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Thursday, September 28, 2006
The White House's History with Iraq Intelligence
In light of the controversy over the Iraq NIE on terrorism and the other "draft" report about the bleak situation in Iraq, I thought that one episode detailed in Ron Suskind's excellent book, "The One Percent Doctrine," deserves more attention.
On page 340-41 of the book, Suskind writes about a request that Vice President Cheney made after a CIA briefing in mid-November 2004, a few weeks after Bush's reelection. Jami Miscik, the CIA's analytical chief, was informed by one of her deputies that Cheney had requested at the briefing that a portion of a particular CIA be declassified and made public. Here's what Suskind writes:
Miscik knew the report - it was about the complex, often catalytic
connections between the war in Iraq and the wider war against terrorism. The
item that the Vice President wanted declassified was a small part that might
lead one to believe that the war was helping the broader campaign against
violent jihadists. The report, she knew, concluded nothing of the sort. Many of
its conclusions flowed in the opposite direction. To release that small segment
would be willfully misleading. She told the briefer to tell Cheney that she
didn't think that was such a good idea.
The Vice President expressed his outrage to Porter Goss. A few days later,
a call came from Goss's office. The call had been placed by one of Goss's
executive assistants -- emblematic, in that Goss did not make the call himself,
of how dysfunctional relations had become at the top of the CIA. The deputy
expressed the DCI's displeasure. He urged Miscik to reconsider. He described
Goss's position succinctly: "Saying no to the Vice President is the wrong
answer."
Language is an improbably powerful thing. It's just words, after all, in a
world full of noise. But certain combinations of words can move mountains and
change lives. This line did that for Miscik, even after all that she, like
others in embattled corners of the government, had gone through trying to
preserve the basics of analysis and due diligence in the face of a one percent
doctrine that could operate without them, if need be - a doctrine that prized
"response" above all.
"Actually," she replied, "sometimes saying no to the Vice President is what
we get paid for."
She hung up and fired off a memo to Goss, saying -- she later recalled --
that "this was just the sort of thing that had gotten us into trouble, time and
again, over the past few years. Telling only half the story, the part that makes
us look good, and keeping the rest classified. Eventually, it comes out and it
looks bad, real bad, and we lose moral capital."
A few days later, Miscik got word, again from a Goss deputy, that the DCI
would reluctantly support her decision. A few weeks after that, she was gone.
"It was only a matter of time at that point," she recalled.
Her memo -- a summation of a long-standing school of thought of which she
is one of countless adherents -- is, of course, classified. That means, by
accepted definitions of such things that its release would compromise the
security of the nation. Indeed.
Something to remember as the Administration begins to leak intelligence to try to support its position in the next month...
Here's the Pre-9/11 History... In Ten Minutes
Keith Olbermann does it again, this time summarizing the Bush Administration's criminally negligent response to a clear terrorist threat up to 9/11. A transcript of the show is here and you can watch it here. It's quite nicely done, and puts the lie to many of the Administration's talking points, and shows that Condi Rice, in particular, has been incredibly untruthful . One point I had never heard about before:
But while it has become conventional wisdom, although debunked by the 9/11
report, that Mr. Clinton dropped an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden, it
is rare to hear anyone discuss whether similar but real feelers were ever
extended to Mr. Bush. And it is, we suspect, even more rare to see this tape of
the Bush White House addressing reports of such feelers in February 2001, after
the government knew al Qaeda had attacked the U.S.S. “Cole.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, February 27, 2001)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they
are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States
drops its sanctions, and the—they have a kind of deal that they want to make
with the United States. Do you have any comments (INAUDIBLE)?
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS Secretary: Let me take that and get back
to you on that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN: There is no record of any subsequent discussion on that
matter.
Oops.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Condi Lies.. Again
After Bill Clinton's smackdown of Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, the Bush Administration sent Condi out again to defend their actions pre-9/11. One of their lines of attack on Clinton has been concerning his statement that Clarke was "demoted" by the Bush Administration. Here's what Condi said on that point:
She also said Clinton's claims that Richard Clarke - the White House
anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country's "best guy" - had been demoted
by Bush were bogus.
"Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And
he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some
several months later," she said.
Now, Condi knows better. But she just can't help it. As Condi well knows, Clinton wasn't referring to Clarke leaving AFTER 9/11. He was referring to what happened to Clarke when Bush and Condi and the crew took office on January 20, 2001. You see, under Clinton, Richard Clarke's position as counterterrorism czar was a cabinet level postion, so Clarke met with the principals directly, showing how important the terrorism issue was for the Clinton Administration.
Yet when Bush took power, he demoted Clarke's position -- it was no longer a Cabinet level position and Clarke was told to meet with the deputies and run things through them before he could deal with the principals, which, as Clarke and the 9/11 Commission detail, was an extremely inefficient and bureacratic process that resulted in Clarke's warnings being ignored by the top Bush officials, including -- GUESS WHO? -- Condi. (Condi was obsessed with missile defense, China and -- surprise, surprise -- Iraq, so Clarke was viewed as chicken little). So, by not continuing the cabinet level status of the top counterterrorism official in the U.S. government, the Bush Administration made crystal clear its view of the importance of the issue of terrorism before 9/11: it simply wasn't important
Condi also had this to say:
The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left
a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the
presidential transition in 2001.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice
responded during the hourlong session.
Oh really? Then what is this?
On January 25, 2001, 5 days after Bush entered office, Clarke sent Condi a detailed memo about Al Qaeda and terrorist concerns. The memorandum attached -- guess what? -- a detailed plan, or "comprehensive strategy", to fight Al Qaeda, written by Clarke in 2000. See it for yourself here.
Condi, I think your pants are on fire again.
BTW, I also recommend Keith Olbermann's commentary about the Clinton Fox interview. You can read it or watch it in its entirety here. But one point, about the allegation made in "Path to 9/11" and by right wingers, that the Lewinsky scandal and Starr investigation, caused Clinton to be distracted, gets Olbermann particularly incensed:
Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to
9/11." Of that company’s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply
put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new
and improved history.
The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this
slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it—who try to
sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag
Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews—have simply skipped past its most glaring
flaw.
Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin
Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on
Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?
That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The
Dog."
Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s
judgment.
Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri—the future attorney general—echoed
Coats.
Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky
witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?
Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two
years?
Who corrupted the political media?
Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the
counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had
warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from
the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, “All Monica All The Time”?
Who distracted whom?
It's a sad state of the current news establishment when it takes a former SportsCenter anchor to be a truthteller.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Finally
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend watching Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace on the Fox News Channel concerning the disinformation campaign put out about Clinton's pre-9/11 record on terrorism. Each point Clinton makes is absolutely true and backed up, as he says, by Richard Clarke's book.
I just wish that Clinton had spoken out sooner, rather than let the right-wing revisionists succeed in convincing the public that Clinton hadn't done enough, when it was Bush who was nearly criminally negligent in his neglect of terrorism issues before 9/11.
