THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
March 2004, Week Four
Page Three
Clarke testifies before the 9/11 commission, giving damning evidence of the Bush administration's lackadaisical approach to the threat of terror attacks before 9/11 and its use of the attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq
- March 24: Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke gives damning testimony before the 9/11 commission. He begins by apologizing to the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks, saying bluntly, "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness." Under questioning, Clarke says the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combating terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" in the months before Sept. 11, 2001. Clarke's criticism contradicts testimony given to the panel Tuesday and Wednesday from Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. All said the administration grasped the threat posed by al-Qaeda and was working hard to fight it. Democrats were pleased with his testimony, but Republican commission members question Clarke's integrity, morality and candor. They also accuse him of trying to spur sales of his book or boost the candidacy of Bush's rival John Kerry. The White House takes the unusual step of identifying Clarke as the senior official who had praised Bush's anti-terrorism efforts in an anonymous briefing for reporters in 2002. "He needs to get his story straight," says Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser and Clarke's former boss, who has refused to testify in public to the commission. At the hearing, Republican commissioner James Thompson held up Clarke's book and a text of the briefing and challenged the witness, "We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?" Clarke says both were true. He was still working for Bush at the time of the briefing and was asked to highlight the positive aspects of the administration's counterterrorism efforts and minimize the negative, he says. Seeking to counter White House suggestions that he is seeking a job in a future Kerry administration, Clarke says he wouldn't accept a position, and notes he is under oath. (AP/Guardian)
- March 24: Richard Clarke tells the 9/11 commission that before the terror attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, Bush and his administration did not treat terrorism as "an urgent issue," and ignored or sidetracked his calls for action to be taken. He testifies that in the Clinton administration, there was no higher priority that fighting terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular: "My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al-Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly no higher priority. There were priorities probably of equal importance such as the Middle East peace process, but I certainly don't know of one that was any higher in the priority of that administration. ...[A]lmost everything I ever asked for in the way of support from [Clinton national security director Sandy Berger] or from President Clinton, I got." He notes that the Clinton administration began taking military action against Islamic terrorists in the first five months of its tenure, in early 1993. But, "the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue." He and CIA Director George Tenet "tried very hard to create a sense of urgency: "Although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way." His and Tenet (another Clinton holdover)'s urgings went unheeded even though the threat level in the summer of 2001, in Clarke's words, "exceeded anything that George Tenet or I had ever seen." Clarke testifies that he is so frustrated by Bush's lack of attention to the threat that he asked to be reassigned to cybersecurity in May or June of 2001. "My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, didn't either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem," he says. "And I thought, if the administration doesn't believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there's an urgent problem and if it's unprepared to act as though there's an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job. I thought cybersecurity was and I still think cybersecurity is an extraordinary important issue for which this country is very underprepared. And I thought perhaps I could make a contribution if I worked full time on that issue."
- The commission also hears of confusion within the nation's intelligence community during both the Clinton and Bush administrations about whether the CIA had the authority to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. However, even if bin Laden had been assassinated, Tenet testifies that his death probably would not have stopped the attacks. "I believe that this plot line was off and running," Tenet testifies. "Operators were moving into this country.... This plot was well on its way. Decapitating one person -- even bin Laden in this context -- I do not believe we would have stopped this plot." In Clarke's testimony, he says he believes the Iraqi war has hindered the US efforts to curb terrorism: "By invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." Clarke's now-famous requests for high-level meetings to consider the threat of al-Qaeda with the "principals" of the administration, repeatedly turned down by Condoleezza Rice and others, were also returned to him with instructions that he consider terror threats only "as part of a cluster of policy issues" that also included such matters as nuclear proliferation in South Asia and democratization in Pakistan, Clarke says.
- "President Bush was regularly told by the director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat. On one occasion -- he was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that George Tenet gave him. On one of those occasions, he asked for a strategy to deal with the threat. Condi Rice came back from that meeting, called me, and relayed what the president had requested. And I said, 'Well, you know, we've had this strategy ready since before you were inaugurated. I showed it [to] you. You have the paperwork. We can have a meeting on the strategy any time you want.' She said she would look into it. Her looking into it and the president asking for it did not change the pace at which it was considered. And as far as I know, the president never asked again; at least I was never informed that he asked again. I do know he was thereafter continually informed about the threat by George Tenet." (The Bush administration implemented almost all of Clarke's counterterrorism plan, part of an overall plan for countering Middle East terrorism known as the Delenda plan, after the 9/11 bombings.) Clarke wrote a memo to Rice on September 4, 2001, that criticized the Defense Department for reluctance to use force against al-Qaeda and the CIA for impeding the deployment of unmanned Predator drones to hunt for bin Laden. The memo urged officials to imagine a day when hundreds of Americans lay dead from a terrorist attack and ask themselves what more they could have done. After the 9/11 attacks a week later, the administration rushed to implement his proposals, but Clarke muses, "I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done in February" 2001. He says that with a more robust intelligence and covert action program in the years before the attacks, "we might have been able to nip [the plot] in the bud."
