THE POWER OF CLARKE'S APOLOGY

I wonder if George Bush has ever apologized to his wife for his mistakes?

Leading congressional Republicans announced plans Friday to seek declassification of 2-year-old testimony from Richard Clarke, hoping to show discrepancies between his recent criticisms of the Bush administration's terrorism policies with flattering statements he made as a White House aide.

"Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said in a speech on the Senate floor.

The Tennessee Republican and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., want Clarke's July 2002 testimony before the joint House and Senate intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks available publicly.

Frist said Clarke, appearing before the joint committee then as a White House counterterrorism adviser, was "effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush administration" and told the committee the White House had actively sought to address the al-Qaida threat.

Republicans hope to compare those words to Clarke's testimony this week before a separate bipartisan commission investigating the attacks. "Your government failed you," Clarke told the presidentially appointed panel and an audience of victims' families.

The declassification requests marked the latest turn in a Republican counterattack against Clarke, who has leveled his criticism against Bush in a new book, "Against All Enemies," as well as in interviews and this week's sworn testimony.

The allegations against Clarke could linger for weeks as the declassification request winds through the appropriate agencies to ensure sensitive national security information isn't revealed. Often most protected are the "sources and methods" of gathering intelligence.

House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., who initiated the declassification request this week, said he feels an obligation to make sure Congress' 810-page report, released publicly in 2003, isn't "contaminated by this new revelation" from Clarke.

Frist made clear Friday that he isn't accusing Clarke of perjury; Goss said he's requested the declassification, a sometimes lengthy process, in case a need for public hearings or other disclosure arises.

"We have to dig through this," Goss said, "not only for the continued accuracy and utility of the joint 9-11 report, but now we have this further question: Does this change things, or is it part of a book-selling tour?"

Two sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in his testimony two years ago, Clarke depicted the Bush administration as far more active in grappling with the threat of al-Qaida than his testimony on Wednesday outlined.

It was not clear whether he also testified two years ago -- as he did this week -- that some senior administration officials almost immediately called for strikes against Iraq in response to the Sept. 11 strikes.

Former Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., who worked with Goss on the inquiry, supported the declassification of Clarke's testimony in its entirety and suggested the administration open the door even wider to include documents -- including Clarke's January 2002 al-Qaida plan -- that could help resolve issues in dispute.

"To the best of my recollection, there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory in that testimony and what Mr. Clarke has said this week," Graham said.

California Rep. Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also wants to see more information disclosed, including 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's report addressing the involvement of a foreign government in supporting some of the 19 hijackers -- an item of dispute with the Bush administration.

"This is selective declassification, in my view, and it is all about discrediting an administration critic," Harman said.

In his testimony this week, Clarke said that while the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combatting terrorists, Bush made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" in the eight months between the time Bush took office and the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a sharply worded speech, Frist said that Clarke himself was "the only common denominator" across 10 years of terrorist attacks that began with the first attack on the World Trade Center, a bombing in an underground parking garage in 1993 that killed six people.

Without mentioning the congressional Republicans' effort, White House spokesman Scott McClellan continued the administration's criticism of Clarke on Friday. "With every new assertion he makes, every revision of his past comments, he only further undermines his credibility," McClellan told reporters.

Asked about Bush's personal reaction to the criticism from a former White House aide, McClellan said, "Any time someone takes a serious issue like this and revises history it's disappointing."

Having read the PNAC crap on the Net convinced me that this Admin. is a Crime Syndicate. The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were property grabs; expanding the territory for Multi-Natl. Business. All this crap about democracy is just that, crap for the ignorant masses.

I posted many times with scant response that America is a Plutocracy. Whether it's Rethugs or Dems in power, the Plutocracy controls the main agenda.

Clarke's apology is worth exactly nothing, because it was based on a lie. A lie given under oath. He might be in some big trouble. I hope so.

Dick Clarke: Hillary's Kind of Hawk
by Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted Mar 26, 2004

Reading former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies--Inside America's Terror War, one half expects the omnipresent author to describe himself showing up in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft the original version of the Declaration of Independence--only to have it hopelessly rewritten by right-wing dolts like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin.

By Clarke's account (see page 2 and page 6), he played a key role in many of the most significant national security crises of the last quarter-century. Things went well when his advice was heeded; disaster ensued when it was not.

