Through all this commotion and vitriol over Richard Clarke's 9/11 Commission testimony there is a pervading aura of the surreal. I say that because, at least in its broad outlines, little he has said is even that controversial.
I don't mean every conversation he recounts or each incident he says occurred in the White House, but the broad narrative -- for instance, the fact that the new administration did not place a high priority on transnational terrorism as a major threat to the United States, certainly not as high a priority as the previous administration.
The key, as we've noted before, was the new administration's abiding belief in the centrality of states as the actors in international affairs. That assumption not only preceded 9/11 but, perversely, survived it.
As we'll discuss in much greater depth in the future, the hidebound unwillingness to rethink that assumption after the 9/11 attacks is at the root of most of our greatest mistakes and strategic failures over the last two and a half years.
But, again, that's for another post.
Let me note an example.
At the beginning of 2000, Condi Rice wrote an article in Foreign Affairs outlining the sort of foreign and national security policy America should pursue. It was published as part of the journal's treatment of the 2000 election and in the article Rice was identified as one of then-candidate George W. Bush's foreign policy advisors. The article was intended to be a quasi-official statement of Bush's policies for the foreign policy elite -- the folks who read Foreign Affairs.
I read the piece at the time, or near after, and it was certainly very widely read by people in the foreign policy community.
I mention it now because this evening a reader reminded me of it and brought a now-pertinent fact to my attention. In the article Rice notes five key foreign policy priorities. Only the last made any mention of terrrorism and it was: "to deal decisively with the threat of rogue regimes and hostile powers, which is increasingly taking the forms of the potential for terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction."
Her article then elaborates on each of the five priorities and takes up the fifth toward the end of the piece.
It's well worth linking through and reading.
Not only does she not mention al Qaida or Osama bin Laden, she scarcely even mentions terrorism in the sense we now generally understand it. Her discussion is about North Korea, Iraq and Iran -- rogue states that might threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction (primarily with the use of missiles) -- and, to a much lesser extent, state-sponsored terrorism from Iran.
The key policy prescription for this section is contained in this paragraph ...
One thing is clear: the United States must approach regimes like North Korea resolutely and decisively. The Clinton administration has failed here, sometimes threatening to use force and then backing down, as it often has with Iraq. These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration. Second, we should accelerate efforts to defend against these weapons. This is the most important reason to deploy national and theater missile defenses as soon as possible, to focus attention on U.S. homeland defenses against chemical and biological agents, and to expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds.
The central policy recommendation is national missile defense -- a defensive capacity aimed at states. And though there is mention of chemical and biological agents and the need to "expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds" even a quick read of the entire section shows clearly that ideologically-based transnational terrorism simply wasn't on her radar as a significant threat to the United States.
There's no mention of Afghanistan or the madrassas in Pakistan, the importance of knocking down terrorist financial networks, Islamist sleeper cells in American or Germany. None of it.
Rice's own words from 2000 provide a lot of back-up for one of the major arguments for which Clarke is now being villified by Rice and her allies.
--Josh Marshall
Maybe Richard Clarke lied in the July 2002 testimony. Maybe he's an al Qaida mole. Maybe instead of being 98% water like the rest of us he's 98% wax. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe ...
Earlier this afternoon I wrote a lengthy post (a few too many typos in the first iteration, for which I apologize, but I thought time was of the essence) on the shameless and I suspect (for himself) eventually quite damaging speech Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist gave on the Senate floor this afternoon, accusing Dick Clarke of being a perjuror and a profiteer on the blood of 9/11.
Though I didn't see it, I read it. And it's a truly egregious text. To have read it on the Senate floor is the sort of act that will, I think, permanently change how I see him. In any case, see the post below for more details and we'll be discussing it more later. But look at this short passage in a story tonight on MSNBC ...
“Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath,” Frist said in a speech from the Senate floor, alleging that Clarke said in 2002 that the Bush administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida before the attacks.Frist later retreated from directly accusing Clarke of perjury, telling reporters that he personally had no knowledge that there were any discrepancies between Clarke’s two appearances. But he said, “Until you have him under oath both times, you don’t know.”
That's astonishing.
I never cease to be amazed at these guys' ability to outpace my ability to impute bad faith to them.
A few hours after accusing Clarke of perjury, he admits that he has no idea -- not just no idea whether he perjured himself, which is a fairly technical question, but no idea whether there were any inconsistencies at all.
He was just running it up the flag pole. Maybe, maybe, maybe ...
As long as we're talking about it, let me share with you some highlights from Frist's speech ...
I am equally troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation’s most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001....
Mr. President, I do not know if Mr. Clarke’s motive for theses charges is partisan gain, personal profit, self promotion, or animus because of his failure to win a promotion in the Bush Administration. But the one thing that his motive could not possibly be is to bring clarity to the issue of how we avoid future September 11 attacks.
...
Third, Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath. In July 2002, in front of the Congressional Joint Inquiry on the September 11 attacks, Mr. Clarke testified under oath that the Administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al Qaeda during its first seven months in office.
Mr. President, it is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media. But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress it is a far more serious matter. As I mentioned, the intelligence committee is seeking to have Mr. Clarke’s previous testimony declassified so as to permit an examination of Mr. Clarke's two different accounts. Loyalty to any Administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied before Congress.
...
In his appearance before the 9-11 Commission, Mr. Clarke’s theatrical apology on behalf of the nation was not his right, his privilege or his responsibility. In my view it was not an act of humility, but an act of supreme arrogance and manipulation. Mr Clarke can and will answer for his own conduct – but that is all.
Regardless of Mr. Clarke’s motive or what he says or implies in his new book, the fact remains that this terrible attack was not caused by the United States Government. No Administration was responsible for the attack. Our nation did not invite the attack.
Amazing stuff.
And speaking of amazing stuff, note this ...
If you recall last Sunday night's 60 Minutes, in which Clark first made his claims, Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley essentially accused Clarke of lying about an alleged encounter between Clarke and President Bush just after 9/11. In this encounter, the president supposedly pressed Clarke to investigate Saddam's possible ties to the attacks.
