Sunday, March 21, 2004

Joe fights for his President In response to Richard Clarke's shocking allegations, allies of the Bush Administration have come out to condemn the charges. Joe Lieberman, for example, spoke out on Fox News Sunday: Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said Sunday he doesn't believe Clarke's charge that the Bush administration -- which 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." Richard Clarke has been working on counter-terrorism since the Reagan administration, he was an insider in the Bush Administration, and yet Joe thinks he knows better about the facts and cautions Clarke not to use rhetoric. Thanks for clarifying things for us, Joe. [Joe, sorry about those Whammies, but you leave us with some nice parting gifts.] 11:31:07 PM    comment [] Compare and Contrast Let's compare and contrast Presidents Clinton and Bush on counter-terrorism, from Richard Clarke's insider's perspective. President Bush: By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August. President Clinton: Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives. President Bush: Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject." Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11." Well, he shouldn't get carried away. President Bush was a very busy man. For the whole month of August, he had a lot of brush to clear from his ranch. In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden. And President Bush, as the "un-Clinton," did not authorize an attack. And on 9/11, while the country was being attacked, he was reading "The Hungry Caterpillar" to a group of school kids. 12:29:52 PM    comment [] Clarke on Bush pre-9/11 You may have seen the commercial for Richard Clarke's interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes tonight. Clark was the "terrorism czar," or the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism. He began working on counter-terrorism policy under Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. He became "terrorism czar" with a Cabinet-level post under Clinton. Although he was carried over by President Bush, he was demoted from a cabinet level position to a staff level position (so much for fighting terrorism pre-9/11). And he has some eye-opening things to say. Here's just one of them mentioned in the linked CBSNews article: Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously. "We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months. "There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on. "I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years." Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz. Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' "And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." [link via Atrios] 12:09:15 PM    comment []

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