posted on March 25, 2004 10:21:07 AM new
No....you and others would much prefer to vote for the "Internationalist" who will more likely than not...hold a white flag up to the terrorists just as Spain has done.
--------------------
Inside the commission, these Members have been pushing the argument that Clinton officials warned the Bush Administration about al Qaeda, only to be ignored by men and women who were too preoccupied with Iraq and missile defense to care.
So having failed to contain al Qaeda during its formative decade, and having made almost no mention of this grave threat in the 2000 campaign, these officials now want us to believe that in their final hours they urgently begged the Bushies to act with force and dispatch. Sure.
As for Mr. Clarke, he is now flacking his book by blaming the Bush Administration for failing to capture Osama bin Laden while offering the novel sociological insight (in last week's Time magazine) that "maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us."
We'd take Mr. Clarke's words more seriously if, as America's lead anti-terror official from 1998 through Mr. Bush's first two years, he had warned someone that al Qaeda might have a strategy to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. He already knew that an Egyptian had flown one plane into the drink and that al Qaeda was interested in flight training. Why didn't Mr. Clarke connect those dots?
The author is also highly critical of both the Afghan and Iraq campaigns. But inside the Clinton and Bush Administrations, his main pre-9/11 counsel was to energize the proxy war in Afghanistan through the Northern Alliance to make life more difficult for the Taliban. This certainly would have helped in the mid-1990s when al Qaeda was massing in that country. But by 2001 it would have done nothing to break up the al Qaeda cells that were already operating in Florida and Germany and that carried out the 9/11 hijackings[/i].
As for Iraq, he and other Bush critics want to claim that the U.S. invasion has only created more terrorists--as if there weren't any before March 2003. And as if those terrorists are only striking at Americans and our allies in Iraq, not also at Turks, and Indonesians, French and Saudis.
[i]Mr. Clarke lambastes the White House for seeking links between Iraq and 9/11, even as he himself asserts that he knew in the immediate aftermatch that there were no such links. How could he have known that? Mr. Clarke fails to mention that Abdul Rahman Yasin, the one conspirator from the 1993 WTC bombing still at large, had fled to Iraq and was harbored by Saddam Hussein for years.
In our view, a U.S. President who failed to ask questions about Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism in the wake of 9/11 would have been irresponsible.
There is a profound contradiction at the heart of this 20-20 hindsight. On the one hand, the critics want to blame the Bush Administration for failing to prevent 9/11, but on the other they assail it for acting "pre-emptively" on a needless war in Iraq. Well, which do they really believe?
We'd guess it is the latter because when these same critics held the reins of government they failed to do much against al Qaeda beyond fire cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. Their boast that after 9/11 they would have toppled the Taliban, as well as increased pressure on Saddam Hussein, is impossible to credit.
Their criticism now, in books and especially through the 9/11 Commission, is a case of blaming the Bush Administration in order to absolve themselves of any and all responsibility.
---
taken from the WSJ
posted on March 25, 2004 10:23:05 AM new"She herself has said she'd be willing to testify under oath. But it's been a long held position of most presidents that their immediate staff, since not nominated nor required to be approved by our Congress, don't testify before commissions."
Not true...two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor have given public testimony.
Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980
Sandy Berger in 1997.
Her argument is that she is maintaining the privacy of her advice to the president. Then she shares it with every TV station in Washington.
posted on March 25, 2004 10:35:21 AM new
Ms. Rice does not wish to lie under oath. She is more comfortable lying on Good Morning America and other venues of mass propaganda.
Friends don't let friends vote Republican!
posted on March 25, 2004 10:54:09 AM newdoes not wish to lie under oath...
She's doing a darn good job of pointing out all the flip-flops clarke's made without going under oath by proving his own previous documented statements that very much conflict with what he's saying now.
--------------------
Taken from MyWayNews -
Rice is not testifying before the 9/11 commission based on a White House principle that a presidential adviser who has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate should not give public testimony. Commissioners are calling on her to testify.
