It Begins: Clarke goes public with allegations of terror mishandling

Great Debates
81

Actually, we’ve got an [url=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,115085,00.html]ex-Bush administration official[/url= offering a different account of what the administration has done:

This contradicts pretty much everything Clarke is saying. Of course, many of you may have guessed by now that the ‘official’ I’m quoting is none other than Clarke himself, back in 2002. The picture he painted then was the exact opposite of what he’s saying now - that Clinton left issues on the table since 1998, and that it was the Bush administration that really kicked things into high gear, BEFORE Sept… 11. In fact, almost immediately after taking office. Increasing funding dramatically, calling for immediate assistance to the Northern Alliance to help overthrow the Taliban, etc. He points out that the Bush administration almost immediately increased the funding of programs to go after al-Qaida FIVE FOLD.

Of course, that was before Clarke had a book to sell and a Democrat to help get elected.

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I didn’t specify a specific debate (since I thought it would be pretty obvious what the debate would be, this is pretty controversial stuff), and my own personal view is that there is no such thing as a hjiack. That’s not the board admin’s view I think, but even given that, I welcome a wider discussion on the issue. It IS a pretty wide ranging issue.

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Sam: While I agree that Clarke’s 2002 interview is pretty damning in terms of his credibility, full disclosure is required: he was explicitly highlighting only the positive aspects of Bush’s actions in that interview. But when asked in testimony today if any it was false, he did say that it was all true.

Clarke’s key mesage seems to be that Bush considered action against terrorism to be “important but not urgent” and that his preocupation with Iraq got in the way of a focus on al Qaida.

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Dr. Rice should be impeached and removed for failing to appear at the public hearings, but it’s factually incorrect to state that she has not appeared before the committee at all. Indeed, Governor Kean has praised her non-public cooperation even while continually calling for her to appear at the public hearing.

But look, this thread and the press are missing the big picture here by exercising too much hindsight. Yeah, not enough attention was paid to al Qaeda. Not by the Bush administration, not by the Clinton Administration. That’s because the U.S. had a fairly non-interventionalist policy following the cold war. Basically, we didn’t sweat the “small stuff,” and the small stuff included successful attacks on U.S. targets outside the United States and unsuccessful or moderately successful attacks on U.S. targets on U.S. soil. Obviously, we should have.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, Bob Kerrey had it right: “I don’t understand, if we’re attacked and attacked and attacked, why we continue to send the FBI over, like the Khobar Towers was a crime scene or the East African embassy bombings was a crime scene.” He wanted to take out al Qaeda – to declare a war.

Why didn’t it happen? The will just wasn’t there among the electorate. Imagine Gore or Bush during the 2000 campaign announcing “There’s these guys called al Qaeda who have been attacking us for a while, and I’m gonna kill or capture every stinkin’ one of them before they get a chance to carry out a huge attack on U.S. soil and if that means invading a country or two and calling up a half million troops, so be it.” I guess it would have saved this forum a lot of debates about the minute details of Florida’s election mechanics, but that’s about it.

Good things can (and probably will) come out of the commission – I bet no one in the White House authorizes killing anyone again without making it crystal clear to the CIA that if they do their thing that’s OK. Maybe even the CIA and the FBI will start sharing information again (though I fear both organizations may be all but irrevocably broken, so I’m kind of pessimistic about that).

As for Clarke? Turns out, he was right, along with Kerrey. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was some huge failure not to listen to him – we haven’t seen that he was working with better data than anyone else, or that top people in the Bush or Clinton administrations were unaware of that data. He just correctly guessed how bad it could get. There’s probably people in State and Defense and elsewhere in the government right now making equally dire predictions about any number of scenarios – most of them will be wrong, and some of them will be right. Who among us, or the committee, will sit in judgement of those who have to decide which of many alarmists to listen to? I’m reminded of the people who “called the crash” back in '87. Most of them did, but it turns out most of them called it 10 or so times during the '80s and then a couple of times in the '90s before it became apparent that they just call crashes.
But the big takeaway is that the collected wisdom of two administrations and a vast bureaucracy failed to recognize a declared war on the United States until the other side hit us on 9-11, and they did it mostly because the will of the electorate wouldn’t have wished any real action be taken even if they had recognized it. Now that the electorate does recognize that we’re at war and (mostly) supports that war, the situation is wholly different. It’s not fair to judge prior administrations on today’s political climate.

