The sorry Mr. Clarke

[dude1394]

Sorry Clarke

The Sorry Mr. Clarke
From the April 5, 2004 issue: Richard Clarke's grandstanding did please its true intended audience--the New York Times.
by William Kristol
04/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 29


"I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, 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."

--Richard Clarke, testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004

RICHARD CLARKE can apologize to anyone he likes. He could have done so sooner. And he could have done so privately. The names of those killed on 9/11--and, for that matter, of those killed by al Qaeda in our African embassies, on the USS Cole, and on other occasions--have presumably been available to Clarke. Would the families of those who died have appreciated a personal letter from Clarke asking for their understanding and forgiveness? Perhaps a few would. The vast majority no doubt would have thought such an apology utterly unnecessary and inappropriate.

Clarke, who worked tirelessly against al Qaeda during the 1990s, is not responsible for the deaths on 9/11. Indeed, the families of those who died surely appreciate Clarke's great efforts, first to thwart al Qaeda, and then to bring the killers of their loved ones to justice. Surely they know of Clarke's sympathy for their loss. Surely the only apology that is owed--though it would presumably be rejected by the families--would be an apology from Osama bin Laden, just prior to his execution.

But Clarke's grandstanding did please its true intended audience. The writers at the New York Times loved it. After all, when Clarke apologized, they wrote, "it suddenly seemed that after the billions of words uttered about that terrible day, Mr. Clarke had found the ones that still needed saying." Indeed, "the only problem with his apology was that so few of those failures really seemed to be his." So presumably, according to the New York Times, everyone else in government who "failed" should also apologize.

No. In fact, what government officials owed the memory of those who died on 9/11--to ensure that they did not die in vain--was a greater determination to prosecute the war on terror than had been shown in the preceding eight months, and in the preceding eight years.

Clarke and the New York Times are certainly free to argue that the Bush administration has not done a good job in fighting the war on terror. They are free to argue that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But neither Clarke nor the New York Times has even attempted to make the case that the Bush administration bears any true moral responsibility for failing to avert al Qaeda's attack on 9/11. Shouldn't the New York Times trouble itself to make this case before it presumes to call for yet more inappropriate apologies?

Was no one at the Times aware of the following exchange between Clarke and commission member Slade Gorton?

GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No.

There have been occasions in the past when government officials properly took responsibility for actions under their direction that went terribly awry. Janet Reno accepted responsibility for the deaths in Waco in 1993. John Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In those cases, apparently reckless U.S. government actions directly caused unnecessary deaths. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans. It would be no more appropriate for President Bush to apologize today than it would have been for President Roosevelt to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Richard Clarke's pseudo-apology has cheapened the public discourse.

--William Kristol

[SaltwaterChaffy]

Can all of these Clarke articles not go in the same thread? This is pretty ridiculous.

[dude1394]

He's just too good and too much of a media darling to be confined to one thread.

[madape]

I remember reading a theory about elections that centers around the idea that campaigns shoud force their strongest position into the media , no matter how supportive the reporting is. For instance, it really benefits the Bush campaign if the media talks about terrorism. Bush is viewed as a much better candidate to fight terrorism than Kerry. If the media content is disproportionally focused on terrorism and terrorism related stories, it helps Bush. If the media is allowed to stray into issues such as jobs, it helps Kerry. So the Bush campaign will contnue to push this story with Clark as long as they can because it buys terrorism more time on CBS... which is good for Bush.

[reeds]

Clarke is da MAN

[dude1394]

Reeds it makes sense that you would look up to a 12 year beuracrat who is the only common thread in the three administrations while al queda has grown. And a good liar at that.
Sounds like another politician that I'm sure you respect.

[dude1394]

Madape. I also heard this from Dick Morris in fact. The idea is that if the question is who is tougher on terrorism bush or kerry, bush wins. So that is also why kerry hasn't said much of anything about this as he would just as soon it go away.

[dude1394]

The mainstream media continue to push this rediculouse liar.

From Robert Novak:

CLARKE'S CONTRIBUTIONS

Former counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke called himself a registered Republican in criticizing President Bush, but his only listed political contributions during the two most recent election cycles have gone to former colleagues running as Democrats for Congress.

In 2002, Clarke contributed $2,000 to Steven Andreasen, who headed arms control policy in the Clinton administration's National Security Council (NSC) and was running for Congress in Minnesota. Andreasen was defeated by Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht.

This year, Clarke has given $1,000 to Jamie Metzl, another Clinton-era NSC staffer. Metzl is running for the House seat from Missouri left vacant by the retirement of Democratic Rep. Karen McCarthy and so far has raised far more money than any other candidate.

CONFERRING WITH CLARKE

Prior to his testimony Wednesday before the independent 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke conferred privately with one of its Democratic members, according to commission sources.

These sources say Clarke huddled with Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. Roemer's subsequent questioning of Clarke contained a few barbs but consisted largely of open-ended questions giving the witness a chance to criticize President Bush. Roemer confirmed he had met "a couple of times with" Clarke, as he said he had with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. "Nobody coaches Dick Clarke," Roemer added.

One reason why House Speaker Dennis Hastert unsuccessfully tried to curtail the commission's activities on schedule was the presence of Roemer, his former congressional colleague. Hastert regards Roemer as a partisan who attempts to project a bipartisan image.

[reeds]

"And a good liar at that"???? Come on, now he is a liar??? The whole book is lies?? Is that what you feel???? Please...im sure he lied thru this teeth just to sell books, all fabricated BS.... I dont think so....