About that call, she said: "I would like to be very clear that this is not a matter of preference. I would like nothing better than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."
posted on March 25, 2004 11:02:50 AM new
But I just pointed out that it is not long standing. Brzezinski and Sandy Berger are former National Security Advisors who testified in public.
posted on March 25, 2004 11:06:59 AM new
Linda, you are sounding more desperate every moment with your defense of the Bush gov't.
Here is more from my link on the previous page about Rice.
*********************************************
Evidently there are very few classes of confidential information Rice is not willing to publicize. She just doesn't want to get questioned.
Now, perhaps you'll say, following the White House line, that she'd love to testify but a constitutional principle is at stake and she has, as she puts it, a "responsibility to maintain what is a longstanding separation -- constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."
Now, there is a constitutional issue involved. But Rice is trying to get people to think that members of the White House staff never testify. And that's not even close to true. In my hand I have a 2002 Congressional Research Service study that lists a whole slew of presidential aides and advisors who've testified in the past.
Indeed, it lists two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor who've given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997.
Interestingly, the CRS study lists five examples of cases where presidential aides refused to testify. It's not clear whether this list is supposed to be exhaustive. And in most cases presidential aides are simply not even asked to testify at all, for reasons of comity between the branches if nothing else. But of the five listed four are from the Nixon administration. And each of those were before the Watergate investigation really got under way. A whole slew of Nixon aides had to head up to the Hill in 1974 after things started to go south for them -- so perhaps we haven't heard the final word on this matter.
In any case, there's a high bar for testimony from a National Security Advisor. But it's happened before. And more than once. If they wanted her to testify, she could testify. What they want is for her to be able to lacerate her critics, discuss whichever parts of her advice to the president would be helpful to her politically at the moment, and freely declassify documents which she or the White House believes will hurt her enemies.
She's a veritable information geyser, a one-woman-FOIA. She just won't answer questions under oath.
This administration should just admit that they screwed up and now go forward and try to make things better instead of trying to cover it all up and throw blame around.
posted on March 25, 2004 11:10:23 AM new
More from the same article on MyNews
Clarke had "not a word about concerns that Iraq was going to somehow take us off the path of the war on terrorism. It would've been easy to do, kick the others out, close the door, say 'I just want you to know I think you're making a mistake.' He didn't do it," she told reporters in her West Wing office.
Rice, in normal circumstances an even-keeled top White House aide, was unusually incensed during a half-hour briefing for reporters in her West Wing office, as she castigated her former employee. She also went on television to make her case. Her comments reflected ongoing White House frustration with Clarke, who has threatened the underpinning of Bush's re-election strategy as an activist in the war on terrorism.
Clarke has dominated news cycles this week with a book, interviews and public testimony accusing Bush of failing to act on the threat of al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and for being fixated on Iraq.
To underline her case that the Bush administration was acting on the threat, Rice read from a letter from Clarke on Sept. 15, 2001, in which Clarke detailed meetings from the previous June and July about preparations being taken to prepare for the possibility of a "spectacular al Qaeda terrorist attack."
MEETING WITH OFFICIALS
"We asked that they take special measures to increase security and surveillance," Clarke wrote of a July 5, 2001, meeting with FBI, Secret Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Customs, Coast Guard and Immigration officials.
The White House has gone to great lengths to try to discredit Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism czar, by accusing him of being a disgruntled former employee who did not get a promotion and whose best friend is a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Rice said Clarke's criticism expressed in his book, in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview and testimony on Capitol Hill, were directly opposite to what he told reporters in an August 2002 briefing.
Clarke said in testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration considered terrorism important but not urgent, while the previous Clinton administration, for which he also served, considered it a top priority.
"There's two very different pictures here, and the fact of the matter is these stories can't be reconciled," Rice said. "Either we were ignoring the threat, or now it's changed that it was important but not urgent, or we were actually responding to the things that he actually suggested, which is what he said in the August 2002 interview."
