The CBS 60 Minutes Richard Clarke Interview

The timing is suspect for the interview and book release, a year and a half after 9/11 and Kerry on vacation so it looks like it has nothing to do with his campaign...

The first attack on the World Trade Center, Feb. 26, 1993. Unanswered.

Brand X wrote:

The timing is suspect for the interview and book release, a year and a half after 9/11 and Kerry on vacation so it looks like it has nothing to do with his campaign...

On PBS' Newshour, Richard Clarke said that the publication of the book had been delayed for 3 months because the White House delayed clearing it for publication.

So if not for their stonewalling, it would have been published before any reasonable person could have accused him of being "political" for releasing it during the election season.

Quote:

The first attack on the World Trade Center, Feb. 26, 1993. Unanswered.

Let's just dissect this one to prove how mistaken you are.

The terrorists who tried to blow up a van loaded with explosives in the basement of the WTC -- an attack that occurred 31 days into Clinton's presidency -- are in jail, arrested and prosecuted and convicted and sentenced.

We did not bomb an uninvolved nation with a despot in charge for which evidence was fabricated to rationalize our unprovoked attack.

Clinton's was a much better 'answer'.

As you watch the commission hearings over the next two days, with both Clinton and Bush administration executives testifying about their actions in the months and years preceding 9/11, remind yourself to keep your mind pried open just a crack to let some fresh air in.

What is your argument here? Any book written by anyone who has worked within any administration can have no credibility? It must always be simple greed motivating? Does this apply to only ex administration members or others too. Would it apply to, say, Ann Coulter? Or is the greed motive restricted to ex admin writers?

I think if you're going to debunk Clarke's claims, you should actually know his background.

Remember when everyone in the Media was asking why Bush was personally engaging in an attack dog campaign against John Kerry instead of leaving it up to his surrogates? Well, now you know why.

Richard Clarke submitted his book to the Bush Administration, as required, for publication review and release, in November 2003. They delayed release for three months until February, resulting in publication in March 2004.

Bush and Karl Rove knew the book's content in November and knew they couldn't prevent its publication. The delay gave them time to readjust their Bush relection campaign strategy into the current attack dog mode.

If anyone was politically motivated over Clarke's book, it was the Bush administration.

BBB

blatham wrote:

What is your argument here? Any book written by anyone who has worked within any administration can have no credibility? It must always be simple greed motivating? Does this apply to only ex administration members or others too. Would it apply to, say, Ann Coulter? Or is the greed motive restricted to ex admin writers?

It seems most of the "ABB" crowd has been using that "simple greed" argument as their excuse for hating Bush. Isn't that the big complaint against Cheney? His ties to Haliburton and all? How the whole administration is out to "protect the rich"?

Why is it acceptable to point the finger at the Bush administration and claim everything they do is based on simple greed but not anyone else?

Remember when everyone in the Media was asking why Bush was personally engaging in an attack dog campaign against John Kerry instead of leaving it up to his surrogates? Well, now you know why.

Richard Clarke submitted his book to the Bush Administration, as required, for publication review and release, in November 2003. They delayed release for three months until February, resulting in publication in March 2004.

Bush and Karl Rove knew the book's content in November and knew they couldn't prevent its publication. The delay gave them time to readjust their Bush relection campaign strategy into the current attack dog mode.

If anyone was politically motivated over Clarke's book, it was the Bush administration.

BBB

The White House and Bush-Cheney campaign counter-attacks yesterday on the Kerry stand-in Richard Clarke were thorough, and despite skepticism of their effectiveness among entrenched Bush critics in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, devastating. Clarke's credibility is in tatters, and the key facts of his being demoted within the White House and passed over for the deputy's slot at Homeland Security are now well and widely-known. The fact that Clarke is best pals with Kerry foreign policy guru Rand Beers has also penetrated deep into the media's psyche. The New York Times pressed Clarke on this disclosure, and he responded that he had been friends with Beers for 25 years "and I'm not going to run away from him just because he's John Kerry's national security adviser."

I also hope that the media continues to circulate Clarke's account of a meeting on September 12, 2001 in which the president repeatedly pushed him to look into the Al Qaeda-Saddam connection. Clarke says that at the time he tried to divert the president's attention from this possibility but that the president wouldn't be diverted. The White House cannot confirm the conversation occurred, but I think they ought to embrace the Clarke account and reply: "Even if it did happen, we think it proves the contrast between Bush and Clinton and Bush and Kerry. This president demands that the careerists rethink their conventional wisdom and turn over every rock. The complacency of the Clinton years and the U.N.-speak of the Kerry campaign cannot replace real presidential leadership. Clarke didn't like to be pushed. Bush pushes. We think the American people like a president who is demanding his staff keep asking the hard questions."