Hadley was quickly tripped up by the fact that CBS had two sources who confirmed that the encounter had occurred, including one who was in fact present during the discussion.
The White House has kept calling Clarke a liar until today. From CBS this evening ...
Retracted White House statements do little to boost public trust. CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports, until today, the Bush administration denied a meeting had taken place between the president and Clarke, during which Bush allegedly instructed Clarke to investigate Saddam Hussein and Iraq after Sept. 11.The White House today reversed that comment, and staff members now tell reporters, "We are not denying such a meeting took place. It probably did."
So they called him a liar. But it seems they either had no evidence or their evidence turned out to be wrong.
Now, consider this. Do you think the White House would have changed its tune if CBS didn't come up with another source?
And how about this?
My recollection is that this meeting was supposed to have been an impromptu encounter in the West Wing -- not something like an Oval Office meeting for which there would almost certainly be some sort of record. I also seem to recall that Clarke said this encounter included him and other unnamed persons.
If that's true, and the White House didn't know the identities of the other people (the unnamed persons), who else would have been able to deny that the encounter occurred except the president himself?
Others could confirm it, yes. But if Clarke and Bush were the only identified participants in the alleged encounter, and if the encounter didn't actually happen, who else but Bush himself would be able to say it didn't happen? One of the two or three other people in on this conversation which, in fact, never occurred?
Think about it.
Late Update: Several readers have noted that in Clarke's book, his description of this meeting does reference the names of two persons involved. But those may well have been the two sources who confirmed the account to CBS. If either had denied it, I have to imagine the White House would have gotten them on camera or in front of a notary public real quick. So, the question remains, what was the basis of the White House's denial that this incident occurred, if not a denial from the president?
--Josh Marshall
Last night I heard through the grapevine that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss was going to ask the Justice Department to bring perjury charges against Richard Clarke.
(As it happens, I've heard at least two other thermonuclear options they were considering using against him -- this just seems to be the one they decided on.)
I told my friend that I thought the White House would be awfully foolish to let that sort of prosecution get underway since the discovery requests from Clarke's attorneys could prove rather uncomfortable for the White House.
But now it seems we know what the story is. According to several news reports out early this afternoon, Congressional Republicans are seeking to declassify testimony Clarke provided on the hill in July 2002. The implication of comments from Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist is that that testimony and this week's don't match and that Clarke must have perjured himself in one of the two instances.
Note that the testimony is from July 2002. That's one month before the backgrounder released by Fox News, which Republican Commission members challenged him with when he testified before them.
They've already argued that these two statements are in bold contradiction. So I think it's a pretty good assumption that the July 2002 testimony is substantially the same, if perhaps more detailed, as that backgrounder in question.
The idea here is to find another version of the same purported contradiction in which both statements are under oath -- thus getting the perjury cudgel out of the tool box.
Now, with respect to that backgrounder, Clarke has said that he was following orders to tell the truth, but with a spin, and did so. And it's worth noting that if that were a crime this White House would be emptied out pretty quickly. But let's set that aside for the moment.
Back up for a moment and look at what's happening here.
What this is about isn't Condi Rice or Richard Clarke or even George W. Bush. It's about what happened -- finding out what happened.
One side wants to find out; the other doesn't. This whole story turns on that simple fact. Why else try to destroy Clark unless what he has to say is profoundly damaging? Liars are usually easily discredited; it's the truth-tellers who need to be destroyed.
This administration has used and continues to use literally unprecedented means to maintain secrecy in order to keep this information -- what happened -- bottled up in the White House and in other parts of the executive branch.
We don't know what Condi Rice did because the documents haven't been released; nor have the minutes of meetings. Nor will she testify in public or even privately under oath.
We don't know what most of the key players did -- or at least we don't know with certainty -- because the locks on the information are being held that tight (the entirety of John Dean's new book Worse than Watergate is excellent in detailing this).
Yet Clarke's new enemies now want to use the fact that they control the Justice Department and the process of declassification to knock him out because he is, to all appearances, trying to bust open that very vault of secrecy.
In other words, precisely the tools these folks refuse to use in the interests of keeping everything secret they are more happy to use to crush someone who is opposing them.
As you know, House Speaker Denny Hastert, who opposed a 9/11 commission, opposed its funding, and opposed its deadline extension, now -- in a line, destined straight for the Daily Show --- says "We need to lean forward in making as much information available to the public as possible, without compromising the national security interests of the nation."
This is Plame all over again, just with the lights on -- a kind of behavior -- a mix of pervasive secrecy and the use of state power to punish political enemies -- that is literally a danger to the republic.
Now, let's consider three different possibilities about what's happening here.
The first possibility is that Clarke is just a straight-up perjurer, that this week he not only perjured himself but slandered the president and misinformed the public.
The second is that it's a scenario like I noted above -- this is the same case as the FOX backgrounder; and the Republicans found a copy under oath to try to use the machinery of the Justice Department to silence him.
The third is that this is just a bluff -- they want to imply there's a contradiction, but they won't actually declassify and release the documents, thus having it both ways.
I strongly suspect it's a mix of two and three.
But why guess? Let's find out. Release all his testimony. All of it.
I think Bob Graham -- former Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and Co-Chair of the Joint Committee in question -- had it just right in what he said today ...
I concur with Senator Frist's call for de-classification of Richard Clarke's testimony to the Joint Inquiry. To the best of my recollection, there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory in that testimony and what Mr. Clarke has said this week.I would add three other recommendations:
First, if Mr. Clarke's testimony is to be released, it should be released in its entirety -- not, as the Bush administration has done in the past, selectively edited so that only portions favorable to the White House are made public.
Second, the Bush administration should de-classify other documents that surround the Clarke testimony, such as his January 25, 2002, plan for action against al Qaeda, in order to clarify the issues that are in dispute.