In February she spent four hours privately with the commission and said she would be available to answer more questions. "I'm prepared to spend longer with them, any where they want, any time they want, answer as many questions as they have," she said.
Rice described Clarke as a sometimes difficult employee who was "too busy" to come to some meetings she chaired until she finally demanded he appear.
"I know how to manage people, and I asked him to come once. We continued to have a problem, I asked him to come twice. We didn't have a problem after that," she said.
Needless to say, Rice rather undermines her arguments about the constitutional importance of maintaining the privacy of her advice to the president since she's sharing all sorts of information on the Post op-ed page and more or less every TV show in the universe.
When she went down to the White House press room to make the statements above, she also read from a previously classifed email Clarke had written to her just after 9/11. Needless to say, it was declassifed so she could try to use it to damage Clarke. Or to put it another way, it was declassified for narrowly political purposes -- taking advantage of the fact that the NSC, which Rice runs, is in charge of that process of declassification.
Evidently there are very few classes of confidential information Rice is not willing to publicize. She just doesn't want to get questioned.
Joshua Micah Marshall
posted on March 25, 2004 11:52:57 AM new
Linda: And after 7 years he still had NO PLAN to deal with them. He dealt with their actions as criminal actions, rather than as acts of war against our country.
Based on what I read Clinton did have a plan. He tried dimplomatic methods and getting the aide of other countries instead of trying to assinate Bin Laden.
Impeach Bush
Marriage is a Human Right not a Heterosexual Privledge.
Bigotry and hate will not be tolerated.
posted on March 25, 2004 12:00:29 PM new
Interesting reading, skylite.
To boot, a phalanx of whistleblowers have outed their lies. The only response that the Bush administration has had to the truth is to attack the characters of the truth tellers. They can't refute what these patriots have to say. Because most of it, except for a few salacious details, is on the record. The Bush Cartel has revealed most of the condemning facts, inadvertently, by itself.
One more time then. In August of 2001, after putting the fight against terrorism on the back burner, after being warned by Clinton experts about the danger of Osama, after ignoring the Hart-Rudman report on the urgent need to combat terrorism after delegating the formulation of a plan to fight terror to Dick Cheney (who was too busy conducting his secret energy meetings with energy company execs and lobbyists, meetings that included an examination of Iraq's oil fields), after receiving a briefing that alerted him to likely imminent Al-Qaeda hijackings, Bush did nothing: NOTHING!
Now, the 9/11 Commission is poised to let Rice get off without testifying publicly under oath -- and the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission can only review the records of the infamous August 2001 warning to Bush while under guard at the White House -- and he must leave any notes about the meeting in a safe at the White House!
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 23, 2004; Page A19
Pity poor George Bush. For some reason, he has been beset by delusional aides who, once they leave the White House, write books containing lies and exaggerations and -- this is the lowest blow of all -- do not take into account the president's genius and all-around wisdom. The latest White House aide to betray the president is Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism before and after the attacks of Sept. 11. He says Bush "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda."
As with former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, another fool who had somehow risen to become chairman of Alcoa, Clarke's account of his more than two years in the Bush White House was immediately denounced by a host of administration aides, some of whom -- and this is just the sheerest of coincidences -- had once assured us that Iraq was armed to the teeth with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Among them, of course, was Condoleezza Rice, who on Monday insisted in a Post op-ed column that Bush not only did everything just right, but so, really, did Bill Clinton. Both administrations "worked hard," she wrote.
This is not what Clarke says in his new book and in interviews conducted in tandem with its publication. On the contrary, he says the Bush administration not only belittled the terrorist threat -- China and missile defense were its initial preoccupations -- but it took its own sweet time coming to grips with al Qaeda. From the start, he says, certain White House aides were fixated on Iraq -- and after Sept. 11, apparently so was Bush. He said he encountered the president the next night in the Situation Room. "See if Saddam did it," the president ordered.