The political fall-out of Clarke's charges is being touted as bad for Bush by some sideline coaches. The Los Angeles Times' quotes Princeton historian Fred Greenstein as believing that "Bush is running on his strength as a war leader, so this hits him where it hurts," and that "if Kerry remains to be defined, Bush is capable of being redefined." Others chime in along the same line, and Clarke's central argument "that the result [of the war in Iraq] has been a lost opportunity on a magnitude greater than most people realize," has traction with the same people who opposed the war all along.

But what about voters? Clarke returns the focus to the the fact that we are at war; that al Qaeda grew to huge proportions under the benign neglect of the Clinton-Kerry law enforcement model; that not only is Saddam in chains as a result of the Iraq war, Libya --a potential nuclear power and admitted WMD producer and possessor-- is now disarmed; and that the terrorists know that America will pursue them not as they were pursued after the African embassy bombings or the Cole, but relentlessly and not with subpoenas but with every lethal weapon in the arsenal.

That's a fine focus for the campaign to have for the next few months, as Kerry attempts to overcome the admiration of Hugo Chavez and his ilk abroad and the MoveOn.org crowd at home. Kerry is now firmly positioned in the Rand Beers-Richard Clarke corner of talk-talk-talk, meet-meet-meet and never do anything about the bad guys unless it involves political upside and the announcement of an indictment. Election 2004 will be a referendum on the war and its conduct, not its coming, though preparedness is an issue that only helps the Bush re-election drive.

Americans are sports fans. Bush took over a franchise in January 2001 that was ill-prepared in every respect for the challenges ahead. The UCLA Bruins' basketball team didn't make the NCAAs or even the NIT this year. Are the fans blaming new coach Ben Howland or old coach Steve Lavin? If some Lavin buddy shoots off his mouth in a bar that Howland's a lousy coach, does he get a hearing? If he's loud enough he gets attention, but not respect and certainly no converts.

Clarke et al can scream from now until November that 9/11 was Bush's fault and that he was a superman who could have stopped the war before it began and won the war had he only been given the tools. It is fantasy-land stuff, as though Lord Halifax had criticized Churchill in 1940 for failing to prevent the fall of France. Such a charge would have diminished the Chamberlin ally Halifax, not Churchill, and Clarke's carping only reminds people of one of the many problems Bush inherited in 2001 --a career staff riddled with desk generals and paper shuffling seminar leaders.

The left seems happy that Clarke has stirred this pot, and are forgetting the shot of Hillary holding the New York Post headlined "Bush Knew" in the United States Senate. The voters outside the fever swamp hate this crap, and are so post-modern that the "sell the book" blockbuster allegations made on corporate cousin "60 Minutes" bounce off the president like pebbles thrown at a battleship.

"the conservative mind-set. (don't confuse me with facts, I have an attitude)"

The facts are in the documentation. Right Wingers won't read those because reading facts may fry their limited brain cells

Geez, PDiddie, don't confuse the right wingers with facts..it destroys their delusions...

* Be specific
Few things are more intellectually irritating (not to mention worthless) than reading some uncautious and poorly thought out claim such as "Liberals never care about truth", or "The conservative mindset precludes empathy". If you happen to be a fan of the TV show "Crossfire" and think the quality of discourse there is just peachy, then you might perhaps be more at home on some other site. Such generalizations are never really true, and they merely function as cliches which let the writer off the hook - he doesn't have to think, it's already done for him.

On Richard Clarke
Richard Clarke blames the Bush administration for September 11, but what does he think about President Clinton?
by Stephen F. Hayes
03/22/2004 8:00:00 AM

"FRANKLY, I FIND IT OUTRAGEOUS that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Those are the words of Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official in the Bush and Clinton administrations. Clarke appeared on CBS 60 Minutes last night to trash the Bush administration and its handling of the war on terror. The timing was propitious. Clarke has a book out today and he is testifying before the September 11 Commission later this week. Expect to hear a lot more about Richard Clarke and from Richard Clarke in the coming months, especially as the presidential campaign intensifies.

Clarke's testimonials are, in a word, bizarre. In his own world, Clarke was the hero who warned Bush administration officials about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda ad nauseam. The Bush administration, in Clarke's world, just didn't care. In Clarke's world, eight months of Bush administration counterterrorism policy is more important than eight years of Clinton administration counterterrorism policy.

