An Interesting Read!

[SuperScout]

Clarke: I Let Bin Laden Family Go

Don't look now, but Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke has inadvertently let the White House off the hook on the most potentially explosive charge related to 9/11 - allegations that President Bush let Osama bin Laden's family escape from the U.S. in the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Clarke says nothing about this episode in his book and with good reason, since the truth fits neither his Bush-bashing agenda nor his carefully constructed image as a tougher-than-nails terrorism fighter.

It turns out, however, that it was Clarke himself who gave the green light for Osama bin Laden's relatives fly home to Riyadh beginning on Sept. 14, just three days after U.S. skies were closed to all air traffic. [Others have claimed that the bin Laden family deaprture was all part of an evil plot involving GWB; so much for baseless rumors!]

The subject of the bin Ladens' escape came up briefly during Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission last week, where he tried to finesse his role in blowing what many still believe was the best chance to get information on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts and his family's financial network.

Clarke told the Commission that an individual - whose identity he doesn't recall - relayed a request for the bin Laden fly-out from the Saudi embassy to his White House Situation Room Crisis Management Team.

He says that he refused to grant approval until the FBI signed off.

In his testimony the closest Clarke came to admitting responsibility was when he told the Commission:

"I believe after the FBI came back and said it was all right with them, we ran it through the decision process for all of these decisions that we were making in those hours, which was the interagency Crisis Management Group on the video conference," Clarke explained, before hinting at his own responsibility.

"I was making - or coordinating a lot of decisions on 9/11 in the days immediately after," he told the Commission.

But in the next breath Clarke tried to shift responsibility away from himself, suggesting instead that blame for the blunder should go perhaps to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card or Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to me," the terrorism whistleblower lamented to the Commission. "Since you press me, the two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State or the White House Chief of Staff's Office. But I don't know."

In an interview with Vanity Fair last October, however, Clarke was more forthright about his role in the decision to let the bin Ladens go.

"My role was to say it can't happen until the FBI approves it," he told VF writer Craig Unger. "And so the FBI was asked - we had a live connection to the FBI - and we asked the FBI to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone that it was O.K. to leave.

Then Clarke confessed, "And [the FBI] came back and said, yes it was fine with them. So we said fine, let it happen."

The charge that President Bush was to blame for the bin Ladens' escape had already become a cause-celeb in left-wing circles, with radical filmmaker Michael Moore among those complaining that the terrorist's kin were allowed to fly the coop at a time when all U.S. flights were still grounded.

In fact, as noted by Unger in his VF piece, U.S. skies had been re-opened to air traffic by the time the bin Ladens were allowed to leave on Sept. 14, leaving yet another Democrat urban legend in tatters. [Oh, dear, does this impugn the entire tinfoil helmet brigade?]

[Seascamp]

Zow and yikes!!!!!! The then supposed anti-terrorism Guru doesn?t know who gave authorization to send the bin Laden outfit on back to Saudi Arabia? Maybe Mikie done it, eh? Or perhaps it?s an acute case of selective memory, hmmm? More the reason to do some declassification of some meeting minutes and memos I?d say.

Sorry, but this guy is starting to look like a woolly mammoth having a rough "encounter" in the La Brea tar pits. The harder he pumps, the deeper he sinks and one day he could become a museum fossil with a happy face on, maybe.

Scamp

[Gimpy]

The Dogs That Didn't Bark

Why Colin Powell and George Tenet aren't bashing Richard Clarke.
Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2004, at 2:39 PM PT

In the short story "Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of a stolen racehorse by observing that the stable's guard dog didn't bark?hence, the intruder was not a stranger.

The mystery of whether Richard Clarke is telling the truth about President Bush's counterterrorism policies might be solved the same way: Which dogs aren't barking? Amid all the administration officials bombarding the airwaves with denunciations, who has stayed mum?