"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke says he replied. The president persevered: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."
Rice's real gift is situational rhetoric. Now, with Bush under criticism from a respected terrorism expert -- and a Republican, to boot -- she makes common cause with the Clinton administration. But that was not always the case. Last October, she faulted previous administrations for doing little about the terrorist threat. In a New York speech, she said of the terrorists: "They became emboldened, and the result was more terror and more victims."
A similar point was made back in 2002 by Vice President Cheney's chief aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. He, too, virtually blamed the Clinton administration for Sept. 11. In a New Yorker interview, he listed terrorist attacks on U.S. or allied interests going back to 1993 and concluded that America had shown only weakness in response. "The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves," he quoted an imaginary Osama bin Laden as saying. "They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak."
Libby has a point. The United States did do precious little. But it took a while to stir the United States and pinpoint bin Laden. That juncture was reached during the Clinton administration when, among other things, an attempt was made to kill bin Laden with missiles. If the Clinton administration had indeed acted slowly, what can then be said about the Bush administration, which had been warned by Clinton aides about al Qaeda? Clarke says the Bush team refused to come to grips with bin Laden. Among other things, he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting or access to the president to discuss the al Qaeda threat. For eight months, he got neither.
Instead, he says, the administration was obsessed with Saddam Hussein. As did O'Neill, Clarke says that the Sept. 11 attacks were viewed by some high administration officials as an opportunity (pretext?) for going after Hussein. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz wondered out loud why so much attention was being paid to bin Laden -- "this one man" -- when Iraq was the clear danger. Other observers said similar things, and so have European defense and intelligence officials who met with their American counterparts right after Sept. 11. Iraq was on the table by Sept. 12.
The White House has opened its guns on Clarke. He is being contradicted and soon, as with poor O'Neill, his sanity and probity will be questioned. It's getting to be downright amazing how former White House aides tell the same tale -- a case, the White House wants us to believe, of hysteria or unaccountable betrayal. I'd like to believe my president, but as Clarke quotes him in a different context, "I'm looking for any shred."
As with Saddam Hussein, it doesn't exist.
******
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on March 25, 2004 01:00:07 PM new
Woodward also quoted Bush directly, with the president saying that he knew bin Laden was a problem, "But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."
I guess Bin Laden wasnt a problem then and still isnt a big enough problem to Bush
Unlike his Democratic predecessor, President Bush was not focused seriously enough on the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network in the months leading up to the deadliest attacks in U.S. history, the former terrorism coordinator in both White Houses testified Wednesday.
Bush was to busy trying to start a war with Iraq. No in Bush's mind ...finsish a war his dad started
While the Clinton administration repeatedly weighed more military action, officials often felt hamstrung by a lack of what they called "actionable intelligence"--or precise information pinpointing the whereabouts of bin Laden and his senior aides.
Such was the case with two out of the three seriously weighed proposals to personally target bin Laden after the August missile strikes.
CIA Director George Tenet, who has served under both presidents, said there were concerns about the veracity of intelligence pinpointing bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998. He also feared missiles would kill people at a nearby mosque, the report said.
Another opportunity, two months later, was dropped, in part because of apparent concerns that bin Laden was at the same hunting camp as a top official from the United Arab Emirates. Another chance, again in Kandahar, was dropped in May despite steady intelligence reporting about his whereabouts.
Tenet feared that intelligence was unreliable, although the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit wrote to a colleague that he was "a bit angry" at forgoing "a chance to get [bin Laden] three times in 36 hours" that May, according to the report.
But military plans didn't even seem to come close to that level of consideration during Bush's first eight months in office.
Pentagon officials who dealt with terrorism told investigators they believed incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "new team was focused on other issues and was not especially interested in their counterterrorism agenda," the preliminary report said.
Explains why we still can't catch Bin Laden...our intelligence stinks
Impeach Bush
Marriage is a Human Right not a Heterosexual Privledge.