"He's creating this new reality to cover his own legacy of failure," says one senior Bush administration official.

In fact, Bush administration officials who worked with Clarke say his warnings about bin Laden were maddeningly vague. Everyone knew bin Laden was a serious threat. Clarke's job, before he was demoted to his position as cyberterrorism czar, was to propose policies to address that threat. But his chief policy recommendation--arming the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan--was already under consideration and in any case would have done little to prevent a September 11 attack already in its final planning stages. After his demotion, Clarke constantly badgered Bush officials in order to get an audience with President Bush to discuss cyberterrorism.

CLARKE HAD FEW WORDS OF CRITICISM for President Clinton on 60 Minutes, despite having worked at the senior levels of his administration. At least he's consistent. Consider an interview with Clarke from PBS's Frontline: Clarke initially defends President Clinton, but an astute interviewer from Frontline with obvious knowledge of the chronology following the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, presses him:

FRONTLINE: Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?

CLARKE: The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat--we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved . . .

FRONTLINE: But didn't you push for military action after the [al Qaeda bombing of the USS] Cole?

CLARKE: Yes, that's one of the exceptions..

FRONTLINE: How important is that exception?

CLARKE: I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.

FRONTLINE: Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?

CLARKE: Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained"--well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen--the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened.

FRONTLINE: So that's a pretty basic mistake that we made?

CLARKE: 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. None of these decisions took place in isolation. 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 counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals.

The "conveyor belt" was, of course, never destroyed. But that fact seems not to matter to Clarke, who nonetheless suggests that the Bush administration bears most of the responsibility for September 11.

THERE ISN'T MUCH THAT'S FUNNY in discussions of war and terrorism. But Clarke's back-and-forth with 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl on the Clinton administration's response to Iraq's 1993 assassination attempt on President George H.W. Bush offers a brief moment of levity.

The assassination attempt came just three months after President Clinton told the New York Times's Tom Friedman that being a Baptist and a believer in "deathbed conversions" he was willing to give Saddam a fresh start.

Saddam dispatched a rag-tag group of intelligence operatives to assassinate his nemesis. They failed. And when the FBI determined that Saddam's intelligence service was behind the plot, President Clinton ordered a handful of Tomahawk missiles to destroy the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

It was a flaccid response to the attempted assassination of a former head of state. But Clarke doesn't see it that way. Along with the strikes, Clarke says, the Clinton administration sent "a very clear message through diplomatic channels" that further Iraqi terrorism would be dealt with more severely. Clarke calls this "a very chilling message."

IN HIS INTERVIEW with Stahl, Clarke goes to great lengths to suggest that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. At one point in the interview, Clarke makes a stunning declaration. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

Leave aside the fact that Clarke was a key player in the decision to strike the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998. That strike came twenty days after al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Clinton administration officials repeatedly cited Iraqi support for Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation and al Shifa in their defense of the targeting.

Disregard, too, the fact that when the Clinton Justice Department blamed bin Laden for those attacks, the indictment specifically cited an "understanding" between Iraq and al Qaeda, under which the Iraqis would help al Qaeda with "weapons development" in exchange for a promise from bin Laden that he wouldn't work against the Iraqi regime.

More important, Clarke's assertion is directly contradicted by CIA director George Tenet. In a letter he wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 7, 2002, Tenet cited numerous examples of Iraqi support for al Qaeda. Tenet wrote: "We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."

Clarke should answer several questions when he appears before the September 11 Commission this week. Among them:

(1) Is George Tenet wrong about Iraqi support for al Qaeda?

(2) Why did the Clinton administration cite an "understanding" between bin Laden and Iraq in its indictment of bin Laden for the 1998 embassy bombings?

(3) Did Iraq support al Qaeda's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction in Sudan?

(4) Clinton administration officials, including Clarke's former boss Sandy Berger, stand by their decision to target al Shifa. Does Clarke?

(5) What did the Clinton administration do to get the Iraqis to turn over Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi harbored by the regime after mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attacks?

DOBBS: David, thank you very much -- David Ensor.

My next guest served as director of the CIA for two years during president Clinton's first term. James Woolsey joins us now from our Washington bureau.

It's good to have you here.

The fact is that there seems to be plenty of blame placed on both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. Are you surprised that it's being so even-handed, this commission?