And finally, the Bush administration should release all other testimony and documents related to 9-11 for which classification can no longer be justified -- including the 27 pages of the Joint Inquiry's final report that address the involvement of a foreign government in supporting some of the 19 hijackers while they lived among us and finalized their evil plot.
The American people deserve to know what their government has done -- and should be doing -- to protect them from terrorists, and who should be held accountable for shortcomings that have left our country vulnerable."
Compare that with one vintage moment from Frist's performance ...
I do not know if Mr. Clarke’s motive for these charges is partisan gain, personal profit, self promotion, or animus because of his failure to win a promotion in the Bush Administration. But the one thing that his motive could not possibly be is to bring clarity to the issue of how we avoid future September 11 attacks.
Speaking only for my part -- though I suspect for others as well -- I have no stake in Richard Clarke. I think he's a hero because I'm quite confident (on the basis of very strong evidence) that he's telling the truth and now facing the whirlwind that we all knew these folks would bring against him.
(Bear in mind that top White House aides have told the press that the president personally initiated and is directing this campaign against Clarke. Not outside rabble-rousers, not nefarious aides operating on their own account, but the president himself. This is all his doing, according to his own staffers.)
If it turns out that what he said this week was really a bunch of lies, then he's no hero at all. And he really should be prosecuted. For just that reason I'm happy to let all the information come out, just as Graham says. This isn't an indifference to Clark's fate, but rather respect for him -- sufficient belief that the truth is his friend to want the whole truth to come out.
If it ends up that he told the truth this week but perjured himself two years ago, I'd be disappointed, and he may have to face an indictment, but he'd still be a hero for telling the truth now. The fact that the Bush White House got him to lie for them then hardly puts them in a good light.
In any case, any legitimate legal jeopardy (as opposed to some bogus charge) Clarke may face is really only a matter of concern for him, his family and friends, and the Republicans who are trying to shut him up.
If you're just interested in having the facts come out, then it's really not a great source of concern. For the public, the fact that Clarke might have lied once and told the truth once isn't really point. All that matters here is what the truth actually is, and that it comes out. And the White House is doing us the favor of showing that that is not a goal they share.
--Josh Marshall
This from the Associated Press ...
Republicans have accused Democratic U.S. House candidate Stephanie Herseth of maintaining a secret Web page to receive campaign donations raised from ads on liberal groups' Internet sites.But a Herseth campaign official scoffed at the charge, saying the Web page is not secret and can be found easily with a standard search of the Internet.
The truth and they think it's hell ...
--Josh Marshall
How low will they go? Now Clarke's a <$NoAd$>racist (from last night's Crossfire ...
ROBERT NOVAK: Congressman, do you believe, you're a sophisticated guy, do you believe watching these hearings that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?RAHM EMANUEL: Say that again?
ROBERT NOVAK: Do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?
RAHM EMANUEL: No, no. Bob, give me a break. No. No.
And then from Ann Coulter ...
Isn't that just like a liberal? The chair-warmer describes Bush as a cowboy and Rumsfeld as his gunslinger -- but the black chick is a dummy. Maybe even as dumb as Clarence Thomas. Perhaps someday liberals could map out the relative intelligence of various black government officials for us.
The abuse this White House has suffered from career civil servants ...
--Josh Marshall
More dirty scoundrels who won't give Condi Rice and the <$NoAd$>president their due ...
[Outgoing Deputy National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick], who stayed through the first four months of the Bush administration, said, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" a strong focus on terrorism. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke and the CSG [the Counterterrorism Strategy Group he chaired] were doing." General Hugh Shelton, whose term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff began under Clinton and ended under Bush, concurred. In his view, the Bush administration moved terrorism "farther to the back burner."
America Unbound, p. 76
Ivo Daalder & James Lindsay
Who knew how far the Clarke cabal stretched?
--Josh Marshall
Last night MSNBC is reported that, according to a senior White House official, Richard Clarke's testimony on the 9/11 "terrorist attacks was considered so damaging that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice planned to ask the panel for a private interview to answer his allegations."
Again, the request is for a private interview. But if you read down into the piece it seems the hang-up may be that Rice or the White House don't want the testimony to be under oath.
The article says that "panel has consistently required anyone rebutting sworn testimony to be similarly under oath." Since Rice is now under fire and the Commission has more leverage, they may hold the line.
Now, what's going on here exactly?
Every White House tries to keep what we might call a penumbra of protection around White House aides. I noted yesterday that two of Rice's predecessors, Brzezinski in 1980 and Berger in 1997, have submitted to testify. But clearly it doesn't happen often.
Yet, having said that, it is very hard for me to grasp the constitutional issue implicated in Rice's taking an oath to tell the truth when she speaks to the Commission.
A constitutional issue involved in a presidential aide speaking to a fact-finding commission? Not a determinative one, I think. But yes, an issue.
Whether the testimony is public? Maybe.
But whether or not the testimony is sworn? I don't get that. This seems especially the case when she wants to appear specifically to rebut other sworn testimony. How can you claim the need to preserve the confidentiality of the president's communications with his top aides, then break that confidence to refute someone's criticism, and then say you won't make the charges under oath?
As far as I can see this is not compelled testimony. So presumably Rice can simply decline to answer questions she thinks tread too closely on her confidential advice to the president, right? Certainly there could be some invocation of executive privilege?
Obviously, not having the testimony sworn gives her ... well, more leeway.
But I'm not sure what the grounds there are to justify it -- especially as she is now eager to speak with the Commission again to challenge Richard Clarke, who, as we know, had to make all his claims under oath. Once again, she wants to lacerate her opponents, but never on a ground that makes for even close to a fair fight.
--Josh Marshall
Watch out! A shoe just dropped!
The Times just posted a story for tomorrow's paper about Condi Rice's efforts at damage control on the Richard Clarke matter.
Here are the first three grafs ...
The White House may have sent a phalanx of top officials to Capitol Hill this week to be grilled by the Sept. 11 panel, but the one official who did not appear publicly has turned out to be the official the panel wanted most: Condoleezza Rice.As she prepares to leave her job at the end of the year, Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser, now finds herself at the center of a political storm, furiously defending both the White House and her own reputation.
