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Saturday, March 27, 2004
Now The Lies Lead to Bush
Josh Marshall remains on top of his game. Remember how Stephen Hadley, Rice NSC Deputy, went on 60 Minutes and said that the Administration denied that the meeting Clarke claimed he had with Bush on September 12, 2001 ever happened? (It was at this private meeting that Clarke claims Bush pressured him to find a link between the attacks and Saddam Hussein.) Lesley Stahl told Hadley that CBS has two additional sources that confirmed the meeting existed, including one witness, and Hadley appeared to back off.
Now the White House has retracted its denial and, according to CBS, are now saying that it does not deny that such a meeting took place. In fact, a White House source is quoted as saying "it probably did."
Marshall makes an interesting point: we know that Bush has personally authorized his staff to go after Clarke, and other than the two sources that CBS had, who confirmed the meeting, the only other person there who could have denied that the meeting happened was the President.
So there does seem to be a pretty strong inference that the President lied to his staff and said the meeting never happened in an effort to discredit Clarke, only to force the White House to backtrack when independent witnesses came forward.
But remember, he's restoring honesty and integrity to the Oval Office...
Friday, March 26, 2004
Knockout
I've written a lot about the heroic Richard Clarke and his devasting testimony recently, but I don't think I could describe Clarke's dramatic appearance before the 9/11 Commission any better than Fred Kaplan has done at Slate. I highly recommend this article. Here's how it opens:
Richard Clarke made his much-anticipated appearance before the 9/11 commission this afternoon and, right out of the box, delivered a stunning blow to the Bush administration—the political equivalent of a first-round knockout.
The blow was so stunning, it took a while to realize that it was a blow. Clarke thanked the members for holding the hearings, saying they finally provided him "a forum where I can apologize" to the victims of 9/11 and their loved ones. He continued, addressing those relatives, many of whom were sitting in the hearing room:
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.
End of statement. Applause. KO.
Piling On
Here's a handy list, courtesy of the Center for American Progress, detailing Condi Rice's increasing credibility problem and difficulty with the truth.
Boiled Rice?
I used to have some respect for Condi Rice, but her blatant lies and distortions have just gotten to be too much.
First, Rice keeps saying that Bush met on a daily basis with Tenet for intelligence updates before 9/11 as evidence to support her claim that Bush was focused on terror. But the daily briefings that Rice is referring to are the President's daily intelligence briefings. Those briefings occur every day, for all Presidents, regardless of what is going on in the world.
Next is the latest argument offered by the Republican subsidiary, Fox News. Sean Hannity has been playing a radio interview that Rice gave in Detroit in October 2000 that Hannity claims rebuts Clarke's allegation that Rice had never heard of Al Qaeda when he told her about it in January 2001. The problem with Hannity's argument: Rice refers repeatedly to Osama bin Laden in the interview, but never once mentions al Qaeda. (Bob Somerby, as usual, does a great job addressing this.) Heck, even I knew who bin Laden was by 2000 -- after embassy bombings, etc. -- but I didn't know about "al Qaeda."
Desperate people...
Mayberry Machiavellis
Remember when Ron Suskind's book on Paul O'Neill came out and the Bush Administration tried to fight the release of some of the documents given to O'Neill on the grounds that they were classified? Remember how the Administration denied they had political motivations for doing so?
Well, now Senator Frist and two Republican members of the House have demanded that Richard Clarke's classified Senate Intelligence Committee testimony from 2002 be unclassified on the theory that Clarke has perjured himself. The CIA and the White House will make the call. Wonder what it will be?
Unbelievable.
The Big Dog Still Rules the Pound
I caught the end of Bill Clinton's speech last night at the Democrat's Unity Dinner and it was awesome. He is still the best. He did the best job yet of countering the Republican's attacks against Kerry and the speech had just the right tone. He also found a theme for the Kerry campaign, repeatedly invoking the phrase "and John Kerry said, 'Send Me.'" Talk about hitting a perfect pitch: it combines the Vietnam war hero background with Kerry's record in the Senate.
If you can catch a repeat, I highly recommend it.
Oh, and based on what I saw last night, I think the theory that Clinton would not work to help Kerry or give less than 100% in order to set Hillary up for 2008 is completely off base.
Baghdad State of Mind
On NPR this morning, someone read snippets of the 9/11 Commission's Committee Staff Report on Intelligence and one particular part caught my ear:
Some CIA officials expressed frustration about the pace of policymaking during the stressful summer of 2001. Although Tenet said he thought the policy machinery was working in what he called a rather orderly fashion, Deputy DCI McLaughlin told us he felt a great tension — especially in June and July 2001 — between the new administration’s need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency. Officials, including McLaughlin, were also frustrated when some policymakers, who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation, though they were persuaded once they probed it. Two veteran CTC officers who were deeply involved in UBL issues were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns. DCI Tenet, who was briefing the President and his top advisers daily, told us that his sense was that officials at the White House had grasped the sense of urgency he was communicating to them.
