The CBS 60 Minutes Richard Clarke Interview

Here's a transcript of part of Bill O'Reilly's show last night.

O'REILLY: Rollback under Clinton. Rapid elimination under Bush.

So will the real Richard Clarke please stand up. We've got two sound bites. You just heard them. OK? Something going on here.

Now, I don't mean to do the dirty work for the Bush supporters here, but doesn't this take away from Clarke's credibility?

Richard Clarke yesterday pulled off one of the more skillful pieces of political jujitsu in recent memory. Just in time for Clarke's appearance before the 9/11 Commission, the White House revealed to Fox News that the couterterrorism-czar-turned-Bush-critic had held an August 2002 background briefing defending the administration's pre-9/11 actions. Hours later, it looked like the White House's strategy to impugn Clarke's credibility might pay off. In a packed hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, Commissioner Jim Thompson pointed to the newly released transcript and to Clarke's book and asked, "Which is true?"

Then Clarke counterattacked. He explained that the discrepancy between what he said then and what he is saying now exists only in "tenor and tone." In 2002, Clarke said, he merely emphasized the more appealing aspects of Bush's early counterterrorism policy (such as the president's stated desire to stop "swatting at flies") and conveniently excluded the less appealing ones (like the absence of consistent senior-level attention to Al Qaeda, which Clarke had been demanding). Not surprisingly, Thompson found this answer unconvincing, and said so. In response, Clarke detailed his motivations: After Time had run a "somewhat sensational" story about Bush's inattention to counterterrorism, he recalled, "I was asked by several people in senior levels of the Bush White House to do a press backgrounder to try to explain that set of facts in a way that minimized criticism of the administration. And so I did." Thompson pressed on: Had the administration asked Clarke to make an untrue case? "Not an untrue case," Clarke replied. "I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. And as a special assistant to the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing." The implication was clear: Clarke had only made these statements because the Bush administration pushed him in front of the press corps to squelch a "potentially embarrassing" charge.

In one fell swoop, Clarke had turned an attack on his credibility into an attack on the Bush administration's credibility. Then Clarke twisted the knife. In the 2002 backgrounder, he had said that before 9/11, the Bush administration "changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda." Now Clarke explained that in fact, the "change" he was referring to was his victory in inserting the word "elimination" into a draft of the National Security Presidential Directive on terrorism that President Bush signed just before September 11. Why was the semantic shift to "elimination" a victory for Clarke? Because the Bush administration was initially uncomfortable with the harsh language of "elimination" and had sought to keep it out. "I tried to insert the phrase early in the Bush administration in the draft NSPD that our goal should be to 'eliminate' Al Qaeda," he said. "And I was told by various members of the deputies committee that that was overly ambitious and that we should take the word 'eliminate' out and say 'significantly erode.'"

Thanks, Infra. I don't get to post much (Newbie still) but I've been around a while. Feel like some here are family...