- But the gathering and sharing of intelligence was so poor that it hardly mattered that there was no specific information pointing to an attack in the United States before September 11 and that attention was focused overseas. "I hate to say it [but] I didn't think the FBI would know whether there was anything going on in the United States by al-Qaeda," he says. He adds that neither he nor senior FBI officials were provided with information that two known al-Qaeda members, who eventually participated in the attacks, had entered the United States. To rebut Clarke's charges, the administration refused to allow the testimony of national security director Rice, but instead sent Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who insists, "I'm not here as Dr. Rice's replacement," and cites his own expertise on national security matters. In the usual administration sales-speak, Armitage tells the commission that there had been "stunning continuity" between the Bush administration's initial approach to al-Qaeda and the policies of the Clinton administration and that the new government "vigorously pursued" policies inherited from Clinton while developing its own response to al-Qaeda. Armitage says that the only problem the Bush administration had was a too-deliberate approach: "We were on the right track. We weren't going fast enough." Earlier, Tenet told the commission that intelligence officials appreciated the danger of al-Qaeda and had a growing sense of urgency in the summer of 2001 about an impending disaster, but they thought it would come overseas, not in the United States. That, rather than the failure to kill bin Laden, was the more serious "systemic" failure.
- Tenet also says that Bill Clinton was determined to have bin Laden killed, but that the CIA resisted the order: "[E]very CIA official interviewed on this topic by the commission," including Tenet, emphasized capturing bin Laden and the only "acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation." One former chief of the agency's bin Laden unit told the commission, "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him." (Clinton security advisor Sandy Berger previously told the commission that the CIA did indeed have the necessary authorization to kill bin Laden. "If there was any confusion down the ranks, it was never communicated to me nor to the president, and if any additional authority had been requested I am convinced it would have been given immediately," Berger said.) Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, asks Tenet about the lack of coordination among senior Bush administration officials about the threat, drawing a comparison with the Clinton senior-level meetings that took place almost daily in late 1999 to prepare for terrorist threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Gorelick says that the commission has been told that Bush's secretary of transportation did not know about the threats and senior officials did not know what data the FBI had in its files. Tenet said the Bush administration had a different manner of communication in the pre-9/11 period when dealing with terrorism. Under Bush he was talking to the president, the vice present and national security adviser every day. He says it took a "galvanizing force" to mobilize both the administration and the American public to take the steps needed to meet the terrorist threat. Tenet notes that even today, the CIA is still five years away from having the human intelligence capabilities to have access to the sanctuary areas where terrorist groups operate. He also notes the commission had to establish benchmarks for the future, saying he worried that other attacks will be coming while memories of the 9/11 attack fade. (Washington Post, Washington Post [transcript of Clarke testimony])
- March 24: Little, if any, bipartisanship is on display today as the 9/11 commission grills former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Clarke, who has served under three Republican administrations and one Democrat until his resignation in 2002, gives damning testimony before the commission. Democrats were quick to support his testimony, while Republicans, using information funnelled to them from the White House via Fox News, attack Clarke's credibility and character. "You've got a real credibility problem," Republican commissioner John Lehman says to Clarke, the author of a new book eviscerating Bush's terrorism policies. "And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you," he continues, "I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book." Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey counters Lehman's attacks: "Well, Mr. Clarke, let me say at the beginning that everything that you've said today and done has not damaged my view of your integrity," says the former Nebraska senator. Shortly before the hearing, the White House violates its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has declined to give public testimony to the commission, called reporters into her office to highlight the discrepancy. "There are two very different stories here," she says. "These stories can't be reconciled."
- In the hearings, Republican commissioner Jim Thompson waves the transcript in one hand and a copy of Clarke's book in the other, demanding "Which is true?" while folding his arms and glowering down at the witness. Clarke, very calm under fire, replies, "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. I've done it for several presidents." With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency -- "the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?" -- Clarke tutors the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who far exceeds his allotted time in his attempts to smear Clarke, finally frowns, "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this." During a second round of questioning, Thompson returns to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality." "I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke retorts. Thompson, a long-time political veteran, says he is ignorant of how Washington works, and leaves the hearings. Democrats teed up easy questions for him. Commissioner Timothy Roemer got Clarke, who served in four administrations, to say that there was "no higher" priority than terrorism under President Bill Clinton, but the Bush administration "either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem." Kerrey did his part to counter the Republican attempts to paint Clarke as a liar. "I feel badly," he says to Clarke, "because I presume that you are at the moment receiving terrible phone messages and e-mail messages."