But her effort to blunt the criticism by spending the week on television and in news media briefings may have had the opposite effect. She has infuriated some members of the panel, who wonder why she has time for CNN but not for them. On Thursday they questioned again whether she should be subpoenaed to testify if she does not appear in public to answer questions about the Bush administration's handling of Al Qaeda before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Wait. Let's back up<$Ad$> a second.
As she prepares to leave her job?
Am I like totally out of the loop on what's happening in this town? Or have we not heard before that Condi Rice has decided to resign as National Security Advisor at the end of President Bush's first term?
Are the authors of this piece just trying to signal the possibility that the president could lose the election and thus her tenure as National Security Advisor would end? If that's it, the phrasing certainly leaves some room for confusion.
I guess it's possible that this is a reference to Rice's hopes to succeed Colin Powell since Powell, according to many press reports, has signalled he won't stay for a second Bush term.
But to the best of my knowledge this is the first time we've heard this about Rice -- certainly in so declarative and unambiguous a fashion.
Even with Powell, the statements are usually couched in some fuzzifying language since he's issued a few non-denial denials when asked if it's true that he's leaving. This, on the other hand, seems crystal clear.
It seems odd to me that we'd have such a prominent placement of a clause so clearly signalling Rice's departure, especially at a moment when she's more embattled than she's been since she came into office.
Late Update: Laura Rozen notes that on January 7th in the Times, Bumiller said Rice "insists [2004] will be her last year of service in the White House."
--Josh Marshall
Not Funny: Read David Corn on President Bush's WMD jokes. Yuck, yuck, yuck ...
--Josh Marshall
It's worth glancing at this whole article in which the Times' Elizabeth Bumiller provides an account of Condi Rice's explanation of the apparent contradicition between Dick Cheney's claim that Clarke "wasn't in the loop" on pre-9/11 terrorism planning and Rice's claim that Clarke "was in every meeting that was held on terrorism."
In this case Cheney's story is matter and Rice's is anti-matter. So perhaps that explains why things have gotten kind of explosive over the last couple days.
--Josh Marshall
Anyone who has ever been young -- which, I suppose, includes everyone -- remembers some shameless whippersnapper who had an older brother, or older sister, or some other sort of protector. And from under the wing or shadow of that protector they'd hurl all manner of taunts and insults and boasts at all the other little kids, confident that none of them could fight back or do anything about it.
Which brings us to Condoleeza Rice.
Here's Richard Clarke, at the center of the storm, up there on Capitol Hill getting grilled over his story. And from the peanut gallery, there's Condi Rice, heading over to the microphones at the White House every chance she gets to attack Clarke when no one can ask her any serious follow ups.
A couple hours after Clarke testified Rice headed over to the mikes and called his charges "scurrilous."
"This story has so many twists and turns, he needs to get his story straight," she said.
Rice truly has the best of all worlds. She hangs back at the White House shooting spit balls at Clarke and the rest of them. But she doesn't have to back anything up because she doesn't have to testify under oath or get questioned.
Needless to say, Rice rather undermines her arguments about the constitutional importance of maintaining the privacy of her advice to the president since she's sharing all sorts of information on the Post op-ed page and more or less every TV show in the universe.
When she went down to the White House press room to make the statements above, she also read from a previously classifed email Clarke had written to her just after 9/11. Needless to say, it was declassifed so she could try to use it to damage Clarke. Or to put it another way, it was declassified for narrowly political purposes -- taking advantage of the fact that the NSC, which Rice runs, is in charge of that process of declassification.
Evidently there are very few classes of confidential information Rice is not willing to publicize. She just doesn't want to get questioned.
Now, perhaps you'll say, following the White House line, that she'd love to testify but a constitutional principle is at stake and she has, as she puts it, a "responsibility to maintain what is a longstanding separation -- constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."
Now, there is a constitutional issue involved. But Rice is trying to get people to think that members of the White House staff never testify. And that's not even close to true. In my hand I have a 2002 Congressional Research Service study that lists a whole slew of presidential aides and advisors who've testified in the past.
Indeed, it lists two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor who've given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997.
Interestingly, the CRS study lists five examples of cases where presidential aides refused to testify. It's not clear whether this list is supposed to be exhaustive. And in most cases presidential aides are simply not even asked to testify at all, for reasons of comity between the branches if nothing else. But of the five listed four are from the Nixon administration. And each of those were before the Watergate investigation really got under way. A whole slew of Nixon aides had to head up to the Hill in 1974 after things started to go south for them -- so perhaps we haven't heard the final word on this matter.
In any case, there's a high bar for testimony from a National Security Advisor. But it's happened before. And more than once. If they wanted her to testify, she could testify. What they want is for her to be able to lacerate her critics, discuss whichever parts of her advice to the president would be helpful to her politically at the moment, and freely declassify documents which she or the White House believes will hurt her enemies.
She's a veritable information geyser, a one-woman-FOIA. She just won't answer questions under oath.
--Josh Marshall
The cudgel the Republicans on the 9/11 Commission <$NoAd$>tried to use against Richard Clarke today was the background briefing which the White House released to Fox News.
Here's former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehmann (itals added)...
I never got Jim Thompson to stand before 50 photographers reading your book. And I certainly never got 60 Minutes to coordinate the showing of its interview with you with 15 network news broadcasts, the selling of the movie rights, and your appearance here today. So I would say, Bravo. (LAUGHTER) Until I started reading those press reports, and I said this can't be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack -- this book -- on President Bush. That's not what I heard in the interviews. And I hope you're going to tell me, as you apologized to the families for all of us who were involved in national security, that this tremendous difference -- and not just in nuance, but in the stories you choose to tell -- is really the result of your editors and your promoters, rather than your studied judgment, because it is so different from the whole thrust of your testimony to us. And similarly, when you add to it the inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said as late as August '05, you've got a real credibility problem. And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you, I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.
Here's how Fox News described Lehmann's comment ...