Bigotry and hate will not be tolerated.
and here flip flop flip flop, how can any thinking person trust this group, flip flop
Condeleezza Rice disputes comment by vice president
New York Times
Mar. 25, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - It is a strange occurrence in Washington when members of the well-ordered Bush White House publicly disagree with each other, but it happened on Wednesday.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, took exception to Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Richard A. Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism chief, was "out of the loop."
On the contrary, Rice said, Clarke was very much involved in the administration's fight against terrorism.
"I would not use the word 'out of the loop,' " Rice told reporters in response to a question about whether she considered it a problem that the administration's counterterrorism chief was not deeply involved "in a lot of what was going on," as Cheney said on Monday in an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program
posted on March 25, 2004 01:02:25 PM new
lol Say what you wish....people writing books want publicity so their books will sell. The documentation of clarke's own words prove he's flip-flopping.
This President did go after AQ and he did remove saddam from power. No talk....proof that he's willing to protect our nation from any threat he believes puts us in danger.
posted on March 25, 2004 01:23:30 PM new
a speech bush made back in 2000, so what happened, and you don't think he was aware....he knew, and let it happen, with his blessing....so he can start a war and invade a sovreign country for it's oil and to profit from the by product of war...he's getting rich off this war....not to mention his friends and family........
" Would strengthen our intelligence community’s ability to detect terrorist threats, and develop long-range strike capabilities to eliminate such threats before they arise
Source: GeorgeWBush.com: ‘Issues: Policy Points Overview’ Apr 2, 2000 "
posted on March 25, 2004 01:30:30 PM new
yes kiara - What he believes. Just as all past presidents have done. They get the information from those who have the job of providing that same information and then make the final call....what they believe.
When the reports of clarke's flip-flopping are available to the general public...they're going to blow this off for just what it is; one more politically motivated person trying to sell a book and smearing this President.
Mark my words....clarke's reversal won't mean a thing he'll be seen for what he is.
In the wake of Richard Clarke's well-supported assertions that the Bush Administration neglected counterterrorism in the face of repeated terror warnings before 9/11, the Bush Administration has launched a frantic misinformation campaign – often contradicting itself in the process.
CLAIM #1: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to."
– National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11.
– White House Press Release, 3/21/04
CLAIM #2: "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11."
– National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "we don't know" if there is a connection.
CLAIM #3: "[Clarke] was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things."
– Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04
FACT: "Dick Clarke continued, in the Bush Administration, to be the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and the President's principle counterterrorism expert. He was expected to organize and attend all meetings of Principals and Deputies on terrorism. And he did."
– White House Press Release, 3/21/04
CLAIM #4: "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high…we were at battle stations…The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11."
– National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'"
– Washington Post, 3/22/04
CLAIM #5: "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11."
– National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks."
– Washington Post, 3/22/04
CLAIM #6: "Well, [Clarke] wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff…"
– Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/22/04
FACT: "The Government's interagency counterterrorism crisis management forum (the Counterterrorism Security Group, or "CSG" chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period."
– White House Press Release, 3/21/04
CLAIM #7: "[Bush] wanted a far more effective policy for trying to deal with [terrorism], and that process was in motion throughout the spring."
– Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04
FACT: "Bush said [in May of 2001] that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and 'I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.' Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." By comparison, Cheney in 2001 formally convened his Energy Task Force at least 10 separate times, meeting at least 6 times with Enron energy executives.
– Washington Post, 1/20/02 , GAO Report, 8/22/03, AP, 1/8/02
CLAIM #8: All the chatter [before 9/11] was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas.
– Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, 3/22/04
FACT: Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that "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]." In the same month, the Pentagon "acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
[Joint Congressional Report, 12/02]
posted on March 25, 2004 02:11:01 PM newThis President did go after AQ and he did remove saddam from power. No talk....proof that he's willing to protect our nation from any threat he believes puts us in danger.