- Democrat Jamie Gorelick continues to counter the attacks, saying after one Clarke statement, "Well, that's a very sobering statement, particularly from someone whose reputation is as aggressive as your reputation is." Republican commissioners labored to change that reputation. Fred Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke continues to respond calmly, though the back of his neck and head are fiery red by this point, "I wasn't asked, sir." Finally, Lehman takes his turn at bat. "I have genuinely been a fan of yours," he says, and adds how he had hoped Clarke would be "the Rosetta Stone" for the commission. "But now we have the book," Lehman says, suggesting it was a partisan tract. Clarke responds severely, "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he says, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke says. "so let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one." Lehman, and no other Republicans, have any further questions for Clarke. (Washington Post)
- March 24: Paul Bremer begins the 100-day countdown to the putative transfer of power in Iraq by extolling the progress made since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but his words were countered by outbreaks of fresh violence, including deadly gun battles in Falluja and rocket attacks on a Baghdad hotel. Bremer still faces serious opposition to his plans for a "transitional" Iraqi government from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most prestigious of Iraq's Shi'ite leaders. Sistani has said he refuses to endorse Bremer's plans and will not meet with UN officials flying to Iraq to give advice on the transition unless the UN refuses to endorse the transition. (Washington Post)
- March 24: The Institute for Science and International Security, a nonpartisan outfit monitoring arms-control processes throughout the world, says that the Bush administration dramatically overstated the number of devices Libya had for making uranium fuel. Administration officials held a briefing last week where they displayed a dozen uranium centrifuges from what they said was a cache of about 4,000 that Libya had obtained before agreeing in December to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. ISIS notes that its own inquiries, which include interviews with federal and overseas experts, found that Libya had indeed obtained 4,000 casings for centrifuges, but that few if any had the finely tooled rotors that are the machine's heart. The rotors are the heart of a functional centrifuge. Without working rotors, says David Albright, the institute's president, Libya would have been "several years from being able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. ...The administration has distorted what was found in Libya, with the implication that it was very close to having a nuclear weapon." A spokeswoman for the Energy Department responds that Libya had the parts and raw material for making the centrifuges, if not thousands of working machines. "Libya had a nuclear weapons program -- that's not in dispute,"" she says. As for the 4,000 centrifuges, she continues, the Libyans "either had the parts in hand, or the ability to make them." After Libya publicly renounced its weapons program, the Bush administration and Britain have tended to portray the project as large and aggressive, while the International Atomic Energy Agency says that Libya was several years away from producing a nuclear weapon. Albright says the administration had papered over a huge gap between centrifuge theory and practice. "It would take the Libyans a long time to learn how to make the sophisticated components," he says. "They might have failed because some of them are extremely difficult to make. The bottom line is that what they had was a far cry from a large number of working machines." (New York Times/CommonDreams)
- March 24: In his testimony to the 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke explains the history of al-Qaeda as the US intelligence community became aware of the organization, and the problems with the CIA conducting covert action. "I think al-Qaeda probably came into existence in 1988 or in 1989, and no one in the White House was ever informed by the intelligence community that there was an al-Qaeda until probably 1995. The existence of an organization like that was something that members of the National Security Council staff suspected in 1993. [Clinton's] National Security Adviser Anthony Lake urged CIA to create a special program to investigate whether there was some organization centered around bin Laden. It was not done because CIA decided there was probably an organization, it was done because the national security adviser thought there was probably an organization. Had we a more robust intelligence capability in the last 1980s and early 1990s, we might have recognized the existence of al-Qaeda relatively soon after it came into existence. And if we recognized its existence and if we knew its philosophy and if we had a proactive intelligence covert action program -- so that's both more on the collection side and more on the covert action side -- then we might have been able to nip it in the bud. But as George Tenet I think explained this morning, our HUMINT program, our spy capability, had been eviscerated in the 1980s and early 1990s [under Reagan/Bush]. And there was no such capability either to even know that al-Qaeda existed, let alone to destroy it.