The answer: Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, and their silence speaks loudly.
Tenet is central to Clarke's case that Bush was negligent on terrorism. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others have said many times?in what they present as a defense against Clarke's charges?that Bush received an intelligence briefing from Tenet every morning and was therefore well aware of the threat from al-Qaida. But Clarke's point is that Bush didn't take Tenet's warnings seriously.

Here's a key passage from Clarke's book, Against All Enemies (Page 235):

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

This is where the famous "swatting flies" story appears.

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda.

Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals [the Cabinet secretaries] in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

If Clarke is spewing nonsense?if the president and his national security adviser really did consider al-Qaida an urgent matter?Tenet is the man to say so. It's hard to imagine that the White House hasn't tried to recruit him to do so. Yet so far he hasn't.

Tenet is not the only quiet dog. One of the hounds that the White House did unleash?Secretary of State Powell?not only declined to growl, but practically purred like a kitten. Interviewed on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, Powell said: "I know Mr. Clarke. I have known him for many, many years. He's a very smart guy. He served his nation very, very well. He's an expert in these matters." His book "is not the complete story," but, Powell added, "I'm not attributing any bad motives to it."

Asked if he had been recruited to join the campaign against Clarke, Powell replied, "I'm not aware of any campaign against Mr. Clarke, and I am not a member."

His choice of words here is fascinating. Note: He did not say "There is no campaign," but rather "I'm not aware of any campaign." As has been widely observed, Powell truly is out of the loop in this administration; it's conceivable he is unaware.

He then went on to say, "[A]nd I am not a member"?suggesting there might be a campaign, but he's not part of it.

It may be a stretch to parse these words so closely. This was an interview, after all, not a written statement. Then again, Powell must have given some careful thought to what he would say. In any case, his answer doesn't exactly amount to a denial of an anti-Clarke campaign. In fact, it's a textbook case of the "non-denial denial."

Powell also circled around an answer when Lehrer asked if Clarke was right in saying the Bush administration did not give "urgent priority" to fighting al-Qaida.

He replied: "We knew that al-Qaeda was a threat to our country. We knew that the Clinton Administration understood this and was working against al-Qaeda. We did not ignore al-Qaeda. We spent a lot of time thinking about terrorism, what should we do about it. ? We were working on terrorism and trying to understand it."

You don't need to be a literary critic to realize that this is an amazing statement. In a few sentences, Powell tells us that Clinton "understood" and "was working against" al-Qaida?while the Bush administration "did not ignore" al-Qaida (not quite the same thing) and "spent a lot of time thinking" about it and "trying to understand it."

In the middle of all this, Powell managed to throw in the following: "I met with Mr. Clarke four days after I was named to be the Secretary of State." Clarke has said, in his book and in many interviews, that he didn't get a chance to brief Bush's Cabinet secretaries on al-Qaida until one week before 9/11. In this context, Powell is telling Jim Lehrer that he met with Clarke even before the administration got underway.

Powell's implicit support of Clarke is significant. In his book, Clarke portrays Powell as his ally in the administration's internecine disputes over terrorism. He writes that when he briefed Bush's transition team in January 2001, "Colin Powell took the unusual step ? of asking to meet with ? the senior counterterrorism officers from NSC, State, Defense, CIA, FBI, and the military. ? When we all agreed at the importance of the al Qaeda threat, Powell was obviously surprised at the unanimity" (Page 228).

Three months later, at the first deputies meeting on terrorism, when Paul Wolfowitz challenged this view and insisted that Iraq posed the greater threat, Clarke writes, "Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. 'We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.' The briefings of Colin Powell had worked" (Page 232).

Finally, the day after 9/11, when Donald Rumsfeld advocated "broadening the objectives of our response and 'getting Iraq,' " it was Powell who "pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda." Clarke writes, "Relieved to have some support, I thanked [Powell and Armitage]. 'I thought I was missing something here,' I vented. 'Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.' Powell shook his head. 'It's not over yet' " (Pages 30-31).

If Powell has any disputes with this account?of his role, his position, the positions of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, or the conversations he and Armitage had with Clarke in January, April, or September 2001?he could have noted them in response to several of Lehrer's questions during the NewsHour interview. Powell, too, didn't bark.