[dude1394]

I never said it was ALL fabricated lies. You are putting YOUR parties political strategies and imposing them on mine. As you know nothing that bush does is good, honest or even true. It's all lies and machinations. No matter there is no proof of it, your party and the media continue to just throw it out there.

What the non-liberal-media and even some of them are doing is pointing out the inconsistencies in his statements and the outright bias that he is showing. Just for example he states that when he first mentioned Al Queda to Dr. Rice it appeared that she had never heard of him. His "opinion" is blatnatly false as it's on the record over a year ago that Dr. Rice intelligently and throughly provided a lecture/answered questions in depth about al queda.

Now why would Clarke "make this up". Unless he has an agenda. Why wouldn't he leave out his "opinions" especially about something this important and instead stick to facts. HOW can anyone who says that Clinton's NUMBER 1 PRIORITY was Al Queda be believed or believable.

WHY would Dick Clarke rush the publication of his book which was planned to come out in April to NOW? Was it to get more publicity during the 9/11 hearings? So is he or is he NOT hawking a book?

[dude1394]

From Andrew Sullivan

Clarke

And then there's a matter of embellishment. His story of one particular incident, as Time magazine's Romesh Ratnesar, noticed, has been hyped several times in the telling. It's an important incident because it gets to the heart of the case that the Bush administration allegedly sacrificed the war on terror for the war to depose Saddam. On the major television news show, "Sixty Minutes," Clarke described a conversation he had with the president on September 12, 2001:"The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this'.....the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'"On a subsequent interview, this is how Clarke described the event: "What happened was the President, with his finger in my face, saying, 'Iraq, a memo on Iraq and al-Qaeda, a memo on Iraq and the attacks.' Very vigorous, very intimidating." And in the book itself? Here's what Bush apparently said and did. He took a few senior intelligence aides aside into a closed room and said: "I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." Clarke simply answered: "Al-Qaeda did this." To which Bush responded, "I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred..."

Now memories blur; people's attitudes can change with recollection. Especially given what we now know about the weak links between al Qaeda and Saddam and the subsequent controversy over the Iraq war, this conversation could easily be distorted through the prism of hindsight. But what I infer from these passages and their differences are several other things: Clarke is essentially telling the truth. But on the face of it, that truth is in no way damning to Bush. It's the president's job to prod his intelligence and counter-terrorism experts not to jump immediately to conclusions, to keep their options open, to pursue every possible avenue in the shadowy, inter-locking world of terrorism and terror-states. The president would have been remiss not to ask his staff to check whether a known and dangerous enemy of the United States was somehow involved in the attacks, especially since a similar attack with WMDs was on everyone's mind, especially Cheney's. And Iraq had (or was believed to have had) some pretty serious WMDs.

But the personal tone of Clarke's attacks, the exaggeration, the political anti-war agenda of a man who lost his job under this president, cannot but undermine the man's basic credibility. If he had written with less fire, if he had testified in a less partisan manner, if he had not embellished, he'd be a far more important witness. But he has done nothing that fatal to this administration, except give important credibility to the argument (an argument I find callow and too limited) that the war against Saddam and the war against terror were unrelated. The picture he has painted is not too different than the one we already know: the Cliton administration was tracking al Qaeda but never committed to effecting its destruction; the Bush administration was working slowly to grapple with the problem, but by no means urgently enough. There's plenty of blame to go round. But I'd argue that eight years of Clinton failure is a little more damning than nine months of Bush inadequacy.

[dude1394]

I'm watching Dick Clarke on hardball. My loathing for this man grows as he shreds 10-12 years of confidentiality and trust that presidents have given him. He is doing irreperable damage to future security advisers. Is there any doubt that EVERY president from now on will have no choice but to purge anyone who he feels is not trustworthy.

Disgusting american.

[dude1394]

Now the clinton administration folks begin to weigh in on the sorry Mr. Clarke. Yes virginia there IS a link between Iraq and terrorism.

Very Awkward Facts
Richard Clarke's denials of Iraq's terror ties don't ring true.

BY LAURIE MYLROIE
Saturday, April 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

The credibility of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has come under withering fire. He has been caught in error after error, omission after omission. I can attest to one error more: a highly revealing error that tells us a great deal about who Richard Clarke really is.

Mr. Clarke singles me out for special criticism in his book, "Against All Enemies." This is not surprising. He believes that Islamic terrorism is the work of a few individual criminals, many of them relatives. I have for years gathered the evidence that shows that terrorism is something more than a mom-and-pop operation: that it is supported by powerful states, very much including Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"?

The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the facts:

• Fact No. 1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport.

• Fact No. 2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin.

• Fact No. 3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal.

• Fact No. 4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef, he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his father worked."

To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait). Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center bombing.

Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain. He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home, where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later, when Iraq invaded.

Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Karim. That file appears to have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's prints. But Yousef is not Karim--as Judge Duffy implied--for many reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. Karim left at Swansea bear "no resemblance" to Yousef's prints. They are two different people.

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents.

The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef's "brothers."

A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country.

When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.

Ms. Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, is author of "The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001).

[u2sarajevo]

How many threads calling Mr. Clarke sorry, or some other negative comment are you going to create?

It gets a bit monotonous.

[dude1394]

Well u2, as far as threads, this seems to be the one that is collecting them so I guess no more. As far as negative comments, it's going to take a while to unravel the saintly mantle the msm has give him so I don't know..

Probably as long as the political 911 commission is going actually.