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It was clear from today’s testimony before the 9/11 commission that Clarke is nothing more than a sensationalist trying to promote his currently released book …

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But the facts he states in 2002 directly contradict this notion. Increasing funding for the CIA to get rid of al-Qaida five-fold? Changing the strategy against al-Qaida from a five-year rollback to immediate elimination? That sounds like quite a lot, to me, for an administration that had only been in office for a couple of months, and which didn’t have as much time as other administrations for preparation from the start because of the delays of the 2000 election.

Where Clarke really blows his credibility is when he refuses to criticise the Clinton administration. If he had said, “The Clinton administration was horrible, and the Bush administration was only a little better”, he might be able to make that fly in the face of his 2002 comments. But his comments from 2002 paint a picture of an administration that took a moribund al-Qaida policy that was pretty much dormant since 1998 and ramped it up substantially. I fail how you can turn that into an endorsement of Clinton’s policies and a condemnation of Bush’s.

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Manhattan: I agree with everything you just said. Can you imagine the howls of outrage had Clinton or Bush announced prior to Sept 11 that they were going to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the government? The loudest howls would have come from the same people who are attacking Bush now for not doing enough prior to 9/11.

This ‘pin the blame on an administration’ game is going to deflect attention from smoe critical issues. For instance, one of the reasons why the U.S. lacked intelligence of both Iraq and al-Qaida was because of the Church Committee hearings, the result of which put heavy restrictions on the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence. For example, the CIA was pressured into adopting a policy that they would not employ people with dirty hands - the result of protests against the CIA’s use of rebel forces of questionable character in other countries. This limitation made it next to impossible to get human assets from within terrorist organizations.

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Clarke seems to have handled the 2002 attack pretty darn well, getting laughs and applause rather than his questioners getting any traction.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097750/

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Just what we need today, laughs and applause versus leadership. It was clear from today’s testimony before the 9/11 commission that Clarke is nothing more than a sensationalist trying to promote his currently released book …

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At the time, his job was to put the best possible spin on the situation for his boss.

91

I tend to agree with that. It reminds me to a certain extent of stock market analysts who correctly call a big move in the market and then get catapulted into fame when the market does move in that direction. The fact is, there are people calling for big moves all the time, and we tend only to hear about the ones who were right-- after the fact. Sometimes it was for a good reason, other times not.

I’ve heard some pundits claim that Clinton could have taken action against Afghanistan since he was able to bomb the living bejesus out of Belgrade. But the daily slaughter in Kosovo was something people could see and relate to. al Qaida and Afghanistan would have been too distant and abstract. I don’t think the US as ready.

As I listen to Clarke and all the evidence pile up, it appears that he is letting his disagreement with Bush over Iraq color other aspects of Bush’s policies as well. It’s as if he can’t simply denounce the Iraq policy, but must denounce everything else as well.

BTW, you left this key quote out of 2002 Clarke interview (which seems to contradict some of his recent testimony):

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In which case, he can not be trusted. Why would you choose to believe the 2003 Clarke and not the 2002 one? Because one is saying something you want to hear?

Besides, he lists facts in 2002 that can be checked. Did Bush order a five-fold increase in funding against al-Qaida in March of 2001? Clarke says so. If that’s true, how do you reconcile that with the notion that Bush wasn’t really interested?

Another thing Clarke says in his book which should set off the “this guy is a smear artist” alarms: He slanders Condi Rice, saying “I got the impression from watching her expression that she had never heard of al-Qaida before that meeting”. Which of course is ridiculous, and from what I hear the conservative radio jocks today have been having a grand time playing an interview with Rice from 2000 in which she goes into the bin Laden/al-Qaida threat in detail.

Calling the National Security Advisor to a sitting president ignorant based on an ‘impression’ you get from an ‘expression’ is not exactly the height of quality journalism. Clearly, this man has an axe to grind.

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His axe is Iraq.

And the truth is, I can agree with him on that to an extent. I never saw the Iraq war as part of the “war on terror”, and it **was ** a big distraction. But it seems that Clarke is trying to change the record to make his point. He should be able to argue against the Iraq war on those merits alone.

94

You wish.

A “shooting war”? Depends a lot on definition. Lives are being lost, that much is clear. But a “shooting war” as I think of it is more along the lines of WWII: a conflict of states, with clear objectives that can best be achieved through military means.

I think we are the victims of our own power. We have the most powerful military force in human history. No state can defy us, if we are determined.

But can an armored division conquer cancer? Can a cruise missile destroy intolerance? Should Cecil pass the fight against ignorance to the 1st Cav.? Of course not.

But our course of action fails to recognize that this is not a state on state conflict, this is a struggle against a radical criminal movement. They have no citadels to storm, no beaches to invade.

Doesn’t it give you the slightest pause that we are playing directly into ObL’s hands? Isn’t he on record as stating that America would invade an oil rich ME country? Didn’t we do exactly that?