So let me see if I understand this correctly: the Bush Administration questioned "the validity of intelligence" regarding Al Qaeda and "wondered if it was disinformation" but did no such thing when it came to intelligence about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Wow.
I think we need to know who the "policymakers" are that the report references.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
This Headline Says It All
"Rice Seeks Private Meeting with 9/11 Panel; Clarke Charges Seen As Devastating; Commission Could Insist on Oath"
Rice apparently wants to rebut Clarke in private, unsworn testimony, because the Administration is scared beyond belief (understandably) that Clarke's testimony will greatly influence the Commission's final report. But the Commission has previously insisted that anyone rebutting sworn testimony to also be under oath.
Let's see if the "constitutional principle" falls down next to craven political need.
In His Own Words
People who know me know that I'm a big fan of Bob Woodward's writing and I've read every book he's written. The Brethren is the best inside look at the Supreme Court ever written and shows the mastery of Justice Brennan outflanking Chief Justice Burger over and over again.
But I was very disappointed with Woodward's last book, Bush At War. It was so clearly only written from the perspective of Woodward's sources, the Bush Administration. Indeed, unlike Paul O'Neill, who was slammed for taking classified documents, the Bush Administration cooperated so freely with Woodward that it gave him classified documents in order to help ensure a positive picture of Bush in the book.
One of the main elements of this, and one in which Woodward drops to the first person narrative, were a series of interviews that Bush gave to Woodward about 9/11. At the time these interviews were a real coup, because it helped to ensure that the Bush portrayal in the book was what the Administration wanted.
Now the Bush Administration has tried to counter Richard Clarke's allegations by asserting, without any factual basis, that it was engaged in terrorism and focused on al Qaeda before 9/11. So Clarke, last night on Larry King Live, noted Bush's own words in Woodward's book during one of his interviews with Woodward:
Now, what does the president say in his own words to Bob Woodward in "Bush at War?" He says, Bush acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. "I was not on point," the president said. "I didn't feel a sense of urgency."
So much for restoring "honor and integrity" to the White House.
It's time for them to go.
(BTW, Woodward has a new book out soon on Iraq and terrorism. Let's see if it is as pro-Bush.)
Contest!
All right Administration Apologists, here's a chance to make some money and defend your illegitimate President at the same time. The Center for American Progress is having a contest: find evidence of any single instance where Rice, Cheney or Bush used the words "bin Laden" or "al Qaeda" in public between January 20, 2001 and September 11, 2001.
If, as Condi Rice said yesterday, that "the assertion that somehow the Bush administration wasn't paying attention when we came into office is just false," this should be a piece of cake. Right? We're waiting.
"You Can't Have It Both Ways"
It's really sad to watch Condi Rice spout lie after lie after lie in an effort to save her President and her reputation. Rice claims that Clarke's book "is 180 degrees from everything else he said, and you just can't have it both ways." (Also every time she runs onto CNN to dispute Clarke's charges she looks worse and worse for not testifying before the Commission publicly and under oath.)
Well, the Center for American Progress has something Condi will want to see. It's a video of her comments on NBC claiming that Bush increased funding for counterterrorism "several fold" pre-9/11 contrasted with news excerpts showing the Administration did precisely the opposite.
Josh Marshall is right: when you have the law on your side, you argue the law, when you have the facts on your side, you argue the facts, and when you have neither the law nor the facts, you just bang your fist on the table.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Trash
Josh Marshall is proving indispensable on the Clarke story -- he keeps coming up with great examples of how deceitful and misleading that Bush Administration has become in attacking Clarke:
More on just how feeble the White House anti-Clarke push-back is getting. This is Bush NSC spokesman Jim Wilkinson again on Wolf Blitzer last night ...
"The terrorists weren't overseas, the terrorists were here in America. By June, the FBI says 16 of 19 terrorists in the 9/11 attacks were already here. I just don't see what this focus on process and titles and meetings. Let me also point something. If you look in this book you find interesting things such as reported in the "Washington Post" this morning. He's talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of "X-Files" stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings."
So now it seems the White House line is that Clarke is some sort of borderline personality or half-crazed crackpot. Here's the reference from the Washington Post ...
"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."
"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.
X-Files stuff ...
When you have a good case, you make it. When you don't, you just talk trash.