***************
Hmmmmmmmmmmm??? :cd: :cd: :cd: :cd:

[reconeil]

"VE-E-E-E-RY IN-N-T-E-E-E-RESTING" indeed,...as: "Sgt Schultz" used to say on; "HOGAN's HEROES". But then, what else could one expect? Still, it is surprising when such crafty and pathological liars (ala Clinton) would let some honesty slip-thru-the-cracks?

Maybe Clarkey Baby should have used that: "I don't recall" bit more often? It worked so well for The World Record Holders of most: "I don't recalls" ever used under oath,...and/or The Clintons. So, why not just do what comes natural amongst liars, and/or: "When in Rome, do as The Romans do"?

Hey,...stick with what has proven to work quite well within your clique. Don't try to get fancy and/or let people REALLY know the truth about anything. Such to the clique is very counter productive,...to say the least.

Still, isn't it truly strange that some politicians and officials would consider any unequivocating truths,...ACTUALLY BLASPHEMOUS and/or that God Forbid The American People ever be exposed to The Truth, even during wartime? But then, I'm not some fanatical leftist ideologue,...so what-hell-do-I-know?

Neil

[SuperScout]

[This article should forever put to rest the issue of the unworthiness of Richard Clarke.]

Richard Clarke should apologize for his book.

BY RICHARD MINITER

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.
[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. ]

[blues clues]

there is enough blame to go around I've never said that bush was at blame it just happened on his watch, but I do blame the cia George Trent and the former FBI director l. free, and ken star, for eight years the Rep.had them looking under every bed in tyhe country not for ENEMIES of the state who were out to hurt us but who was Clinton in bed with for that I don't forgive.

b razz

[Gimpy]

I see no evidence that disputes Richard Clarkes charges in Minters article. It's obvious that his "motives" are typical Clinton "bashing" as is most of his bull$hit!

Just another vain attempt by the "dog pound" to assasinate the character of Clarke.

[reconeil]

Re: "...assasinating the character of Clarke" by ANYONE,...not actually necessary. After all, Old Clarkey Baby has done a pretty-good job of doing it to himself,...all by his lonesome.

And besides, not all people are so easily taken-in by any officials' one-sided and/or self/clique-serving sworn testimonies about anything. Just like apolitical and/or non-bent people couldn't possibly believe most that came out of Clinton's mouth,...same must also logically apply to most coming out of Clarke's mouth. It's just natural.

Neil

[SuperScout]

I would urge you to re-read Miniter's article, specifically ... 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.

Miniter is not part of any "dog pound" as you allege, but is a very credible investigatory writer, with articles appearing in such a wide variety of publications such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic and Readers' Digest. His work has also been recognized by the National Press CLub and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Clarke has done an admirable job of inflicting major damage to both of his feet, either by shooting himself in them, or inserting them with greater frequency in his mouth. Even in the assessment of some of his friends, he has become his own worst enemy. And just because an author writes something negative about anyone, it shouldn't automatically earn your label as "bashing" or automatically cause you to start cussing. It just may have a morsel or more of pure, unadulterated truth in it.

[Seascamp]

Do ya think the CIA and FBI were dogging Clinton?s trail over his sexcapades? I would think the Secret Service had that watch and the duty of keeping track of all the comings and goings. First off the CIA would be in major breach of law and charter to be doing that and I doubt the FBI could have found their butts with both hands during that time as they were far too busy jacking around and screwing over their boss, Janet Reno. My guess is that the various and assorted Clinton peccadillo?s were pure media high-grade honey and they just swarmed all over him, big time. Sure there was Ken Star and a number of Repos all over Clinton and working every angle they could, but I really think Clinton was his own worst enemy with regard to his bed time saga?s and lack of due caution and discretion. As clever and smart as he is in so many ways, one would think he could have been a ton more discrete and not paint himself in such an awful and escape proof corner. But that?s just my opinion, eh.

Scamp