The Emperor Has No Clothes

I just watched Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes (the link is a great summary) and I am absolutely blown away.

Clarke said everything I had expected and more. Moreover, this is an independent, non-partisan who worked for Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 as well as Clinton saying that Bush's actions on terrorism both before and after 9/11 were "terrible."

As Josh Marshall has already noted, now we know why Bush is stonewalling the 9/11 commission. But Clarke, unlike the President, is going to testify publicly to the commission next week.

Here's the breakdown on what Clarke said:

First, although Clarke didn't discuss his briefings of Rice before Bush was sworn in (unbelievably, that has now become one of the less damning facts), Clarke said that he wrote a memo to Rice on January 24, 2001 requesting "urgently" (emphasis in original) a Cabinet-level meeting tp deal with the "impending al Qaeda attack." He never got that. Instead, he got a meeting with the second-in-command in each relevant department ... in April 2001. His meeting with Paul Wolfowitz, Rumseld's deputy, is notable. After Clarke told him that they had to deal with bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Wolfowitz said, "No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy. We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke told Wolfie that there hadn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the U.S. in eight years (Clarke pointed out that the last act of Iraqi terrorism had been the plan to assasinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993, which Clinton had effectively dealt with by bombing the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters and informing Iraq through public and private channels that if anything else happened, the consequences to Iraq would be grave. Nothing else happened.) And the CIA backed up Clarke's assertion that there was no Iraqi terrorism against the United States. (Clarke made the point during the interview that there continued to be none ... until we invaded and occupied their country unprovoked.)

This leads us to Clarke's second point about the Bush Administration. He blamed "the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they were back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke also gave a powerful comparison between how Clinton and Bush dealt with terrorism, one that should shut up the blame-Clinton-first crowd. Clarke said that when Bush began hearing from Tenet during his daily briefings in June, July, August 2001 that a major al Qaeda attack was going to happen against the U.S. in the weeks and months ahead, Bush should taken some steps to address it then. But he didn't.

Clarke said the last time the CIA picked up a similar level of chatter was in December 1999, and in response Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. This action led to the thwarting of a major attack on the L.A. International Airport when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives.

In contrast, Clarke notes, Bush "never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinent-level meeting on the subject."

Oh, and the Cabinent-level meeting that Clarke had been asking for since January 2001? It finally took place -- one week before 9/11. What was Clarke's proposal? A plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan and to kill bin Laden.

The Iraq stuff is just as bad, but more expected, given what Paul O'Neill has already written. Clarke says that on September 12, 2001, Rumsfeld was pushing for strikes against Iraq. They told Rummy, "no, no, al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan." Rummy said, "But there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq." Clarke first thought Rumsfeld was joking, and then when Clarke realized he wasn't, he replied, "Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it." Clarke said that he and Tenet told Rumsfeld, Powell and Ashcroft that "we've looked at this issue for years and there's just no connection betweeen Iraq and al Qaeda."

Then Bush got involved, information I had never heard before. Clarke says that Bush dragged him into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said "I want you to find out whether Iraq did this." Clarke told the President, "Mr. President, we've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind and there's no connection." Bush then "came back at him" and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection" in "a very intimidating way," suggesting that he should come back with that answer.

So Clarke went back and did it again. And came to the same conclusion. And he asked the CIA and FBI to sign off on it, which they did. And he sent his memo to the President. And it got bounced by the NSA or deputy, saying "Wrong answer. Do it again."

The person who sent back the memo? Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy, who the administration sent on 60 Minutes to try to discredit Clarke. Referring to Clarke's allegation that Bush asked Clarke to look into the Iraq issue again, Hadley said that "we cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." Leslie Stahl then told Hadley that 60 Minutes had two other independent sources, including an actual witness, claiming that it in fact had occurred, Hadley could only say, "Look, I stand on what I said." (Man, the Administration has got to stop going on CBS and lying -- they just keep getting caught.)

The only other thing that the Bush Administration could muster against Clarke is that he is bitter because he was demoted from his cabinet-level rank during the Clinton administration when Bush took office in January 2001. Hello? Doesn't this just prove what Clarke is saying -- that Bush didn't take terrorism as seriously as Clinton had. (Let's also remember that Clarke stayed on until 2003.)

Finally, Clarke pretty much sums it up here: "Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

If Bush wants to run on 9/11, BRING IT ON.

- posted by Joshua @ 8:26 PM