was caught en route to Los Angeles International Airport *2000: Bombed the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 US Navy members, and injuring another 39

So what, when they had the power to act effectively against al Qaeda, did these Clinton administration officials do? Little or nothing. Their most effective action was to bomb what turned out to be an aspirin factory in Sudan. They had the opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden, but decided not to do it because they were not sure their lawyers would approve.

For these people to criticize the Bush administration's efforts to protect Americans against terrorism, long after their own ineptitute had allowed al Qaeda to grow bold and powerful, is contemptible.

Of these Clintonite critics, the most important appears to be Richard Clarke. Clarke has written a book called Against All Enemies which will appear tomorrow--coincidentally, just in time for the 2004 election campaign. Clarke is being interviewed on 60 Minutes as I write this--a cozy corporate tie-in, as Viacom owns both CBS and the publisher of Clarke's book.

Clarke's charges against the Bush administration have already been widely published. Like his former boss Sandy Berger, he decries the Bush administration's failure to heed his "warnings" while Clarke and his fellow Clintonites were still in power. And he claims that Bush ignored terrorism "for months"--unlike his former boss, Bill Clinton, who ignored it for years.

But most of the attention flowing Clarke's way has centered on his claims about what happened when he was working inside the Bush administration after January 2001. Clarke was President Clinton's counter-terrorism coordinator; he was demoted by the Bush administration to director of cybersecurity. But before that demotion, he says that Bush's foreign policy advisers paid too much attention to Iraq. Then, after September 11, Clarke says that President Bush asked him to try to find out whether Iraq had been involved in the attack:

Now he never said, "Make it up." But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, "Iraq did this.'' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection," and in a very intimidating way.

Clarke seems to view this request as a manifestation of a weird obsession. But Clarke must know that Iraq was involved in the Islamofascists' 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center. So it was hardly unreasonable for President Bush to want to know whether Saddam was behind the successful effort in 2001 as well...

...More generally, Clarke accuses the administration of spoiling for a fight with Iraq and claims that Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, was talking about Iraq immediately after the September 11 attacks. This is exactly the same claim that was made by the rather pathetic Paul O'Neill. The most basic problem with this claim is that while the administration endorsed the act of Congress that made regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States, it didn't attack Iraq for a year and a half after September 11, and then only after Saddam had definitively thumbed his nose at a series of U.N. resolutions.

So, Richard Clarke's criticism of President Bush comes down to this: before September 11, like everyone else in the United States (including Clarke), he did not make al Qaeda terrorism his number one priority. Everything else he says is self-serving nonsense.

But let's pursue a little further the question, who exactly is Richard Clarke? What do we know about him?

First, we know that before September 11, he was professionally committed to the idea that al Qaeda represented a new form of "stateless terrorism" that could never cooperate with a country like Iraq:

Prior to 9/11, the dominant view within the IC was that al Qaida represented a new form of stateless terrorism. That was also the view promoted by the Clinton White House, above all terrorism czar, Richard Clarke. To acknowledge that Iraqi intelligence worked with al Qaida is tantamount to acknowledging that all these people made a tremendous blunder--and they are just not going to do it.

We now know that this dogma was false, and Iraq did in fact support and collaborate with al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. But there is no one as resistant to new information as a bureaucrat who has staked his career on a theory.

Second, we know that Richard Clarke was very willing to justify pre-emptive attack, on the basis of imperfect intelligence, when the attacker was Bill Clinton:

I would like to speak about a specific case that has been the object of some controversy in the last month -- the U.S. bombing of the chemical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger wrote an article for the op-ed page of today's Washington Times about that bombing, providing the clearest rationale to date for what the United States did. He asks the following questions: What if you were the president of the United States and you were told four facts based on reliable intelligence. The facts were: Usama bin Ladin had attacked the United States and blown up two of its embassies; he was seeking chemical weapons; he had invested in Sudan's military-industrial complex; and Sudan's military-industrial complex was making VX nerve gas at a chemical plant called al-Shifa? Sandy Berger asks: What would you have done? What would Congress and the American people have said to the president if the United States had not blown up the factory, knowing those four facts?

Is it really a crazy idea that terrorists could get chemical or biological weapons?

Well, no, it's anything but a crazy idea. But Clarke seems to have gotten a very different attitude toward that possibility once a Republican became President.

Third, we know that Clarke bought into the now-discredited "law enforcement" approach to counter-terrorism: if people are making war on us, arrest them!

Long before our embassies in Africa were attacked on August 7, 1998, the United States began implementing this presidential directive. Since the embassies were attacked, we have disrupted bin Ladin terrorist groups, or cells. Where possible and appropriate, the United States will bring the terrorists back to this country and put them on trial. That statement is not an empty promise.

No, it wasn't an empty promise. Clinton's promise of due process for terrorists explains why bin Laden is alive today, along with many of his confederates.

So it is not hard to see why Richard Clarke, a discredited and demoted bureaucrat, would be bitter toward President Bush and the members of his administration who have carried out a successful anti-terrorism campaign, far different from the one endorsed by Clarke and the Clinton administration.

But is Clarke only a bitter ex-bureaucrat, or is there more to his attack on President Bush? Let's consider both Clarke's personal history and his current employment. Clarke now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; here is his Kennedy School bio, which notes that the capstone of his career in the State Department was his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs.

