posted on March 31, 2004 06:24:30 PM new
WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- The White House was worried about the damaging testimony of a former counter-terrorism chief to a commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks last week but was trying to let the issue die on its own, according to Pentagon briefing notes found at a Washington coffee shop.
"Stay inside the lines. We don't need to puff this (up). We need (to) be careful as hell about it," the handwritten notes say. "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."
The notes were written by Pentagon political appointee Eric Ruff who left them in a Starbucks coffee shop in Dupont Circle, not far from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's home.
The notes are genuine, a Pentagon official said. They were compiled for an early morning briefing for Rumsfeld before the Sunday morning talk shows, during which administration officials conducted a flurry of interviews to counter the testimony of Richard Clarke, President George W. Bush's former terrorism czar who left the post in 2003. Rumsfeld appeared on Fox and ABC.
The Starbucks customer who found them gave them to the liberal advocacy group the Center for American Progress, which published them on its Web site Wednesday. Included in the notes was a hand-drawn map to Rumsfeld's house, which is largely blacked out on the Web site for security reasons.
Clarke told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the White House was obsessed with Iraq and ignored warning from him and others that al-Qaida was the real threat to the United States. Bush signed an order Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, the commission staff reported.
The Starbucks notes, printed on paper titled "Eric's Telephone Log" with a notation indicating the points came from a conference call, counseled to "rise above Clark" and "emphasize importance of 9-11 commission and come back to what we have done."
Since the notes were found, however, the White House has decided to allow national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify before the committee under oath. She will provide a direct answer to Clarke's account.
Rice answered Clarke's allegations in media appearances last week but declined to provide sworn public testimony to the panel, saying it set a dangerous precedent for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.
One of Clarke's most damaging allegations is that he crafted an anti-terrorism plan -- a National Security Presidential Directive -- to take on al-Qaida in January 2001. The NSPD was not approved until Sept. 4, and neither was it substantially changed in the intervening months, according to Clarke. He has challenged the White House to release both documents to allow for a side-by-side comparison.
The notes address this matter, saying the plan to attack the Taliban existed before Sept. 4.
"The NSPD wasn't signed till Sept. 4 but had an annex going back to July (with) contingency plans to attack Taliban," the notes say.
That point is related to another in the notes. The briefing says commission member Jamie Gorelick, a former general counsel of the Defense Department under President Clinton, was pitting Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage against Rice. Under sworn testimony, Armitage contradicted Rice's claim the White House had a strategy before Sept. 11 that called for military operations against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Other than the fact that this guy was a security risk and outght to fired, what's the point of the article?
Bush knew Clarke was going to testify against him. What lawyer wouldn't recommend discussion of legal strategy?
Besides, Clarke is a liar, and everyone knows it's just a matter of time until he's forgotten.
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We do not stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing -- Anonymous
posted on April 1, 2004 05:16:01 AM new
You hit the nail on the head, Reamond! The administration's dirty little secrets will come out of the closet. If Nixon couldn't get away with what he did, what makes Bush and his team think they can? You can't silence everyone and thankfully, there are those brave enough to tell the truth. I just don't see Bush as having the intelligence to think of all this on his own. We do spend a lot of time blaming just Bush. IMO, Chaney is a shark and far more dangerous. Bush on his own is just a guppy. Without a prepared speech in front of him, he doesn't have much to say.
posted on April 1, 2004 05:41:03 AM new
taken from the Wall Street Journal
BOOKSHELF
Against Selected Enemies
Richard Clarke should apologize for his book.
BY RICHARD MINITER
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.
So I looked forward to reading "Against All Enemies." Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism--a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints--and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright--and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.
I was wrong on all counts. Forthright? One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded. About this he doesn't say a word. The whole premise of "Against All Enemies" is its value as an insider account. But Mr. Clarke was not a Bush insider. When he lost his right to brief the Cabinet, he also lost his ringside seat on presidential decision-making.
Mr. Clarke's ire is largely directed at the Iraq war, but its preparation was left to others on the National Security Council. He left the White House almost a month before the war began. As for its justification, he acts as if there is none. He dismisses, as "raw," reports that show meetings between al Qaeda and the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, going back to 1993. The documented meeting between the head of the Mukhabarat and bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996--a meeting that challenged all the CIA's assumptions about "secular" Iraq's distance from Islamist terrorism--should have set off alarm bells. It didn't.
There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam's son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.
Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke's testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)
He fails to mention that President Clinton's three "findings" on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan's intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision--bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes--as a diplomatic necessity.