From the fervent emotional tone of your posts, friend Manny, I have gathered the impression that you crave vengeance. This is entirely understandable, and human. But you allow that to cloud your reason at your peril, and ours.

I am reluctant to extend this possible hijack. Point of fact, I don’t think the invasion of Afghanistan has produced any worthwhile results, but I consider the question debateable, and open to intrepretation by reasonable persons.

The invasion of Iraq, however, is a different kettle of piranha.

As to Sam’s questions of Mr. Clarke’s character, we could readily concede every point, and it would make no difference. Mr. Clarke is a scoundrel, a disloyal apostate and a backstabbing opportunist, entirely willing to toss aside years of public service in pursuit of a buck. He may, as well, spend his leisure time stuffing kittens into blenders, for all I care.

But! he makes verifiable or falsifiable charges, he is specific…dates, names, and places. If he is lying, the Bushiviks, and the illustrious Sam, should have no problem proving it. One cannot fail to note that most of the attacks thus far on Mr. Clarke are slurs and innuendos as to his character and motivation, which are entirely irrelevent and devoid of substance.

Note well: they had Mr. Clarke’s book in thier hands for months, they knew what was coming. Why, then, did they not have documented proof available to refute every specific contention? Why are they reduced to ad hominem attacks if they have the facts at thier fingertips?

Unless, of course, its true.

95

Watching him give testimony today before the 9/11 commission, I simply don’t buy the character attacks. They just don’t ring true. You could tell he was straight up by the way he gave testimony. No stuttering, no dissembling, no mealy-mouthed McLellan bullshit. He did something nobody else in the Bush administration seems capable of doing… assumed some responsibility and apologized for his failures.

His demeanor tells me everything I need to know about who’s being honest here. Especially when you compare it to how Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice answer questions lately. I mean, Cheney’s so scared he’s only willing toss out smears of Clarke hiding behind the folds of Rush Limbaugh’s skirt. Can you say coward? Clarke was under oath today… wonder why Condi Rice won’t answer questions under oath. Oh I don’t know… because everything she says is complete bullshit?

96

Actually, there’s a better explaination, and I’m surprised that you didn’t think of it first: They’re idiots. Given the choice betweein the two possibilities, I’m going with the “idiot” one, myself.

97

I agree with this, and have noted it before. As Clarke himself points out, there were two major terrorist killings of Americans in prior instances, both larger than anything that happened recently, and neither were followed up by any manjor shifts in policy or retaliation, and neither case panned out into something as world-shaking as 9/11 did. Plus, there were many many potential threats out there.

I don’t really buy this as much, however. The reality is, administrations have taken this country and other countries to war when they thought the security threats demanded it even when it went against the public will: in some cases when it went radically against the public will. And the straw man being put up here is the idea that invading Afghanistan was the ONLY thing that would have made a difference: it’s either completely take over a country, or occasionally lob missles at key spots. This is a ridiculous attempt to make an excuse for not taking other intermediate steps. And Clarke’s depiction of the Clinton response to a threat and the Bush response are themselves pretty telling EVEN if Bush really was sincere about some larger strategy. Clinton’s people swung into action, had to show everyday that they had made progress in finding and thwarting the threat. Bush’s impulse was to make sure they DIDN’T do anything the Clinton people had done: which in effect meant they did nothing in particular. He ordered a larger strategy to be drawn up, rather than an intelligence scramble. He got a list of all the potential threats concievable, but didn’t follow up on it. The President himself is quoted as saying that he didn’t follow up on it.

I notice that Clarke is the only one I know of who has flat-out apologized for failing to be able to prevent 9/11. “Your government failed you … and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask … for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”

He’s also now sworn, under oath, that he will not take a position with the Kerry administration or its campaign.

98

Perhaps. I recognize he stands to profit from sensationalizing his accounts. OTOH, the administration has even larger stakes.

The best determination of what to trust has to do with how well it fits with the rest of the facts. My puzzle looks differently than yours - neither are complete, and we hopefully start with some of the same pieces. I’m just not having to the bend the corners of the new pieces.

99

Isn’t it amazing how posters such as Sam, John, and manny can’t seem to pry themselves away from the character attacks on Clarke? What’s the deal, guys? Is there some directive from Mr. Rove that every statement on Clarke’s quite specific, quite detailed, and quiet well-documented charges must consist of no less than 99.44% attacks on character and motivation?

100

Because Clarke 2004 is no longer under the employ of George W. Bush, and is now free to say what he really thinks about his ex-boss?

“If you can’t attack the facts…”