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Friday, March 19, 2004
More on Richard Clarke
Drudge is reporting that Clarke is appearing on Sixty Minutes this Sunday to promote his book, and has more statements about the Administration's focus on Iraq and not Al-Qaeda immediately after the 9/11 attacks:
Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.
The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the 9/11 attacks],'" he tells Stahl.
Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and Al Qaeda] but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.
Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."
(Presumably, the "more" is their decision to ignore Al-Qaeda from January 20 to September 10, 2001, despite Clarke's warnings and plans)
As Drudge is apt to note, Developing...
Oops.
Once again, the vaunted Bush campaign makes a tiny boo-boo: some of Bush's campaign merchandise is made in Burma.
Medicare Continued
The plot thickens: the White House is implicated in the order not to tell anyone that the cost estimate for Medicare went up 33% before the House vote.
Well, We May Have Lied In Order To Start a War, But Don't Forget That Clinton Lied About Whether or Not He and Monica Had...
Moveon.org is continuing their campaign to censure Bush with this great ad featuring Rummy from last Sunday.
South Carolina Redux
The heart of the Bush campaign is defense and national security. That's the one area that Bush is polling better than Kerry, and they've made it clear that they're going to attack Kerry as weak on defense. Indeed, as Dick Morris has written, Kerry has the clear advantage on the economy and Bush has the clear advantage on national security. (Morris makes the interesting argument that to talk about the other's issue to defend yourself is to heighten its importance.)
That's why they must apoplectic that John McCain was asked about Kerry's record on defense yesterday and that McCain defended Kerry against the attacks. McCain said, "I don't believe that he is quote weak on defense." That's a huge gift to Kerry.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what loyalty McCain feels to the Republican Party, he hates Bush and likes Kerry. (If you don't know why, read this for a brief summary. But all you need to know is that Republican operatives in South Carolina in 2000 implied that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black daughter, when, in actuality, his dark-skinned daughter Bridget had been adopted by McCain and his wife, Cindy from Mother Theresa's orphanage.)
So we might see a repeat of this down the road.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
"If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you've got to back it up with facts"
The Lies continue... (credit to Salon.com)
Compare
Speaking yesterday at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Vice President Dick Cheney declared that Sen. John "has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on matters of national security." Cheney's money line in defining the supposedly weak-on-security Democratic candidate was this: "Senator Kerry has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all. Recently he said, and I quote, 'I don't want to use that terminology.'"
Cheney first debuted the zinger at a South Dakota fundraiser on March 8: "Several days ago, Senator Kerry said he wasn't even comfortable calling this a war. He said, 'I don't want to use that terminology.'" President Bush chimed in the same day at a Texas fundraiser: "Just the other day my opponent indicated that he's not comfortable using the word 'war' to describe the struggle we're in. He said, 'I don't want to use that terminology.'"
On March 13, at another Republican fundraiser in Kentucky, Cheney repeated the allegation: "On one side, we have the Democratic nominee, who is uncomfortable with the idea we are at war. Quote, 'I don't want to use that terminology,' he said last week." Then Cheney repeated the claim again in California on Wednesday.
with
[W]here did this I-won't-call-it-a-war-on-terror quote come from? On March 5, Kerry gave a foreign policy-oriented interview to the New York Times aboard an airplane. Extended portions of the interview were printed in the paper, as a sidebar to a news story. At one point Kerry was addressing the big picture regarding "the war on terror," a phrase he used repeatedly during the interview.
He said, "The combination of economic, the economic bleakness, the devastation, within countries that are potentially explosive, where you have very large young populations of uneducated people ripe for the pickings of radicalism, is a much bigger challenge than the world as yet has been willing to grapple with." Kerry concluded, "The final victory in the war on terror depends on a victory in the war of ideas, much more than the war on the battlefield. And the war -- not the war, I don't want to use that terminology. The engagement of economies, the economic transformation, the transformation to modernity of a whole bunch of countries that have been avoiding the future. And that future's coming at us like it or not, in the context of terror, and in the context of failed states, and dysfunctional economies, and all that goes with that."
There's not a college freshman in America who would read that passage and suggest Kerry is reluctant to call the struggle against terrorism a "war." That's simply not what he said. His point was obvious -- the war on terror, or "the war on the battlefield," is intricately connected with the war of ideas (economics, modernity, religious fanaticism).