"You've got a real credibility problem," John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan, told Clarke, calling the witness "an active partisan selling a book."Clarke responded: "I don't think it's a question of morality at all, I think it's a question of politics."
Now, get a load of this Clarke guy! Okay, wait, don't get a load of him yet. Lehmann's broadside was harsh enough. Did Fox accurately portray what Lehmann said? I'll let you decide.
Okay, now ... get a load of this Clarke guy! Lehmann accuses him of all this terrible stuff. And this character Clarke comes back with, "Hey buddy, morality, shmorality. It's all politics to me!"
Hmmm. Actually, that wasn't his response. That was his response to a completely different exchange, which came later ...
THOMPSON: Mr. Clarke, in this background briefing, as Senator Kerrey has now described it, for the press in August of 2002, you intended to mislead the press, did you not?CLARKE: No. I think there is a very fine line that anyone who's been in the White House, in any administration, can tell you about. And that is when you are special assistant to the president and you're asked to explain something that is potentially embarrassing to the administration, because the administration didn't do enough or didn't do it in a timely manner and is taking political heat for it, as was the case there, you have a choice. Actually, I think you have three choices. You can resign rather than do it. I chose not to do that. Second choice is...
THOMPSON: Why was that, Mr. Clarke? You finally resigned because you were frustrated.CLARKE: I was, at that time, at the request of the president, preparing a national strategy to defend America's cyberspace, something which I thought then and think now is vitally important. I thought that completing that strategy was a lot more important than whether or not I had to provide emphasis in one place or other while discussing the facts on this particular news story. The second choice one has, Governor, is whether or not to say things that are untruthful. And no one in the Bush White House asked me to say things that were untruthful, and I would not have said them. In any event, the third choice that one has is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were, and that is what I did. I think that is what most people in the White House in any administration do when they're asked to explain something that is embarrassing to the administration.
THOMPSON: But you will admit that what you said in August of 2002 is inconsistent with what you say in your book?
CLARKE: No, I don't think it's inconsistent at all. I think, as I said in your last round of questioning, Governor, that it's really a matter here of emphasis and tone. I mean, what you're suggesting, perhaps, is that as special assistant to the president of the United States when asked to give a press backgrounder I should spend my time in that press backgrounder criticizing him. I think that's somewhat of an unrealistic thing to expect.
THOMPSON: Well, what it suggests to me is that there is one standard of candor and morality for White House special assistants and another standard of candor and morality for the rest of America. I don't get that.
CLARKE: I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics.
THOMPSON: Well, I... (APPLAUSE)
THOMPSON: I'm not a Washington insider. I've never been a special assistant in the White House. I'm from the Midwest. So I think I'll leave it there.
We'll touch on the substance of the matter later. In general I think Fred Kaplan had it just right in the title of his piece this afternoon: "Richard Clarke KOs the Bushies."
--Josh Marshall
The campaign to destroy Dick Clarke's credibility is today rolling out (or I should say the White House is rolling out) a background briefing Clarke gave in August 2002. (Needless to say, the White House has taken it off background -- which is in itself reminiscent of this earlier incident. Interestingly, the transcript has thus far only appeared on the White House-subservient Fox News network, which may be a point that bears watching.)
They've brought this transcript forth because in it Clarke seems to follow some of the same line or spin that the Bush administration is now using against him -- much of it this point about whether there was a 'plan' handed over. Now, I've given it a quick read. And on some points there's not much of a contradiction at all. On other points there are contradictions, though I think one of the issues here is that what now Clarke says the new team ignored wasn't a Clinton administration plan per se, but rather his plan.
In any case, the larger point I think is this: Career civil servants working for a given White House do tend to follow that White House's spin when they're giving background briefings. That's hardly a surprise. It's somewhat in the nature of the enterprise.
Luckily we don't have to rely on what Clarke said then or what he's saying now.
He's now come forward, speaking for himself, with a long list of detailed claims and accusations about the White House's inattention to the terrorism issue during the first eight months of the administration and their desire to wrench the war on terror into a second Iraq war after 9/11.
As Fred Kaplan notes in this excellent piece in Slate, if Clarke's claims are factually wrong they should be easily rebuttable -- given that the White House has all the relevant documents and evidence at its disposal. Yet, thus far, they've scarcely made an attempt and have focused all their fire on attacking Clarke personally -- that he was liar and a boob and both out-of-the-loop and responsible for everything that went wrong.
That pretty much tells you the whole story.
--Josh Marshall
McClellan on Richard Clarke from yesterday's gaggle <$NoAd$> ...
QUESTION: And then, can I ask you to clarify, too, because one of the points you've made is he was here for nearly a decade; why did he raise these concerns -- why did he raise these concerns a year-and-a-half after he left? What, then, was the report that he put together that, then, was on the President's desk September 4th, the action plan in terms of doing --McCLELLAN: Well, that was something the National Security Council put together. That was something -- it was a comprehensive strategy for eliminating al Qaeda, not rolling back al Qaeda. The President wanted a strategy that had teeth, that when we came in and we looked at -- looked at the threat posed by al Qaeda, we made it a top priority. But the President wanted to go beyond the actions of the past, which were maybe aimed at rolling back al Qaeda. He wanted a comprehensive strategy that had teeth. That's why we made al Qaeda a priority from very early on.
And then you also look at what we did after 9/11. We immediately took action to go into Afghanistan and remove the Taliban from power and to deny al Qaeda the safe haven that they had in that country to plan and plot against America and our friends and allies.
QUESTION: But you have left the impression that Clarke did little or nothing to deal with or propose solutions to dealing with al Qaeda while he was here.
McCLELLAN: No, no, no. Here in the United States. No, no. Dr. Rice actually asked him for ideas in the very first week of this administration that he had for going after al Qaeda. And some of those -- some of those we pursued --
QUESTION: Wasn't he the one who pushed in many ways and helped put together the report that landed on the President's desk September 4th?
McCLELLAN: He was involved in our counterterrorism efforts up until October 9th of 2001, when that position was separated, something that he actually suggested, as well.