- "And there is something else that I think we need to understand about the CIA's covert action capabilities. For many years, they were roundly criticized by the Congress and the media for various covert actions that they carried out at the request of people like me and the White House -- not me, but people like me. And many CIA senior managers were dragged up into this room and others and berated for failed covert action activities, and they became great political footballs. Now, if you're in the CIA and you're growing up as a CIA manager over this period of time and that's what you see going on and you see one boss after another, one deputy director of operations after another being fired or threatened with indictment, I think the thing you learn from that is that covert action is a very dangerous thing that can damage the CIA, as much as it can damage the enemy. Robert Gates, when he was deputy director of CIA, and when he was director of CIA, and when he was deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates repeatedly taught the lesson that covert action isn't worth doing. It's too risky. That's the lesson that the current generation of directorate of operations managers learned as they were growing up in the agency. Now, George Tenet says they're not risk-averse, and I'm sure he knows better than I do. But from the outside, working with the DO over the course of the last 20 years, it certainly looks to me as though they were risk-averse, but they had every reason to be risk-averse, because the Congress, the media, had taught them that the use of covert action would likely blow up in their face." (Washington Post [transcript of Clarke testimony])
- March 24: Richard Clarke proves Condoleezza Rice lied to the American people in her recent op-ed published in the Washington Post, when she wrote that the strategy of the Bush administration was designed to marshal all elements of national power to take down the [al-Qaeda] network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Rice said that the US plan called for military options to attack al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets, taking the fight to the enemy where he lived, and that the plan was begun almost from the moment the administration took office. Commission member Jamie Gorelick asks Clarke, "Is that an accurate statement, in your view?" Clarke responds, "No, it's not." Gorelick continues, "In addition to the items that were left hanging during this period of time that we've talked about, in your view -- the Predator [drone], the issue of aid to the Northern Alliance, the response to the Cole -- the other item that we have heard about that was deferred until the policy emerged was action on the set of covert authorities or the draft of covert authorities that Director Tenet supplied to the NSC in I believe it was March of '01. Is that true?" Clarke responds with an affirmative, and Gorelick concludes,"And no action was taken on those until after 9/11. Is that correct?" Clarke answers, "That's correct." (Washington Post [transcript of Clarke testimony])
- March 24: The Bush administration resorts to outright lies to defend itself against the allegations from Richard Clarke. Bush has once again said "had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11," he would have taken action, a statement designed to deflect attention from the specific warnings that he personally received outlining an imminent Al Qaeda attack that could involve hijacked planes being used as missiles. The lies continue to pile up. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed that Clarke "chose not to" voice his concerns about the administration's counterterrorism policy. However, Rice fails to mention that Clarke sent her an urgent memo in January 2001 asking for a Cabinet-level meeting about an imminent al-Qaeda attack. The White House itself admits top Bush officials rejected Clarke's request, saying they "did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." Press secretary Scott McClellan denies Clarke's charge that the president ordered the Pentagon to begin drafting plans to invade Iraq immediately after 9/11. But according to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This was corroborated by a September 2002 CBS News report which reported that, immediately after 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told "aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." McClellan also insists that "this administration made going after al-Qaeda a top priority from very early on" in the face of increased terror warnings before 9/11. But, according to the public record, the administration made counterterrorism such a "top priority" that it never once convened its task force on counterterrorism before 9/11, attempted to downgrade counterterrorism at the Justice Department, and held only two out of more than one hundred national security meetings on the issue of terrorism.
- Meanwhile, the White House was cutting key counterterrorism programs -- Bush himself admitted that he "didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley denies Clarke's charge that there was an imminent domestic threat against America from al-Qaeda, saying, "All the chatter [before 9/11] was of an attack, a potential al-Qaeda attack overseas." But, according to the bipartisan Congressional report on 9/11, "In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States" to "carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives." The report "was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001]." And, Bush National Security spokesman Jim Wilkinson claims that "it was this president who expedited the deployment of the armed Predator [drone]." But, according to Newsweek, it was the Bush Administration who "elected not to relaunch the Predator" and who did not deploy the new armed version of it despite "the military having successfully tested an armed Predator throughout the first half of 2001." In fact, the White House threatened to veto efforts putting more money into counterterrorism, tried to cut funding for counterterrorism grants, delayed arming the unmanned airplanes that had spotted bin Laden in Afghanistan, and terminated "a highly classified program to monitor al-Qaeda suspects in the United States." (White House/Washington Post/CBS/Newsweek/Daily Misleader, White House/CBS News/Washington Post/Helena Independent Record/PR Newswire/Daily Misleader)
- March 24: The New Republic's Ryan Lizza calls Bush's attempts to discredit Richard Clarke "intellectually dishonest." He observes, "For the last 48 hours, administration officials have done their best to chip away at Clarke and his case against the president. They've adopted several different tacks -- none of which is particularly honest, and many of which are mutually contradictory. Their initial approach, now discarded, was to argue that Bush actually embraced Clarke -- a holdover from the Clinton administration -- in 2001, thus demonstrating that the administration was serious about al-Qaeda before September 11. ...Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, made this case: "Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the President came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration -- a really unprecedented decision, very unusual when there has been a transition that involves a change of party. We did that because we knew al-Qaeda was a priority, that there was a risk that we would be attacked and we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists -- and if an event, an attack were to succeed, to be an experienced crisis management team to support the president."