JAMES WOOLSEY, FMR. CIA DIRECTOR: Well, I'm glad if that's the approach, because they really do need to look at the whole picture. I think that one very important issue here, Lou is whether there had been any ties between Iraq and al Qaeda back in the 90s. And, you know, George Tenet wrote in 2002, October 7, to the Senate, saying that there were senior level contacts going back ten years, senior al Qaeda in Iraq and training by the Iraqis of al Qaeda in, quote, "poisons, gases and conventional explosive."

So although there are a number of people, some of who served at senior levels in the Clinton administration, who don't want there to have been any contacts of any kind and don't want to admit it between al Qaeda and Iraq, I think including Dick Clarke, because then they would be charged with not having done enough to lean on Saddam. I think those contacts are clear at least in George Tenet's eyes and there's been more detail come out since.

DOBBS: Dick Clarke, Richard Clarke, asserts there were no clear ties between the September 11 attacks and Iraq. You obviously -- what would be the reason for him to say? He was in charge of counterterrorism at that point.

WOOLSEY: There may not have been Iraqi ordering of 9/11. The contacts going back a long time are clear. Clarke, on page 95 of his book, which I've just been reading, has at least three important misstatements. First of all, he does not seem to recognize at all that one of the major plotters in the '93 attack on the World Trade Center was an Iraqi citizen, went back to Iraq after the attack, was seen by ABC News in Baghdad outside his father's home and was told that he was being taken care of by the Iraqi government.

And reports of documents we captured during the invasion indicate that Yassin was on a monthly stipend from the Iraqi government and was given a house. Why would the Iraqis do that with one of the World Trade Center bombers of '93 unless they had some kind of relationship with him. Clarke doesn't even seem to be curious about something like that.

DOBBS: Jim, one of the things that struck me in today's testimony, listening to former Senator Bob Kerrey, who I thought did a remarkable, candid, straightforward, evenhanded job, he goes back through, actually the late 80s, 90s, through the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, the USS Cole, the first attack on the World Trade Center, the millennium attacks, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and, of course, September 11. My God, all of that was known to be al Qaeda. How in the world could two administrations frankly be so ineffective in dealing with a demonstrated threat?

WOOLSEY: Part of the problem may have been that some of the senior analysts in CIA, DIA and some of the White House staffers got locked into early the view that al Qaeda had nothing at all to do under any circumstances with any governments and they missed some connection with governments. Look, Clarke in his book creates out of whole cloth the notion that some of us whom he calls part of a cult believe that Ramzi Yousef was not really in prison in Colorado. In fact, he was, as Clarke puts it, lounging beside Saddam Hussein as a mastermind of Iraqi intelligence during the 90s. It's nonsense. None of us has said anything remotely like that.

We're curious about whether or not this young Pakistani who lived in Kuwait was born there, Abdul Bassir (ph) became -- changed his name to Ramsey Yussef and became a terrorist or whether there had been some kind of theft of his identity. For Clarke to say something like that is like the 13th chime of the clock. Not only is it bizarre in and of itself, it calls into question, as far as I'm concerned, everything from the same source.

DOBBS: Jim Woolsey, this commission working hard, diligently a great deal of time being spent. What in your estimation will be the productive positive result from this commission's findings?

WOOLSEY: I think they need to go back and question everyone's assumptions back to the early and mid 90s about al Qaeda, and governments. And look hard at whether their objectively, whether there were any ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, between al Qaeda and Iran. There are a number of things al Qaeda did that I think it's going to be difficult in time for people to sustain saying they did completely alone and unhelped by anyone who was, you know, had some fake passports, whatever. Look, Lou, it doesn't mean that any organization were under the command of the others.

I look on them as sort of like Mafia families. They hate each other, they kill each other from time to time. They insult each other but they are capable of cooperating here and there. And the people like Clarke who have been saying they never work together under any circumstances I think those assumptions need to be questioned vigorously by this commission and others.

DOBBS: You are the professional. When you talk about questioning assumptions, I think there's sort of a reflex from most of us mere civilians we hope our intelligence experts are constantly challenging assumptions and assessing a word straightforwardly. Does it concern you and we've only got a few seconds but I would like to know. We're spending an inordinate amount of time looking in a rearview mirror rather than forward. Does that concern you?

WOOLSEY: To some extent. We need to get the past as clear as we can in order to understand the future. The assumptions a lot of people made is those organizations never touched base with one another, never cooperated on anything. I think maybe the major misleading thing that was done to all of us by the intelligence agencies from the mid 90s on and by people like Clarke.

DOBBS: Jim Woolsey, thank you very much for being here.

WOOLSEY: Good to be with you.