QUESTION: Well, help clarify, because if he was involved with and helped author this report that had to deal with dealing with al Qaeda that landed on the President's desk a week before September 11th --
McCLELLAN: At the direction of --
QUESTION: -- how can you say he did nothing or raised no concerns?
McCLELLAN: At the direction of -- at the direction of the National Security Advisor. I'm talking about here in the United States. Remember that the fact is that he was not in many of the meetings where he would have some of the direct knowledge of what he asserts. He appears to be more wrapped up in the process about what title he had and what meetings he was able to participate in or not participate in. The world according to Dick Clarke is all about Dick Clarke. If he and his ideas are not at the center of all that is going on, then he thinks you cannot be taking terrorism seriously.
Well, let's look at the facts. Let's look at the action we took. This President took action immediately upon coming into office to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda. The first major foreign policy directive of this administration was a comprehensive -- to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda, not to roll back al Qaeda.
QUESTION: Understood, but explain how there's not a glaring contradiction. You say he did nothing, and yet there was a report that was on the President's desk a week before September 11th.
McCLELLAN: What did I say? Wait, wait. What did I say? I did not say --
QUESTION: You said he was more involved in process and which meetings he was in. I’m trying to understand --
McCLELLAN: He is more focused on -- he appears to be more focused on process and what title he had and what meetings he was in or not in.
QUESTION: What was the report on September 4th?
McCLELLAN: That was the comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda, at the direction of Dr. Rice and the National Security Council and the President of the United States, who made it clear early on. He said, I don't want to be swatting at flies, we need a comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
I don't usually keep up that well on the political cartoons (my loss). But see Tom Toles today on Clarke.
--Josh Marshall
The lead summary from this <$NoAd$>evening's uber-insider Nelson Report ...
Clarke Terrorism Charges...White House must head-off before it gets "outside the Beltway"Summary: the 9/11 Commission has always been a high risk potential for the Bush Administration, hence the very careful limits put on official cooperation. Hearings this week, "bombshell" book by former WH staffer Richard Clarke, have high risk potential to change attitudes "outside The Beltway". Polls consistently show the public still puts "trust" in double digits for Bush over Kerry on terrorism war. So White House reacts quickly, and very very firmly, to anything resembling a credible criticism of Bush...see the deconstruction of ex-Treas. Sec. O'Neill, UN inspector Blix, and now Clarke. The White House's top terrorism expert going back to the Reagan Administration provides anecdotal and eye-witness testimony apparently corroborating many other sources that Iraq was THE fixation, at the expense of all else. VP Cheney's rebuttal that Clark "out of the loop" is confusing, if Clarke was given the terrorism oversight job by NSC chief Rice. This one will bear watching...the polls will tell the tale.
Taiwan elections...let's give it a rest for today, except to note that President Chen has endorsed the idea of an official recount, and the High Court has said it will think about it, and rule on all this as soon as possible. But that's not likely to be before Friday's anticipated certification of Chen's reelection, so KMT is still screaming.
As soon as the transcripts of today's testimony appear, watch for Tim Roemer's exchange with Paul Wolfowitz over Richard Clarke's claims. Wolfowitz would not clearly address the validity of claims which his spokesman yesterday was bold enough to call a 'fabrication'.
More soon. And later, the gaggles start flowing ...
--Josh Marshall
Amazing. Jim Woolsey is on Lou Dobbs show, as I write. He continues to press the Iraq-al Qaida link, suggests only that it's not clear Saddam 'ordered' the 9/11 attacks (my recollection, I haven't seen the transcript yet), and goes on to accuse Clarke of being crazy or thoroughly lacking in credibility because he accuses Woolsey, Laurie Mylroie and others of saying what they have in fact been saying for years. A through-the-looking-glass performance.
--Josh Marshall
Spin and push-back is a delicate art. Used indiscriminately it can show how weak your real case must be.
Case in point. This afternoon the White House released Richard Clarke's resignation letter from January 2003, arguing that boilerplate praise for the president contained in the letter shows that Clarke has flipflopped and is thus a hypocrite.
Here's the phrase that they're highlighting: "It has been an enormous privilege to serve you these last 24 months ... I will always remember the courage, determination, calm, and leadership you demonstrated on September 11th."
The best they can do.
--Josh Marshall
Today President Bush said: "The facts are these: George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threat to the United States of America, and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted."
I would hope so. But isn't this setting the bar rather low?
I certainly doubt there was any intelligence with remotely that level of specificity.
But that statement does suggest the president's team is bracing for quite a lot of uncomfortable information to come out. Why else make such a statement that really does no more than state that which goes without saying: namely, that had the White House had detailed knowledge about where and when the attack would occur that they would have done something about it?
--Josh Marshall
It's amazing how many partisan Democrats and disgruntled former employees working under cover as career civil servants, spies and military officers have betrayed this president. It just seems to happen again and again and again. I mean, just think of the list: Rand Beers, well-known partisan Democrat and hack, Richard Clarke, self-promoter, disgruntled former employee, and "self-regarding buffoon", Karen Kwiatkowski, conspiracy theorist and all-around freak, Valerie Plame, hack and nepotist, Joe Wilson, partisan hack, self-promoter and shameless green tea lover. When will the abuse end?
--Josh Marshall
One line of adminstration attack against Richard Clarke is that he appears to be a friend of Rand Beers, John Kerry's chief foriegn policy advisor. They even teach (or taught, I'm not sure) a course together at the Kennedy School.
On the surface this sounds like decent evidence of Clarke's political ties and possible political motivations.
But pressing this line of attack mostly shows that President Bush is running to be president of the amnesiacs.
Here's why.
Who is Rand Beers exactly? He's a career government national security expert specializing in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He's a registered Democrat. But his profile is that of an apolitical civil servant -- enough so that he was asked to work for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and the current President Bush in various capacities.
In August 2002 Condi Rice hired him to be the special assistant to the president for combating terrorism at the NSC. In a sense that was the job that Clarke had before 9/11, although by that point the chairs had been shuffled around so much that no direct comparison is really possible.