- His approach seemed to overcome the central paradox in any Bush strategy to destroy Clarke: How can you defend yourself from charges that you didn't take terrorism seriously before 9/11 while simultaneously attacking the credibility of the person you put in charge of terrorism before 9/11? Hadley's answer was to point out that Clarke's appointment proved the Bush administration was serious. But on Monday, once the Bushies had taken a closer look at how devastating Clarke's account was, Hadley's soft approach was abandoned. The new method for overcoming the inconvenient fact that Bush put Clarke in charge of terrorism was to simply write Clarke out of the history of the Bush administration altogether. Instead of Bush's terrorism adviser, Clarke became a weak Clintonite who did little to halt al-Qaeda's rise during the 1990s. If there was one consistent theme to yesterday's attack, this was it. The most intellectually dishonest performance was Dick Cheney's emergency interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Limbaugh wondered how in the world Bush could have made this guy Clarke head of counterterrorism. "Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision," Cheney said. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame." Who could be expected to keep track of such minor details as how long Clarke was kept as counterterrorism czar? Maybe some scenes from Clarke's book would jog the vice president's memory. Clarke was the guy standing in Cheney's office on the morning of 9/11 with Rice in the minutes after the first attack. He's the guy that Condi turned to and asked, "Okay, Dick, you're the crisis manager, what do you recommend?" Later in the day he was also the guy standing in between Rice and Cheney in the White House Situation Room. He was the one whose shoulder Cheney placed his hand on when he asked, "Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?"
- Cheney might also remember Clarke as the guy who asked Cheney to request authorization from Bush to shoot down any hijacked airplanes. He may also recall him as the man who briefed Bush when the president finally arrived back at the White House. In other words, Cheney neglected to inform Limbaugh's audience that Clarke didn't move to cyberterrorism until a month after 9/11. Clarke's nine-month tenure as the man in charge of counterterrorism in the Bush administration is being thrown down a memory hole. "so the only thing I can say about Dick Clarke," Cheney continued on Limbaugh's show, "is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit, and the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?"
- Rice echoed the memory-hole strategy yesterday, noting on Fox News, "Dick Clarke was counterterrorism czar for a long time with a lot of attacks on the United States. What he was doing was -- what they were doing apparently was not working. We wanted to do something different." She didn't get a chance to explain how this statement comports with Hadley's insistence that "one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact" because "we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists." So there's a significant problem with the memory-hole strategy: It requires everyone to suspend their knowledge of one of the most elementary facts of this story. Perhaps recognizing this, the White House has trotted out a few supplementary lines of attack. One is to portray Clarke as fetishizing meetings. A pillar of Clarke's evidence for the administration's lack of attention to terrorism before 9/11 is that there was never a meeting of Bush's senior national security advisers to discuss the issue. There were principals meetings about Iraq, the ABM treaty, and Kyoto, but not al-Qaeda. During the late summer of 2001, when intelligence chatter about an attack peaked, Clarke urgently pressed for a cabinet-level meeting, but Rice rejected his request. Now the White House is claiming that Clarke was just obsessed with meetings, and preferred process to action. "To somehow suggest that the attack on 9/11 could have been prevented by a series of meetings -- I have to tell you that during the period of time we were at battle stations," Rice said yesterday. McClellan added, "He's been out there talking about whether or not he was participating in certain meetings. So it appears to be more about the process than the actual actions we have taken."
