Manipulation for war?

[DKSuddeth]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm.../ap/20040321/ap_on_go_pr_wh/terrorism_adviser

Ex-Aide: Bush Manipulated U.S. Into War
52 minutes ago Add White House - AP to My Yahoo!


By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing to recognize the al-Qaida threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq (news - web sites) with dangerous consequences.


He accuses Bush of doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism."


Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, writes in a new book going on sale Monday that Bush and his Cabinet were preoccupied during the early months of his presidency with some of the same Cold War issues that had faced his father's administration.


"It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier," Clarke told CBS for an interview Sunday on its "60 Minutes" program.


CBS' corporate parent, Viacom Inc., owns Simon & Schuster, publisher for Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies."


Clarke acknowledges that, "there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too." He said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) on Jan. 24, 2001, asking "urgently" for a Cabinet-level meeting "to deal with the impending al-Qaida attack." Months later, in April, Clarke met with deputy cabinet secretaries, and the conversation turned to Iraq.


"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke said. "But 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."


The Associated Press first reported in June 2002 that Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions.


The last of those two meetings occurred Sept. 4 as the security council put finishing touches on a proposed national security policy review for the president. That review was finished Sept. 10 and was awaiting Bush's approval when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.


Almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Clarke said the president asked him directly to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.


"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,'" said Clarke, who told the president that U.S. intelligence agencies had never found a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.


"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection,' and in a very intimidating way," Clarke said.


CBS said it asked Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy on the national security council, about the incident, and Hadley said: "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."


CBS responded to Hadley that it found two people it did not identify who recounted the incident independently, and one of them witnessed the conversation.


"I stand on what I said," Hadley told CBS, "but the point I think we're missing in this is, of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9-11."


Clarke also harshly criticizes Bush over his decision to invade Iraq, saying it helped brew a new wave of anti-American sentiment among supporters of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites).

"Bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' This is part of his propaganda," Clarke said. "So what did we do after 9/11? We invade ... and occupy an oil-rich Arab country, which was doing nothing to threaten us."

Clarke retired early in 2003 after 30 years in government service. He was among the longest-serving White House staffers, transferred in from the State Department in 1992 to deal with threats from terrorism and narcotics.

Clarke previously led the government's secretive Counterterrorism and Security Group, made up of senior officials from the FBI (news - web sites), CIA (news - web sites), Justice Department (news - web sites) and armed services, who met several times each week to discuss foreign threats.

 

[tim_duncan2000]

I guess all those Democrats and people around the world who talked about the threat that Saddam and his weapons could pose manipulated the US as well. Oh wait, it doesn't matter that they have been saying this since 1998. I guess they got tricked by Bush too.

I also am amused when people talk about how the US is doing a terrible job in the war on terror. Usually, these people just say that and don't say anything about what they could have done better and/or what they would have done. They do that and they also use hindsight and don't realize it.

 

[kcmcdonald]

if i were to tell anyone in the inteligince agencies on 9-10 that tommorow at 9 am AQ is going to fly two palnes into the WTC and a plane into the pentagon. They would laugh and through me in a lunny bin. Noby thought that could happen, our preception of a terror attack was an embassy in the thrid world. Not the WTC, no one thought that could happen. And international terror was not a hotbutton issue before 9-11. Hell no one even thought about it. Terrorism only happened in the middle east. well aftet 9-11 we found out how wrong we were. Terror had been treated as a back burner issue and if the clinton guys really thought that UBL and AQ were such a threat, why didn't they act?

 

[kcmcdonald]

oh and i know i've said this before and i'm saying it again.
The US has had a policy of "regime change" in Iraq since 1998. It took a republican and 9-11 to finally act on this policy.

 

[jimnyc]

Maybe Clarke is still a little sour about his 'demotion'?

Richard Clarke's Legacy of Miscalculation

The outgoing cybersecurity czar will be remembered for his steadfast belief in the danger of Internet attacks, even while genuine threats developed elsewhere.

The retirement of Richard Clarke is appropriate to the reality of the war on terror. Years ago, Clarke bet his national security career on the idea that electronic war was going to be real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and Iraq have shown, real action is still of the blood and guts kind.