In any case, he came in in August 2002 and he resigned about seven months later, a few days before the beginning of the war. Eight weeks after that he signed up to work for John Kerry. A good summary of Beers' story can be found here in this June 16th, 2003 article in the Washington Post.
When you look at it, Beers' and Clarke's stories sound quite similar.
And the pattern suggests two possible theories.
The first is that President Bush has the odd misfortune of repeatedly hiring Democratic party stooges for key counter-terrorism assignments who stab him in the back as soon as they leave his employ.
The second is that anyone the president hires in a key counter-terrorism role who is not either a hidebound ideologue or a Bush loyalist gets so disgusted with the mismanagement and/or dishonesty that they eventually quit and then devote themselves to driving the president from office.
Which sounds more likely?
--Josh Marshall
More on just how feeble the White House anti-Clarke <$NoAd$>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.
--Josh Marshall
More calls for Philip Zelikow to resign as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission.
--Josh Marshall
Alright, I promise not to do too much of this. <$NoAd$>But here are some portions of comments from Jim Wilkinson, an NSC spokesman, on Paula Zahn Monday night (itals added)...
First, knock Clarke for pursuing the well-known fool's errand of hitting the terrorists overseas before they can hit us here ...
This is a president who had Condoleezza Rice and others ask for a strategy. Dick Clarke, when he first came and briefed, presented several ideas, all of which frankly were overseas. He had the idea to increase help for Uzbekistan, which we did. He had the idea to help increase the counterterrorism budget, which we did. These were all ideas, but they were over there.
Next, the 'strategy' strategy ...
I want to make a very point here, that all of his ideas he presented were not a strategy. This is a president who wanted a comprehensive strategy to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it hides, where it plots, where it raises money. All the ideas that -- except for one -- that Dick Clarke submitted, this administration did. This is the president who expedited the arming of the Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle, so that we could go after these terrorists like we've done in other places.
This 'strategy' mumbojumbo has definite echoes of Nigel Tufnel: No, no, no, this one goes to eleven ...
On a more substantive note compare Wilkinson's description of Clarke's pitiful proposal to this one from an August 4th, 2002 article in Time. Note particularly the comment from the "senior Bush administration official" at the end ...
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other 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."
Next from Wilkinson, misstate Clarke's statements and then accuse him of Iraq double-talk by again mischaracterizing another statement ...
Well, I think your viewers tonight would be a little alarmed if the president didn't ask about Iraq. This is a nation that was shooting at our pilots, shooting at our pilots hundreds of times a day in the southern no-fly zone, a nation that had used WMD against its neighbors. And I think your viewers tonight would be a little alarmed if the president didn't ask about any connection from anybody on any part of the globe, frankly.The president wanted to know who did it and who was responsible. Dick Clarke, on another interview he gave to PBS "Frontline," said that, right after 9/11, all his options were open. He wasn't sure who did it. So, again, we see Mr. Clarke on three sides of a two-sided issue. What the American people need to know is that their government is working diligently to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it plots, where it raises money, and where it does threats or tries to do us harm here.
Here's the Frontline passage Wilkinson is referring to ...
Question: Because one of the things that surprises a lot of the public, I think, is that immediately after Sept. 11, the administration knew exactly who had done it. Was that why?Clarke: No. On the day of Sept. 11, then the day or two following, we had a very open mind. CIA and FBI were asked, "See if it's Hezbollah. See if it's Hamas. Don't assume it's Al Qaeda. Don't just assume it's Al Qaeda." Frankly, there was absolutely not a shred of evidence that it was anybody else. The evidence that it was Al Qaeda began just to be massive within days after the attack.
Question: Somebody's quoted as saying that they walked into your office and almost immediately afterwards, the first words out of your mouth was "Al Qaeda."Clarke: Well, I assumed it was Al Qaeda. No one else had the intention of doing that. No one else that I knew of had the capability of doing that. So yes, as soon as it happened, I assumed it was Al Qaeda.
Returning to the Wilkinson tirade already in progress, now blame all previous terrorism attacks on Clarke's being a doofus while also managing to step on Cheney's story line by insisting that Clarke was running the show right before 9/11 ...
I would say that, since this president's been here, two-thirds of al Qaeda have been captured or killed. I would say, I would remind you that Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the African embassies were bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy when the USS Cole was bombed. Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism policy in the time preceding 9/11 when the threat was growing.
Finally, make a nonsensical comparison between Clarke's blowing 9/11 and the president's wiping out all the bad guys afterwards ...
And in June of 2001, when the FBI said 16 of the 19 hijackers were already in the United States, Dick Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism. I think you contrast that directly with this president's record of freezing millions of dollars in terrorist assets, rounding up more than two-thirds of the members of al Qaeda. It's a clear distinction.
Most of these aren't even distortions. They're silly little gotchas, many of which don't even make any sense.
This is the best they can do.
--Josh Marshall
A Request ... I'm working on a couple different non-TPM projects at the moment. So I want to enlist your assistance.
Administration appointees and spokespeople are hitting the airwaves today like a motley medieval army -- little clear organization or discipline, just everyone running on to the field at once and hacking away as best they can.
(Along the lines of little discipline, note the contradictory nature of the attacks. In some, we did everything Clarke wanted; in others, he was out of the loop. Hard to figure both are true. It's scattershot because they're desparate and don't have the facts on their side.)
Many of these folks are saying things that are either demonstrably false or highly debatable. We noted one example in the former category from Vice President Cheney's appearance earlier today on Rush Limbaugh. (You can measure the Veep's confidence in his ability to face any amount of serious questioning by the fact that he decided to go on air with Limbaugh on this.)
In the latter category is this response of Paul Wolfowitz to Clarke's charges. The clip is from Newsweek ...
In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz describes Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," says this official.
So Wolfowitz says this account is a 'fabrication'. <$Ad$>I wonder what part. There's no way from the outside to know whether this particular exchange took place. But it's no secret that Wolfowitz was a major booster of Mylroie's work. I believe he even blurbed one of her books. So it's certainly not implausible that such an interchange could have occurred.