Another professor at the Kennedy School is Rand Beers, who is evidently an old friend and colleague of Clarke's, as Beers' Kennedy School bio says that "[d]uring most of his career he served in the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs."

So Clarke and Beers, old friends and colleagues, have continued their association at the Kennedy School. Indeed, they even teach a course together. And, by the most astonishing coincidence, their course relates directly to the subject matter of Clarke's attack on the Bush administration: "Post-Cold War Security: Terrorism, Security, and Failed States" is the name of the course. Here is its syllabus:

Between them Rand Beers and Richard Clarke spent over 20 years in the White House on the National Security Council and over 60 years in national security departments and agencies. They helped to shape the transition from Cold War security issues to the challenges of terrorism, international crime, and failed states...Case studies will include Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Colombia, and Afghanistan. Challenges of counter-terrorism and homeland security will also be addressed.

Why do we find this particularly significant? Because Rand Beers' bio says:

He resigned [his State Department position] in March 2003 and retired in April.  He began work on John Kerry's Presidential campaign in May 2003 as National Security/Homeland Security Issue Coordinator.

There you have it: Richard Clarke is a bitter, discredited bureaucrat who was an integral part of the Clinton administration's failed approach to terrorism, was demoted by President Bush, and is now an adjunct to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Thanks to the indefatigable Dafydd ab Hugh for noting the connections between Clarke and Beers.

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/...le.asp?ID=12673

Not to mention Condi Rice's rebuttal to this tripe:

White House Rebuts Former Adviser's Claims

Monday, March 22, 2004   

WASHINGTON — The White House is disputing assertions by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator that the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by Al Qaeda in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.

National security deputies worked diligently between March and September 2001 to develop a strategy to attack the terror network, one that was completed and ready for Bush's approval a week before the airliner hijackings, the White House said in a statement Sunday.

It said the president told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice early in his administration he was "'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against Al Qaeda, rather than simply waiting to respond."

The point-by-point rebuttal confronts claims by Richard A. Clarke in a new book, "Against All Enemies," that is scathingly critical of administration actions.

Clarke wrote that Rice appeared never to have heard of Al Qaeda until she was warned early in 2001 about the terrorist organization and that she "looked skeptical" about his warnings.

"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," Clarke said in the book, going on sale Monday.

But on Monday, Rice told Fox News this account is "ridiculous."

"I don't know why Dick Clarke tries to read people's minds," she said, explaining how she heard of Al Qaeda in 1998.

Clarke said Rice appeared not to recognize post-Cold War security issues and effectively demoted him within the National Security Council staff. He retired last year after 30 years in government.

Rice echoed the administration's rebuttal in a guest column in Monday's Washington Post and addressed Clarke's characterization of her obliquely.

"Before Sept. 11, we closely monitored threats to our nation," she wrote. "President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of the CIA every day — meetings that I attended. And I personally met with (director) George Tenet regularly and frequently reviewed aspects of the counterterrorism effort."

Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel investigating the attacks, recounted his early meeting with Rice as support for his contention the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by Al Qaeda.

He said that within one week of Bush's inauguration he "urgently" sought a meeting of senior Cabinet leaders to discuss "the imminent Al Qaeda threat."

Three months later, in April 2001, Clarke met with deputy secretaries. During that meeting, he wrote, the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz told Clarke, "You give bin Laden too much credit," and he said Wolfowitz sought to steer the discussion to Iraq.

The White House responded that the Bush administration kept Clarke as a holdover from the Clinton era because of its concerns over Al Qaeda.

"He makes the charge that we were not focused enough on efforts to root out terrorism," Bush communications director Dan Bartlett said Sunday. "That's just categorically false."

Bartlett said Clarke's memo to Rice in January 2001 discussed recommendations to improve security at U.S. sites overseas, not inside the United States. "Each one of these, while important, wouldn't have impacted 9/11," he said...

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said Sunday he doesn't believe Clarke's charge that Bush — who defeated him and former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election — was focused more on Iraq than al-Qaida during the days after the terror attacks.

"I see no basis for it," Lieberman said on "Fox News Sunday." "I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric."

And Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., told ABC's "This Week" that while he has been critical of Bush policies on Iraq, "I think it's unfair to blame the president for the spread of terror and the diffuseness of it. Even if he had followed the advice of me and many other people, I still think the same thing would have happened."...

"We believe the timing is questionable," he said. "When (Clarke) left office, he had every opportunity" to make any grievances known.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,114811,00.html

So, Rice disputes Clarke's analysis. Much of Clarke's contention is based on his inferences into what President Bush wanted and his newly discovered ability to read Condi Rice's mind. And not even Democrats such as Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman believe him.

Yeah, he's credible. :roll:

[MDM4AU 338]

The evidence as I see it leads me to believe that the finger of guilt you liberals like to point at GWB should be evenly distributed amonst yourselves as well.

Big Fat Chance of that happening! :roll:

[Tiger in Spain 0]

Clinton had no less that 5 terrorist attacks happen "on his watch", now all of the sudden, 9-11 is President Bush's fault. If Slick Willy had used his brain to think, rather than his penis, a lot of innocent Americans would be alive today. Al Qaeda gave the US 8 years to see what they were capable of doing (WTC 1993). Clinton ignored these warnings, and the indifference his administration showed to Bin Laden has resulted in the fight we find ourselves in now.