- Obviously, the topics the administration chooses to hold high-level meetings on suggest a great deal about its priorities, but Clarke's main point goes beyond that. In his book he argues that cabinet-level meetings during the dangerous period of late summer 2001 actually could have been instrumental in shaking information out of the bureaucracies. During the Clinton administration, Clarke insists such meetings drilled into cabinet secretaries the urgency of the threat and pushed officials to uncover clues that thwarted attacks. The other problem with the White House's dismissal of Clarke's alleged meeting fetish is that it contradicts one of the Bushies' other attacks on him. Maybe those cabinet-level meetings on al-Qaeda weren't important, but McClellan suggests that Rice's staff meetings were essential. "Dr. Rice, early on in the administration," McClellan said yesterday, "started holding daily briefings with the senior directors of the National Security Council, of which he was one. But he refused to attend those meetings, and he was later asked to attend those meetings and he continued to refuse to attend those meetings." Apparently, some meetings are more important than others. When White House officials yesterday weren't ignoring the fact that Clarke worked for Bush or complaining about his attendance record at staff meetings, their final major argument was that his approach to terrorism was more timid than the new administration's. "We didn't feel it was sufficient to simply roll back al-Qaeda; we pursued a policy to eliminate al-Qaeda," McClellan told reporters. This is an odd statement since Clarke for several years had been calling unambiguously for the complete destruction of bin Laden's organization. In fact, it was Clarke himself who was tasked with writing the new administration plan to deal with al-Qaeda. He pulled out his plan from the Clinton years, and presented it at a deputies meeting. It was the Bushies who flinched at the plan's aggressiveness. Several deputies thought the goal to "eliminate al Qaeda" went too far. They wanted the document to say "significantly erode al-Qaeda." Clarke won but it hardly mattered. September 11 happened before Bush ever signed the plan.
- Why are the administration's attacks such a bundle of confusion? Probably because this White House has never been confronted with such a credible and nonpartisan critic on the issue of terrorism. Polls over the last six months show an erosion of the public's confidence in one of the pillars of Bush's strength: his credibility. But that has not translated into a weakening of Bush's second greatest asset -- voters' belief that he would confront terrorism better than John Kerry -- and the administration wants to keep it that way. Of course, not everything Richard Clarke writes is necessarily the Gospel truth, and the press may quickly lose interest in his criticisms. But for the first time since 9/11, Bush's greatest accomplishments have been credibly recast as his greatest failures. No wonder the White House response seems so desperate." (The New Republic/CBS)
- March 24: The Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority has hired British public relations firm Bell Pottinger Public Affairs "to promote the establishment of democracy as the country recovers from war," according to the Holmes Report. Led by company founder Lord Tim Bell, who oversaw Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in 1979, Bell Pottinger will lead a consortium that includes the Dubai-based advertising agency Bates PanGulf and the media services company Balloch & Roe. A company spokesperson says it will inform "the Iraqi people about the democratic process that will see sovereignty returned to an interim Iraqi administration, the conduct of democratic elections, and the establishment of a new constitution for Iraq" by employing a multi-media strategy, including television, print, outdoor posters, and leaflets. If necessary, it will convene town hall meetings as well. (Working for Change)
- March 24: Foreign affairs expert Robert Boorstin examines the allegations made by Richard Clarke in his new book Against All Enemies. "Clarke takes us inside a White House that was deaf to the threat posed by al Qaeda, a White House that took eight months to schedule a principals meeting to address the problem – the meetings where the president and the Cabinet make the most important decisions about national security," Boorstin writes. "Clarke gives us a look into a White House and an administration populated by officials who were blinded by an obsession with Iraq. He offers us a glimpse into the Situation Room, where President Bush repeatedly asked Clarke and his staff to look for proof that Saddam Hussein had taken down the World Trade Center immediately after the attacks. And he takes us into a White House where officials who dissented from the official line chose to be mute rather than protest when they thought things were moving down the wrong track. Clarke's conclusion is tough, direct and on point: the Bush administration 'failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings.' It launched 'an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.'"
- He notes that the Bush administration's vituperative attacks on Clarke's integrity and truthfulness was to be expected: "After all, this is the White House that -– in one of the most serious breaches of national security on record -– exposed a CIA agent whose husband dared to challenge the president's version of the truth. A grand jury investigation is ongoing. This is the administration that threatened to prosecute former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill for exposing documents he used in his recently released memoir, The Price of Loyalty -- unclassified documents that the Treasury Department released to him. Meanwhile, there has been no investigation into the president's decision to openly discuss highly classified national security meetings and directives with Bob Woodward for his largely favorable book, Bush at War. And this is the administration that summarily fired economics adviser Larry Lindsay when he estimated that the war in Iraq could cost up to $200 billion. Well, we're at $170 billion and counting and Iraq is far from stable or secure."