While angry over Mr. Bush's intelligence failures, Mr. Clarke actually defends one of the Clinton administration's biggest ones--the bombing of a Sudanese "aspirin factory" in 1998. Even at the time, there were good reasons for doubting that it made nerve agents. He fails to mention that in 1997 the CIA had to reject more than 100 reports from Sudan when agency sources failed lie-detector tests and that the CIA continued to pay Sudanese dissidents $100 a report, in a country where the annual per-capita income is about $400. The soil sample he cites, supposedly showing a nerve-gas ingredient, is now agreed to contain a common herbicide.
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
Or, better, "Against All Evidence." Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts.
The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda's "chief operational leader" in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001.
He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that "he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime." An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam's payroll for years.
Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt.
He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
In recent days we have been subjected to a great deal of Mr. Clarke, not least to replays of his fulsome apology for not doing enough to prevent 9/11. But he has nothing to apologize for: He was a relentless foe of al Qaeda for years. He should really apologize for the flaws in his book.
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Mr. Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore
posted on April 1, 2004 08:11:09 AM new
If Bush had nothing to hide about what his office knew about 9/11 why was he against the committee in the 1st place?, why did he then refuse to testify?, why did prohibit Rice from testifying at first?
Sounds like a cover up to me.
Impeach Bush
Marriage is a Human Right not a Heterosexual Privledge.
Bigotry and hate will not be tolerated.
posted on April 1, 2004 09:15:00 AM new
There was no mention of al Qaida, bin Laden or Islamic terrorists in the Rice speech that she had scheduled to deliver Sept.11, 2001.
On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.
The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
~
During the summer of 2001, as al Qaeda operatives were in flight training and finalizing plans for the attacks, the administration's public focus was on other matters.
posted on April 1, 2004 09:21:18 AM new
I've asked this question before but I will ask it again...
Considering that there is a pretty consistant group of posters here that have proven themselves to have a good handle on reading comprehension skills - why do people insist on personally going thru articles written by other people and selectively bolding sections they feel to be important. Is is that you are concerned that we are not goint to skip over entire sections of text or just will not interpret it the way that you have?
It's irritating, it's condescending and it's visually distracting. Please stop.
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on April 1, 2004 10:25:10 AM new
You got it Linda - ignore I will.
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
Former colleague disputes Clarke's terror accusations
By Bill Sammon and Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A former Democratic colleague of Richard A. Clarke yesterday disputed the former White House analyst's accusations that President Bush was not sufficiently focused on terrorism before the September 11 attacks.
"I'm uncomfortable with the charge that somehow the Bush people ignored or didn't treat in a serious way the fact that this country was under major threat from terrorist organizations," said Coit Blacker, a former National Security Council (NSC) official who was special assistant to President Clinton.
"I just don't think that's right," Mr. Blacker said. "They may not have been sufficiently attentive to what Dick thought they needed to know, but that's not the same thing as taking a cavalier attitude toward the threat."
Mr. Blacker, director of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, declined to question the credibility of Mr. Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush.
"Dick passionately believes in what he says," Mr. Blacker said. "I tend to be more charitable towards the Bush folks."
NSC spokesman Sean McCormack, who was with Mr. Clarke in the White House Situation Room the day after the terrorist attacks, yesterday disputed several passages in Mr. Clarke's book describing the events that transpired in that room.
posted on April 1, 2004 02:23:49 PM newFormer colleague disputes Clarke's terror accusations
They found one person to dispute him ? Big deal, I figured they could produce at least 3 or 4 Bush sycophant weasels.
But Clarke has a former Cabinet memeber that independently supported what Clarke said about Bush looking for excuses to invade Iraq. That's all that is needed to show what a liar and coward Bush is.
posted on April 1, 2004 02:39:21 PM new
What makes me mad about this is that Bush should've known better than to keep a Clinton official (Clarke) on his team. Very poor judgement.
posted on April 1, 2004 02:39:40 PM new
LOL @ one??
No...there have been many...you must be skipping over what all the people who have been disputing a lot of what clark said in his book, have been saying....even what he himself said before and now.
posted on April 1, 2004 02:56:45 PM new
EAG - I've wondered the same thing myself. There were many holdover's from the clinton administration. Most left when their terms expired and/or as new replacements were found. Kerry was demoted by not being given the job he really wanted....in the HomeLandSecurity dept. Pissed he wrote his book flip-flopping what what he had previously said.
But I'd *guess* with 9-11 happening so quickly after his election...the more immediate issues took precident.