In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.

September 11 spoiled the fun, though, and electronic attack was shoved onto the back-burner in favor of special operations men calling in B-52 precision air strikes on Taliban losers. One-hundred fifty-thousand U.S. soldiers on station outside Iraq make it perfectly clear that cyberspace is only a trivial distraction.

Saddam will not be brought down by people stealing his e-mail or his generals being spammed with exhortations to surrender.

Clarke's career in subsequent presidential administrations was a barometer of the recession of the belief that cyberspace would be a front effector in national security affairs. After being part of the NSC, Clarke was dismissed to Special Advisor for Cyberspace Security on October 9th in a ceremony led by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and new homeland security guru Tom Ridge. If it was an advance, it was one to the rear -- a pure demotion.

Instead of combating terrorists, Clarke would be left to wrestle with corporate America over computer security, a match he would lose by pinfall. Ridding the world of bad guys and ensuring homeland safety was a job for CIA wet affairsmen, the FBI, the heavy bomb wing out of Whiteman Air Force Base -- anyone but marshals in cyberspace.

Information "Sharing" and Cruise Missiles
The Slammer virus gave Clarke one last mild hurrah with the media. But nationally, Slammer was a minor inconvenience compared to relentless cold weather in the east and the call up of the reserves.

But with his retirement, Clarke's career accomplishments should be noted.

In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.

In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.

Trying his hand in cyberspace, Clarke's most lasting contribution is probably the new corporate exemption in the Freedom of Information Act. Originally designed to immunize companies against the theoretical malicious use of FOIA by competitors, journalists and other so-called miscreants interested in ferreting out cyber-vulnerabilities, it was suggested well before the war on terror as a measure that would increase corporate cooperation with Uncle Sam. Clarke labored and lobbied diligently from the NSC for this amendment to existing law, law which he frequently referred to as an "impediment" to information sharing.

While the exemption would inexplicably not pass during the Clinton administration, Clarke and other like-minded souls kept pushing for it. Finally, the national nervous breakdown that resulted from the collapse of the World Trade Center reframed the exemption as a grand idea, and it was embraced by legislators, who even expanded it to give a get-out-of-FOIA-free card to all of corporate America, not just those involved with the cyber-infrastructure. It passed into law as part of the legislation forming the Department of Homeland Security.

However, as with many allegedly bright ideas originally pushed by Richard Clarke, it came with thorns no one had anticipated.

In a January 17 confirmation hearing for Clarke's boss, Tom Ridge, Senator Carl Levin protested that the exemption's language needed to be clarified. "We are denying the public unclassified information in the current law which should not be denied to the public," he said as reported in the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News.

"That means that you could get information that, for instance, a company is leaking material into a river that you could not turn over to the EPA," Levin continued. "If that company was the source of the information, you could not even turn it over to another agency."

"It certainly wasn't the intent, I'm sure, of those who advocated the Freedom of Information Act exemption to give wrongdoers protection or to protect illegal activity," replied Ridge while adding he would work to remedy the problem.

Thanks for everything, Mr. Clarke.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/143

 

[jimnyc]

Lieberman: 'No Basis' for Clarke's Accusation

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who, along with Sen. John McCain, pushed for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks last year, said Sunday that he saw no basis for ex-terrorism czar Richard Clarke's allegations that the Bush administration had bungled the war on terror.

"The charge, if I hear it correctly, that Dick Clarke has made, that the Bush administration was more focused on Iraq in the days after September 11th, than on September 11th and getting back at the terrorists, I see no basis for it," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday."

The former Democratic presidential candidate suggested that Clarke's allegations were driven by election year politics, prompting him to warn, "There is a higher interest than our partisan interest in victory and that is the national interest in victory over terrorism. "

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/22/14702.shtml

 

[jimnyc]

Kerry Connection 'Discredits' Terror Czar Clarke, Say Critics

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.

He was even critical when reacting to the news of the capture of Saddam Hussein, telling ABC News, "I don't think it's going to have a near-term positive effect on security. ... In the short term, we may have actually a worse problem."