- Boorstin knows Clarke from working with him in the Clinton White House. "Clarke is not a quiet man and he has ruffled his share of feathers. He can be rightly accused of stubbornness and a no-nonsense approach when it comes to pursuing his missions -– tracking down al-Qaeda, preventing an attack on our nation's computer systems, or making sure our nation's emergency response systems are the best they can be. But Clarke is, above all, a patriot. He has spent more than 30 years of his life working to protect the people of the United States. He was hired by Ronald Reagan and worked for four presidents -– three Republicans and one Democrat. Dick worked for governments, not political parties. And for years he was the canary in the coal mine, warning about the grave threat posed by al-Qaeda. Bush's top officials, it turns out, were not willing to listen. Perhaps it was because Clarke, like CIA director George Tenet, was a holdover from the Clinton administration. And the Bush administration national security doctrine on taking office was rooted in the fundamental premise that everything Clinton did was wrong. Perhaps it was because although Clarke criticized the Clinton administration, he was even more critical of George W. Bush's tenure. The efforts to defame Clarke for telling the truth are ultimately both pathetic and damaging. Pathetic because attacking people's character is the only route left for a White House that has been marked by delusion and deception. Damaging because the White House has no good response to the bottom line: the American people today are less safe than we otherwise might have been. Only history will judge the wisdom of the Bush administration's failures in its first nine months in office to deal with al-Qaeda and its obsession with Iraq to the exclusion of other, more important threats. But Dick Clarke has given us the first draft of that history –- and it's a scary read." (Center for American Progress)
- March 24: Journalist Carol Marin bitterly protests the wave of Bush campaign ads that purport to be real news releases. The first ads, or "video news release" as they are being termed, show a "journalist" making what appears to be a report on the Bush Medicare plan, gives a highly partisan "news report" on the legislation, and closes with cheering crowds and the "reporter closing with, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting." When the Columbia Journalism Review asked, "Who the hell is Karen Ryan?," the answer turns out to be that Ryan is a public relations specialist pretending to be a reporter. The US Department of Health and Human Services hired a company, which in turn hired another company, which then hired Ryan to front the "reports." A survey by the CJR found that television stations in Atlanta, Fresno, Dayton, and Fort Wayne, among others, have used all or part of Ryan's report. Nowhere in the body of the VNR is the source of its information disclosed. That is to say, nowhere is the viewer told this is a government press release from the Department of Health and Human Services, not an actual news report. HHS, for its part, has adamantly denied doing anything wrong, arguing it is simply trying to educate the public on new and complex legislation. And Karen Ryan, who says she once actually was a freelance journalist before going into PR, maintains correctly that television stations were not forced to run these government-sponsored video news releases, but chose to. Some stations blame CNN for failing to flag the story as a VNR when it was fed to its affiliates. Other stations admit it was their own error. (Chicago Tribune)
- March 24: The New York Times opines that the dropped charges against Captain Yousef Yee, who was originally accused of espionage and complicity with terrorists, shows "the incompetence and mean-spiritedness of their prosecution." The Times writes, "Captain Yee was arrested last September after inspectors found what they claimed were suspicious, perhaps classified, papers in his luggage. Captain Yee spent 76 days in a naval brig, much of the time in leg irons, and prosecutors suggested that they might seek the death penalty. As the investigation proceeded, it became evident just how weak the accusations were. The military downgraded the charges to mishandling classified data. But it added charges that Captain Yee had engaged in an extramarital affair and had kept pornography on his government computer. At a hearing in December, the government revealed that it had never bothered to make a formal determination that the documents Captain Yee was charged with carrying were actually classified. The hearing was adjourned so prosecutors could make this basic determination. But before it was, the government made public the more salacious charges. As Captain Yee's wife and 4-year-old daughter looked on, a fellow officer testified under a grant of immunity about having an affair with him. In dropping the prosecution last week, the military refused to clear Captain Yee, contending that it had acted only because of 'national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence.' But there is no reason to believe this is true. Lawyers on both sides had security clearances, and sensitive evidence, if any existed, could have been kept confidential. In a final unpleasant touch, rather than letting go of the accusations of possessing pornography and having an affair, the military formally reprimanded Captain Yee this week, based on those allegations. These are matters the military rarely investigates. The reprimand appears to be the military's feeble attempt to make Captain Yee look bad. The case raises many questions -— not about Captain Yee, but about his accusers. Did Captain Yee's position as a Muslim chaplain make him suspect in the eyes of the military, even in the absence of significant evidence? Why did prosecutors begin their case before determining whether the information at issue was classified? Why were embarrassing sexual allegations included, and emphasized, in a case that claimed to be about national security? The damage this case did to Captain Yee is incalculable, but the military has also hurt itself. It has cast further doubt on its detention policies in Guantanamo. It has diminished public confidence in military justice. And it has weakened its own credibility for future cases when it tries to invoke national security. For Captain Yee's sake and its own, the military should apologize for its misguided prosecution and put in place procedures to prevent a case like this from happening again." (New York Times)