Or as the lawyers say, when you have the facts on your side, you bang the facts. When you've got the law on your side, you bang on the law. When you have neither, like Wilkinson, you just bang yourself.
Right on the Money
I've been critical of Daschle at times when I didn't feel that he stood up enough to the Bush Administration, but this statement issued by him on the attacks against Richard Clarke is right on the money. I've highlighted what I see as the relevant point:
When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stepped forward to criticize the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, he was immediately ridiculed by the people around the President and his credibility was attacked. Even worse, the Administration launched a government investigation to see if Secretary O'Neill improperly disclosed classified documents. He was, of course, exonerated, but the message was clear. If you speak freely, there will be consequences.
Ambassador Joseph Wilson also learned that lesson. Ambassador Wilson, who by all accounts served bravely under President Bush in the early 1990s, felt a responsibility to speak out on President Bush's false State of the Union statement on Niger and uranium. When he did, the people around the President quickly retaliated. Within weeks of debunking the President's claim, Ambassador Wilson's wife was the target of a despicable act.
Her identity as a deep-cover CIA agent was revealed to Bob Novak, a syndicated columnist, and was printed in newspapers around the country. That was the first time in our history, I believe, that the identity and safety of a CIA agent was disclosed for purely political purposes. It was an unconscionable and intolerable act.
Around the same time Bush Administration officials were endangering Ambassador Wilson's wife, they appear to have been threatening another federal employee for trying to do his job. In recent weeks Richard Foster, an actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services, has revealed that he was told he would be fired if he told Congress and the American people the real costs of last year?s Medicare bill.
Mr. Foster, in an e-mail he wrote on June 26 of last year, said the whole episode had been "pretty nightmarish." He wrote: "I'm no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policymakers for political purposes."
Think about those words. He would lose his job if he did his job. If he provided the information the Congress and the American people deserved and were entitled to, he would lose his job. When did this become the standard for our government? When did we become a government of intimidation?
And now, in today's newspapers, we see the latest example of how the people around the President react when faced with facts they want to avoid.
The White House's former lead counter-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, is under fierce attack for questioning the White House?s record on combating terrorism. Mr. Clarke has served in four White Houses, beginning with Ronald Reagan's Administration, and earned an impeccable record for his work.
Now the White House seeks to destroy his reputation. The people around the President aren't answering his allegations; instead, they are trying to use the same tactics they used with Paul O'Neill. They are trying to ridicule Mr. Clarke and destroy his credibility, and create any diversion possible to focus attention away from his serious allegations.
The purpose of government isn't to make the President look good. It isn't to produce propaganda or misleading information. It is, instead, to do its best for the American people and to be accountable to the American people.
The people around the President don't seem to believe that. They have crossed a line -- perhaps several lines -- that no government ought to cross.
We shouldn't fire or demean people for telling the truth. We shouldn't reveal the names of law enforcement officials for political gain. And we shouldn't try to destroy people who are out to make country safer.
I think the people around the President have crossed into dangerous territory. We are seeing abuses of power that cannot be tolerated.
The President needs to put a stop to it, right now. We need to get to the truth, and the President needs to help us do that.
"This is the best they can do"
Once again, I need to recommend Josh Marshall's work, this time on the Richard Clarke story. Marshall sets a standard for bloggers than is hard to even come close to. Marshall has been looking at the desperate, contradictory, nonsensical and illogical arguments that Bush Administration spokespeople have been making on the airwaves to try to counter Clarke's damning allegations. Dick Cheney (surprise, surprise) has some particular egregious misstatements.
It's also interesting that Rice's editorial in the Post yesterday contracticts statements that her deputy, Stephen Hadley, made on 60 Minutes trying to defend the Administration's position.
Marshall noted yesterday that "If they're resorting to blatant distortions and untruths this quickly they must not have a good defense." Now he's concluded "This is the best they can do."
Monday, March 22, 2004
The Lies Don't Stop
Here's a great article from the Wall Street Journal (the non-editorial page actually often does fantastic reporting) about the lies, misstatements and myths about the administration's response on 9/11. Of particular note are the frequency of lies by Bush himself.
The O'Franken Factor
I really love Al Franken and he was featured in the N.Y. Times Magazine this past Sunday. The article mentions Franken taking Bill O'Reilly at the Book Expo last year. I watched that event and man it was a spectacle. He just GAVE it to O'Reilly -- so bad that smoke was really coming out of O'Reilly's ears, sitting next to the podium. As this article notes, Franken had the cohones, in the middle of his attack, to ask O'Reilly if he could have a sip of his water. O'Reilly got so mad that he convinced Fox to launch an incredibly ill-conceived frivilous lawsuit against Franken and the publisher.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
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.