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/21/141608.shtml

 

[jimnyc]

I think it's becoming quite obvious what's going on here with Clarke.

 

[sitarro]

Great job Jim , I couldn't agree more .

 

[DKSuddeth]

kinda looks that way to me also.

 

[Zhukov]

This goes beyond even our current election season. These people are desperately trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility for 9/11. They are pointing their finger at someone else before anyone thinks to blame them.

13 of the 19 hijackers didn't even know what was going on until after they got on the plane, but Pres. Bush was supposed to know?

I think it's likely some didn't find out until they were told (probably over the PA system) to remember to say, "there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."

 

[sitarro]

 

[spillmind]

all this critisism of bush must just be a coincidence and an election year plot by the democrats

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by spillmind
all this critisism of bush must just be a coincidence and an election year plot by the democrats

Coincidence? No. But it IS an election year ploy by Democrats.

I suppose the daily reports about Kerry's past are just a coincidence and not part of the GOP campaign?

It's called politics as usual.

 

[Palestinian Jew]

if i were to tell anyone in the inteligince agencies on 9-10 that tommorow at 9 am AQ is going to fly two palnes into the WTC and a plane into the pentagon. They would laugh and through me in a lunny bin. Noby thought that could happen, our preception of a terror attack was an embassy in the thrid world. Not the WTC, no one thought that could happen.

I guess your just ill-informed, but there were CIA reports and hypothetical situations of planes crashing into buildings, but you are right if you were refering to Condeleeza Rice.

Lieberman: 'No Basis' for Clarke's Accusation

Lieberman is a liberal republican even though he claims to be a democrat.

Kerry Connection 'Discredits' Terror Czar Clarke, Say Critics

The republican connection is reaching at best. How long has it been since Beers and Clarke taught together?



I do believe Clarke timed this to hurt Bush, which I would assume he would with his thoughts of Bush.

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by Palestinian Jew
Lieberman is a liberal republican even though he claims to be a democrat.

Why is it that every time a democrat states anything that might support the president, someone ends up claming that person is 'really' a democrat?

 

[st8_o_mind]

I would expect the r's to go after Clark's credibility, but the real issue is Bush's (and his minions) credibility. Clark's report is strikingly similar to those of Sec. O'Neil's , Hans Blix, Kay, the US Army War College, the people of Spain and the millions of Americans who opposed Bush's "pre-emptive" war. Bush manipulated (at best) and fabricated intelligence, lied in his state of the union address, cynically used the tragedy of 9/11 to advance his myopic agenda with respect to Iraq. Clark is not the issue. Inspectors are not the issue. The French are not the issue. The truthfullness of the President of the United States is the issue.

At least when Clinton lied, nobody died.

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by st8_o_mind
lied in his state of the union address

Oh boy, here we go again.

Can you cite these lies?

 

[st8_o_mind]

sure, I can cite some of them but I am a bit distracted at the moment.

Of course everyone remembers the famous "18 words" in the state of the union address. That was a claim that Iraq had tried to purchase "yellow cake" from Nigar. The White House has already acknowledged that one.

Lets see, there is the connection meetings between Iraqi intel and the 9/11 hijackers that did not happen.

There are the aluminum tubes that turn out to be for rockets not for "reconstituting" nuclear capability.

The are the "mobile labs" that arn't.

There is Don Rumsfeld saying he even know where the WMD were in Iraq! East and South of Bagdad!

There is the fear mongering with the adminin. including bush and condi warning that our confirmation of Iraqi WMD program might come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

There is the brits 45 minute claim used extensively by Bush.

There is the claim that Iraq is harboring al-quada. (Technically its true though there were north of the US no fly zone in area controlled by US supported Kurds!

There is the constant admin. campaign to link 9/11 with Iraq. Over and over again.

There are a few of the lies. I'll post more in future but I'm distracted here. I'm at work and cannot focus on this too much.

 

[jimnyc]

Sorry, they aren't lies. They were comments made based on intelligence. It now appears that a lot of intelligence was faulty or outdated, but it was hardly lies.

I think you need to learn the difference between faulty intelligence and lies. Unless of course you can prove he already knew the intelligence was faulty when he spoke. Can you?