I guess Bush proved who the bigger threat was by going to war with Iraq and removed Saddam from power instead of forecably going after the man that killed over 3,000 people.
How many people did Saddam kill in the US?
North Korea was a threat at one time and all Bush did was talk about that. If the axis of evil was such a threat why hasn't he done anything or is he just waiting for them to do something to the US?
Where can I order some of the Bush flip flops, I need a new pair.
Impeach Bush
Marriage is a Human Right not a Heterosexual Privledge.
Bigotry and hate will not be tolerated.
posted on March 25, 2004 02:25:23 PM new
logansdad - I'll go slower for you.
CLARKE said from 1998 on clinton HAD NO PLAN to deal with AQ. You can read his own words from my previous post. Do you not believe clarke's statement there?
2nd Ms. Albright [clinton administration] also said that to go after binladen would have been 'unpopular' and please read her full testimony to the commission on how they felt what they discussed about taking 'action' against binladen. And how that would be looked upon by the world, how there was no 'calling' from the public for that action.
And in addition to that, binladen was offered to clinton on a silver platter and he turned down that offer because HE said he had nothing to charge him with.
What part of those statements don't you get/accept?
When the Bush administration was able and was SURE it was binladen behind the 9-11 attacks...he went after them. You keep skipping over that, ignoring that fact.
Or just answer why you believe clarke would have said clinton HAD NO PLAN.
"Fighting terrorism in general and fighting al Qaeda in particular were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration ... I believe the Bush administration, in the first eight months, considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue."
posted on March 25, 2004 02:45:13 PM new
KWAME HOLMAN: Albright also said President Clinton considered a ground invasion into Afghanistan to flush out the ruling Taliban and al-Qaida, but decided against it.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I do think-- this is my personal opinion-- that it would be very hard, pre-9/11, to have persuaded anybody that an invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate. I think it, it did take the mega-shock, unfortunately, of 9/11 to make people understand the considerable threat.
Plus, there was not a staging area in Pakistan, and the variety of problems that we faced, I do think that this administration faced also.
"Fighting terrorism in general and fighting al Qaeda in particular were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration ... I believe the Bush administration, in the first eight months, considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue."
Clarke said that the Bush goal should be to eliminate al Qaeda, "but that Bush officials called that "overly ambitious. It was reworded to say the goal was to "significantly erode" bin Laden's network. After the Sept. 11 attacks the word "eliminate" was added back into the directive, he said.
posted on March 25, 2004 03:12:45 PM new
It's already been established, helen, that clarke has reversed himself a couple of times.
I'd believe those in the top level of the clinton administration before I'd believe clarke's 'take' on what happened.
Why don't YOU answer the question as to clarke saying 'clinton had no plan' that he passed on to the new administration. Especially since you were one who is continually screaming about Bush having NO PLAN. And you were the one who was SOOOO against our war in Afghanistan while others here thought it was necessary. You were screaming just as loudly then as you have with President Bush taking us in to Iraq. So even IF Bush had gone after binladen you still would have been screaming he went without world support....he went without our nation being attacked.
There would have been no pleasing YOU no matter what he did.
From your quote..."Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration."
Linda, there was a plan but it wasn't passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.
You neglected to add that he then said, "Second point is that the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998"
The difficulty was in convincing the Bush administration that they should accept the plan that Clinton had in place ....NOT that he had no plan.
Clarke said that the Bush goal should be to eliminate al Qaeda, "but that Bush officials called that "overly ambitious. It was reworded to say the goal was to "significantly erode" bin Laden's network. After the Sept. 11 attacks the word "eliminate" was added back into the directive, he said.
Also....
Philip Shenon wrote in Saturday's New York Times: "Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation -- and how the new administration was slow to act."
Again, you are misinterpreting what you are reading.
[ edited by Helenjw on Mar 25, 2004 03:40 PM ]
chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period."