- March 24: An interview with the grande dame of the Washington press corps, Helen Thomas, reveals her scathing take on the Bush administration and the Washington press. Thomas, who has worked for 57 years at UPI and was Ronald Reagan's favorite reporter, is frank in her view on the Bush administration: "We've always been manipulated and managed, back to when I began with Kennedy and certainly before, but never to this extent.... The secrecy in this administration has reached the highest levels. That's never been seen before. Everybody has to be on board with this president. Nobody plays devil's advocate.... There is no search for answers in this President." She says this administration refuses to be accountable to the American public: "We are truly, truly being denied the information we should have. 9-11 gave it greater impetus. 9-11 instilled in everyone that we have to be patriotic. You get out of that by demanding answers: What is terrorism? What is terror? Why did the President try to kill two investigations of 9-11?.... If you can't get to the root of a problem, how can you solve it? There aren't enough guns in the world to kill hatred. How can you want to be a war president? No past president, not even Eisenhower, wanted to be known as a war president." Thomas is matter-of-fact about her fall from grace with Bush: "He won't call on me, and I'm in the back row now so I'm ignored.... They don't like my questions. That's okay, just so somebody asks them, but they just don't want me to ask questions.... If I was a favored columnist, I'm sure I'd be in the front row again. But I have the prerogative of asking the questions, I do try. I do think all of us [in the press] have laid down on the job early on [after 9-11]. Some of us are coming out of a coma. But nobody's being challenging enough. We are adversarial, we aren't there to worship at anybody's shrine. We're there for accountability." While many current journalists, talk show hosts, and opinion givers are treated like celebrities, Thomas is a throwback to the Edward Murrow school of objective, adversarial journalism whose job is to provide the public with all possible information. She says that the thing that keeps her going is "Outrage. And interest in the world, and knowing that I'm lucky to be alive. Maybe we can leave a legacy of truth. Maybe." (Working for Change)
Bush horrifies many by making jokes out of his failure to find Iraqi WMDs
- March 24: Bush uses his administration's failure to find WMDs in Iraq as the source of jokes at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association. His speech features a slide show called "White House Election-Year Album." Several slides show the president looking under furniture and out the window. They were captioned: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," "Nope, no weapons over there," and the like. The presentation came directly after a tearful address by the widow of journalist David Bloom, who was slain in Iraq. Some supporters see Bush's jokes as "good-natured fun," but 67% of those polled believe that the tragedy of losing so many American and Iraqi lives over the false search for WMDs is no laughing matter.
- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry says the jokes display a "stunningly cavalier" attitude. "If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the president, this is not a joke." He adds: "585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded and there's no end in sight. George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny?" Iraqi war veteran Brad Owens says, "War is the single most serious event that a president or government can carry its people into. This cheapens the sacrifice that American soldiers and their families are dealing with every single day." CNN viewers respond, in part: "How can a thinking, caring human being joke about the lies that led to body bags and broken young men and women? I was appalled." Another writes, "It was tasteless and childish. It shows the true man -- or child in his case." Reporter Bob Dreyfuss writes, "That's funny? I wish the tape of the president cackling about his lies over Iraq could be broadcast on Iraqi TV. And maybe shown to the families of US soldiers killed in Iraq."
- Journalist David Corn, who attended the banquet, writes, "Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, 'Come on, David, this is funny.' I wanted to reply, 'Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it.' ...This was certainly one of those occasions in which you either get it or don't. And I wasn't getting it. Or maybe my neighbor wasn't. ...[Bush] obviously considered it fine to make fun of the reason he cited for sending Americans to war and to death. What an act of audacious spin. ...I wondered what the spouse, child or parent of a soldier killed in Iraq would have felt if they had been watching C-SPAN and saw the commander-in-chief mocking the supposed justification for the war that claimed their loved ones. ...Even if Bush does not believe he lied to or misled the public, how can he make fun of the rationale for a war that has killed and maimed thousands? Imagine if Lyndon Johnson had joked about the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident that he deceitfully used as a rationale for U.S. military action in Vietnam: 'Who knew that fish had torpedoes?' Or if Ronald Reagan appeared at a correspondents event following the truck-bombing at the Marines barracks in Beirut -- which killed over 200 American servicemen -- and said, 'Guess we forgot to put in a stop light.' Or if Clinton had come out after the bombing of Serbia -- during which U.S. bombs errantly destroyed the Chinese embassy and killed several people there -- and said, 'The problem is, those embassies -- they all look alike.' Yet there was Bush -- apparently having a laugh at his own expense, but actually doing so on the graves of thousands. This was a callous and arrogant display. For Bush, the misinformation -- or disinformation -- he peddled before the war was no more than material for yucks. As the audience laughed along, he smiled. The false statements (or lies) that had launched a war had become merely another punchline in the nation's capital." (AP/WPTZ-TV, TomPaine, The Nation, Guardian, Salon)