Kerry's phrase about not wanting to "use that [war] terminology" had nothing to do with Sept. 11, al-Qaida, Madrid or Baghdad. It was Kerry's clarification to reporters of the distinction between the war on the battlefield and the battle over ideas. But the Bush campaign is trying to transform the utterance into a false ideological dividing line.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the cut-and-paste ruse is being promoted by Bush's tools in the conservative media. Writing for the Wall Street Journal opinion Web site last week, James Taranto cited Bush's use of the "terminology" quote and insisted, "Bush's criticisms of Kerry are based on hard facts."
Better check again.
Impeach Scalia
Exhibit 1. Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, Et Al. v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Et Al., March 18, 2004
Exhibt 2. George W. Bush Et Al. v. Albert Gore, Jr. Et Al. On Application for Stay, December 9, 2000
Exhibit 3. George W. Bush Et Al. v. Albert Gore Jr. Et Al., December 12, 2000
Exhibit 4. Eugene Scalia Nominated to Be Solicitor of the Department of Labor, April 2001
The Great Divider
I was critical of Richard Cohen's columns during the 2000 campaign, because too often he just followed the herd when he wrote about Gore, but he has been on fire on the 2004 campaign.
Readers will remember that I posted his column where he argued that if Bush wants to get credit for dealing with September 11, he needs to also remember that September 10 is his too.
Now he's got another great column discussing the complete lie Bush sold the country in 2000 about being "a uniter, not a divider:"
Sooner or later some industrious journalist will comb through all the promises George W. Bush made during his first presidential campaign and see which ones he kept. A good start would be to return to the speech he gave in Iowa at the beginning of the 2000 campaign. He promised to reduce taxes, to "rebuild the military," to institute a missile defense system and to impose education standards -- all of which he has done. Still, he gets a failing grade.
For it was at Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 14, 1999, that Bush declared himself "a uniter, not a divider" -- maybe his most important promise and the one he has clearly not kept. He prefaced that vow by saying, "I reject the ugly politics of division." Instead he has reveled in it, pursuing policies and appointments that sometimes seem designed to do nothing more than energize the president's conservative base and drive everyone else up the wall
Cohen also discusses what is that makes Bush such a divider:
[T]o a degree that is impossible to quantify, it also has to do with Bush's demeanor, a
perceived smugness and a plain unwillingness to be what he promised he would be: a uniter.
On the contrary, he came out of the gate as a hard-edged conservative. In foreign affairs, he repudiated treaties and agreements. He became unilateralism personified. In domestic affairs, he acted for all the world as if he had won a landslide election and not a squeaker that had to be decided by the Supreme Court. If it wasn't for the "activist judges" he so dislikes, he would now be just another gentleman rancher in Texas.
"I know how to lead," Bush said that day in Iowa -- but he does not. Leadership does not mean going your own way. It means getting others to follow, constructing a consensus. Bush has failed to do this, and the failure is not due to a lack of leadership skills. It's purposeful. The narrowness of the election kept Bush close to his conservative base. Among other things, he has nominated judges who are not mere conservatives but true right-wing reactionaries. In two cases his nominees had to be sneaked onto the bench by fiat, not by Senate confirmation. Just recently Bush threw his base the red meat of a frivolous constitutional amendment that would bar gay marriage. It's a sop to homophobes and Bush knows it. His body language gives him away.
In the words of the man he ... defeated (no, more like "was the declared the winner against), when that man was referring to his father: It's time for them to go.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
"September 10 is his, too."
I've been meaning to post this for a long time, and, after the horrible attack in Spain, I'm finally motivated to do it. Bush has long made it clear that he is going to make his prosecution of the war on terror the key element to his reelection. But, as demonstrated by his refusal to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission, Bush has been reluctant to give any help to people trying to figure out what went wrong from September 10, 2001 backwards. And he may have good reason for refusing to cooperate.
Devoted readers will remember that I mentioned that Richard Clarke is coming out with a book this month, on March 22. Who is Richard Clarke? Well, he was essentially the counter-terrorism czar for the Clinton Administration and his formal title was head of the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council. Clarke's background is important to consider: he was one of the two senior directors from Bush Sr. that was kept on by Clinton and he eventually stayed on to work for Bush Jr. during the beginning of his Presidency.