The place one would not expect to find Clarke--from reading his book, anyway--is in a voting booth in 2000 pulling the lever for a Republican presidential candidate. But, testifying last week before the national commission probing the September 11 terrorist attacks, Clarke says he did just that.

"I'm not working for the Kerry campaign," Clarke protested when former Navy Secretary John Lehman suggested some might perceive Clarke as having a partisan agenda. "Last time I had to declare my party loyalty, it was to vote in the Virginia primary for President of the United States in the year 2000. And I asked for a Republican ballot."

Blaming America First

Hearing this on TV, I tried my best to suspend disbelief when I started reading Clarke's book. Perhaps it really was a serious national security study written by a hawkish Republican, who had public policy--not partisan political--differences with the Bush Administration.

Then I read Chapter 1. That's where Clarke, narrating the events of September 11, introduces Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Mrs. Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected," writes Clarke. "Like her husband, she was a right-wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker."

On the next page, Clarke says of the Vice President: "Below that surface of calm ran strong, almost extreme, beliefs. He had been one of the five most radical conservatives in Congress."

Make no mistake: The Cheneys are conservatives. But how likely do you think it is that an environmentalist Democratic aide in the Clinton White House would have referred to Tipper Gore as, say, an environmentalist wacko? Or noted that Al Gore had been one of the five most radical leftists in the Senate?

Answer that and you'll know how earnestly "Republican" is Richard Clarke.

In Against All Enemies, hagiographies of hallowed leftists are followed by demonizations of accursed conservatives.

If Lynn Cheney is the kind of Second Lady who would have the effrontery to offer an opinion in a bunker, what sort of First Lady was Hillary Clinton? Secretly saintly, implies Clarke.

He describes the scene at a hotel near Kennedy Airport, where President and Mrs. Clinton went to meet the families of victims of the TWA 800 disaster. "I opened the door to the next room, which had been set up as a chapel," writes Clark. "Alone in the room, on her knees, Mrs. Clinton was praying."

But when it came to piety, Hillary had nothing on Janet Reno. "She had shown incredible public courage in taking the blame for the disastrous siege of the religious cultists at Waco, Tex.," Clarke writes, referring to the incident in which Clinton's attorney general ordered the tear gas attack on the Branch Davidian compound that sparked the conflagration that resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people, including many children.

Taking credit for that showed "courage," says this "Republican." But John Ashcroft's manner of defending the Patriot Act is something else entirely. In Clarke's view, that understandably raised the specter of the Third Reich. Writes Clarke of Ashcroft: "The Attorney General, rather than bringing us together, managed to persuade much of the country that the needed reforms of the Patriot Act were actually the beginning of fascism."

Speaking of Evil Empires, Clarke even betrays ambivalence as to just how evil global Communism was.

Referring to Robert Gallucci, a member of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, Clarke casually states: "Gallucci and I had both been anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s."

While comparing the War on Terror to the Cold War, he says: "In retrospect, some (particularly those born after 1970) believe America overreacted to the Cold War threat. At the time, however, it seemed an existential struggle, the depth of which is now difficult for many to recall or understand."

Oh, really? Who finds it difficult to understand that when a Godless empire aims thousands of nuclear warheads at your cities you are in "an existential struggle"? Only unreconstructed liberals--with whom this "Republican" Clarke obviously has deep empathy.

Partisans of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry may ludicrously persist in portraying this man who reached the apex of his career in the Clinton White House as a Republican hawk. But, in his book, Clarke himself vividly paints his vision for a Blame-America-First Aquarian Age--that age that might have been, he suggests, if only a Clinton had ruled again.

Drawing a contrast with George W. Bush's aggressive approach to the war on terror, Clark says: "Others (Clinton, the first Bush, Carter, Ford) might have tried to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, what led 15 Saudis and four others to commit suicide to kill Americans. Others might have tried to build a world consensus to address the root causes, while using the moment to force what had been lethargic or doubting governments to arrest known terrorists and close front organizations. One can imagine Clinton trying one more time to force an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, going to Saudi Arabia and addressing the Muslim people in a moving appeal for religious tolerance . . ."

Yeah, right, Dick. Then all of us "Republicans" could have sat down with Bill, Hillary and Osama bin Laden and sung endless choruses of Give Peace a Chance.