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Monday, September 11, 2006
Clarke: Clinton Administration Officials Shared a "Common Fixation" With Fighting Terrorism
Richard Clarke has issued a statement slamming ABC's 9/11 movie and defending the Clinton Administration's focus on terrorism. Noting that he is "someone who was directly involved in almost every event depicted in the fictionalized docudrama," Clarke had this to say:
Although I am not one to easily believe in conspiracy theories and have
spent a great deal of time debunking them, it is hard to escape the conclusion
that the errors in this screen play are more than the result of dramatization
and time compression. There is throughout the screenplay a consistent bias and
distortion seeking to portray senior Clinton Administration officials as holding
back the hard charging CIA, FBI, and military officers who would otherwise have
prevented 9-11.
The exact opposite is true. From the President, to all of his White
House team, and NSC Principals (Lake, Berger, Albright, Tenet, Reno) there was a
common fixation with terrorism, al qaeda, and bin Ladin. The President approved
every counter-terrorism operation presented to him, including many that CIA
proved unable or unwilling to implement. He increased counter-terrorism spending
by 400% and initiated the first homeland security program in forty years. Even
though the US had taken relatively few casualties from al qaeda at the time, the
President repeatedly authorized the use of lethal force against bin Ladin and
his deputies and personally requested the US military to develop plans for
"commando operations" againstthem. Even though he knew the timing of an attack
aimed at killing bin Ladin would be labeled by critics as a political diversion,
Clinton decided to follow the advice of his national security team and pay the
price politically.
Again, Clarke is one of the few eyewitnesses to what went on in both the Clinton and Bush Adminsitrations. His opinion should carry a fair amount of weight as to what actually went on.
Operation Ignore
Al Franken, in a chapter in his excellent book, "Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them," nicely summarizes the extreme neglect by the Bush Administration concerning the terrorist threat before 9/11 that I discussed below.