Clarke is important because he was convinced, by the end of the Clinton Administration, that the threat of radical Islamic terror, by Al-Qaeda specifically, was as great as ever, and he was convinced that Bin Laden's next strike would take place on American soil. After the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, Clarke desperately wanted the U.S. to take military action, but he was unclear what he could do, since the Clinton Administration was about to leave office.
Nevertheless, Clarke put together a proposal for a massive attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He presented his plan to his boss, NSA Sandy Berger and others on the NSC, on December 20, 2000. Remembering that Clinton had been left to deal with Bush Sr.'s foray into Somalia in 1993, Berger did not feel that it was right to start a military action just when Bush Jr. was about to take over.
An article in Time Magazine that should be required reading details what Berger did:
With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism...
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice... Senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."
After the briefing, Rice, soon to become Clarke's boss, admitted to him that the dangers from Al-Qaeda appeared to be greater than she had ever realized. Significantly, Rice was not the only senior White House official who was given Clarke's briefing:
As the new Administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's wwarnings. Some members of the outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us."
Well, this certainly helps to explain why Rice demanded that she testify before the 9/11 Commission in private and Cheney has wanted to limit questioning.
TO BE CONTINUED
Monday, March 15, 2004
Survivor
I've been a recent convert to Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David, but I think the show two weeks ago was one of the best episodes of anything I've ever seen. As is often the case with these things, it's impossible to adequately summarize a plot and give it justice, but the scene involving Colby Donaldson from CBS' Survivor and a Holocaust survivor was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Other highlights were the rabbi whose brother in law died on September 11, 2001 -- he was run over by a bike messenger in uptown Manhattan, completely unconnected to Al-Qaeda -- yet the Rabbi treats the death and comments about Sept. 11 as if he perished in the WTC.
I'm sad that last night was the series finale for this year. And I'm told that only season one is out on video.
An Imminent Threat?
Faced with no WMDs, the Bush Administration has been playing defense over its claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S. back in 2002 and 2003, during the "rush to war." Recently, however, it has tried to take the offensive and claimed that it never used the phrase "imminent threat" to describe Iraq. But facts are stubborn things, as much as the Administration tries to change them -- here's Rummy getting caught by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times on Face the Nation yesterday:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though ..., when then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the -- you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't. The President didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's -- that's what's happened. The president went...
SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that?
RUMSFELD: I - I can't speak for nobody -- everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.
SCHIEFFER: The Vice President didn't say that? The...
RUMSFELD: Not -- if -- if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says 'some have argued that the nu' --this is you speaking --'that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'
RUMSFELD: And--and...
FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.
RUMSFELD: Well, I've-- I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s-- suppose I've--
FRIEDMAN: 'No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'
RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of -- of the situation was that he-- he had -- we --we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that we believed and we still do not know-- we will know.
Ooops.
Red-Blue Nation
Here's a nice summary of the state of play in the 2004 election. Unbelievably, it's likely down to about 18 states. While voters in say, Texas, New York or Maryland, may never see a TV ad for Bush or Kerry, voters in those 18 states will be oversaturated by November.
I really see this election now as a race against time. Bush needs to define Kerry over the next three months, because Kerry is still relatively unknown. Kerry, on the other hand, has survived the Democratic primary as unscathed as any nominee in history (yes, the much-maligned Terry McAulliffe deserves some credit for front loading the process), and has the opportunity to cement a positive image with the voters between now and the convention. I agree whole-heartedly with Josh Marshall that Kerry needs to hit back on defense and national security now, to avoid having voters who are just paying attention now see him as weak on those issues. One thing I'm quite (pleasantly) surprised by is how off-kilter the Bush political machine is, after being so good for much of his presidency. Bush is very much off kilter now, and everytime he tries to plug the dam, something else comes loose.
Given the situation, I think Kerry needs to be aggressive during this period. Money, again, will be key during the general election, because although many people has discussed Bush's money advantage during the primary season, not many have discussed Bush's continued advantage in the fall, even though both will receive the same $75 million from the gov't to fund their general election campaigns. The problem is that the nominee of each party will receive the money right after the convention. Since the Democratic convention is at the end of July and Bush's is at the end of August (as close to Sept. 11 as they could get), Kerry will have to make his money last a month longer. I don't think this is as big a deal as Bush having ridiculous amounts of money during the primary season, but it is a factor to consider.