Then the spokesperson says Wolfowitz always regarded al Qaida as a "major threat." Is that true? He certainly didn't have that reputation. He was seen as an Iraq hawk and advocate of various other generally hawkish positions. But not someone heavily invested in the al Qaida issue. Indeed, Clarke's description of his relative lack of interest in al Qaida seems very plausible.
To test my hypothesis I went to the Nexis database and tried this search: "wolfowitz w/100 bin laden". That is, all instances where Wolfowitz's name comes up within one hundred words of 'bin laden'. I set the date range between January 1st, 1980 and September 10th, 2001.
I got 14 hits. By way of contrast, when I plugged in Richard Clarke's name I got 48, with Sandy Berger, 502.
Of those fourteen, five were actually misdated articles from after 9/11. Others were just cases where his name came up in proximity to bin Laden's but in which there was no connection.
There seemed to be only two instances where his name actually came up in relation to bin Laden's. One was an article in which Richard Holbrooke was questioning the Bush administration's and Wolfowitz's zeal for national missile defense.
Holbrooke questioned that threat to Washington, charging that the plan is ''almost a religious matter'' for the Bush administration.''We have to ask ourselves, in what way are we really threatened?'' he said. ''It's people like (Saudi militant) Osama bin Laden who are dangerous, and they have no long-range missiles.''
The other is a case in which Wolfowitz was being interviewed about missile defense ...
JACO: Dr. Wolfowitz, who is missile defense aimed to protect against? Is it the Chinese? Is it the so-called rogue states like Iraq, Iran, North Korea? Is it a freelance terrorist like Osama bin Laden who might have an ICBM? Who is this particularly a defense against?WOLFOWITZ: Well, we're talking about defenses against missiles of a variety of ranges and I'll give you a real example that's out of history, in fact I think you were in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm yourself and you saw what even those limited Iraqi Scud missiles were able to do. They almost succeeded in dragging Israel into the war actively, which would have changed the whole character of the war. The single worst hit we took during the war was when a single Scud missile hit a barracks in Dhahran.
That's a real-world threat from 10 years ago that today is much worse in the Korean Peninsula than anything we encountered in the Gulf. Hopefully we have Saddam Hussein lower down now, but it's a threat we could face in the future in the Gulf either from Iraq or Iran.
Then there's a, sort of, intermediate-range threat which begins to target the capitals of our key allies and some of our bases in places like Japan or Turkey or Europe.
Finally, there's the longer-range threat which could attack the United States.
And hostile countries like North Korea are working at all ranges. The North Koreans have already deployed a lot of missiles of the short-range, Scud type, and a pretty large number we think of the intermediate range. And we think they're working, and within five to 10 years will have a capability to target the United States.
We're trying to get our ability to defend against those threats out in front of the threats, and we aren't yet there. We're still just a year away from deploying an answer to that Scud missile that we dealt with 10 years ago.
But with this acceleration of the program that President Bush has directed, I think we can catch up.
Nothin' about OBL from Wolfowitz.
These are the only two cases where Wolfowitz's name comes up in relation to bin Laden. And I think it's fair to say that both show a lack of interest in this threat rather than the presence of it.
In other words, my quick-and-dirty search didn't generate one case where Wolfowitz discussed bin Laden as a threat at all -- though I'm sure he must have mentioned him at some point.
You might say that the comparisons with Clarke and Berger are unfair since they were in government and Wolfowitz wasn't. But when I swapped bin Laden's name for 'Saddam' in my search, I got 546 hits, and well over 400 of them were from after he left government in 1993.
Now, I grant that this is a pretty crude way to measure how Wolfowitz judged the al Qaida threat prior to 9/11. But I think it's pretty suggestive too. And it does match up with what I think can only be called the consensus opinion about what Wolfowitz focused on.
Now, back to my request.
Since Nexis searching is a crude measure, I'd like to know if any readers can point me to pre-9/11, published references to Wolfowitz stating his belief that al Qaida was a "major threat." Doesn't have to be that phrase of course. Just any reference that would back up the present claim.
More generally, and this is the real request, there are a lot of White House appointees and surrogates hitting the airwaves bashing Clarke, many of which are making willfully deceptive claims or simply lying.
Sixty or seventy thousand people come to this site every week day. That should be more than enough eyes to monitor all the relevant chat shows. If you find instances where you think someone is pulling a Cheney and especially if you can point me to a transcript or an online replay, I'd be greatly obliged if you can send it my way.
--Josh Marshall
Before this morning, the following occurred to <$Ad$>me.
Vice President Cheney has been out of sight for a long time. But of late he's been out a lot, doing media interviews, giving campaign speeches and so forth.
Isn't it time someone asked him about the fact that senior members of his staff are at the center of a criminal investigation into the intentional leak of the identity of a clandestine operative at the CIA?
He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?
Now to the point at hand.
Cheney was on Rush Limbaugh today fighting back against Richard Clarke.
Now, I don't expect Limbaugh to ask the question above. But look what Cheney said about Clarke.
RUSH: All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?CHENEY: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame.
Cheney frequently gets a pass for what his aides later portray as unintentional misstatements of fact. But there are two or three levels of dishonesty involved in this response. The key one is timing. It's convenient that Cheney doesn't "recall the exact time frame" since the time frame puts the lie to his entire point.
Clarke was put in charge of cyberterrorism (a pet interest of his); but that was after 9/11.
He's saying that Clarke wasn't really so central to the terrorism big picture prior to 9/11 because he was tasked with dealing with cyberterrorism (which Cheney describes as something like a glorified version of Norton AntiVirus). But, as noted, this happened after 9/11. That's after the period in which Clarke claims the White House wasn't paying attention to the terrorism issue.
If there's any question that's the period Cheney is talking about it becomes more clear as the conversation continues ...
RUSH: Cybersecurity? Meaning Internet security?CHENEY: Yeah, worried about attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology systems we have these days and that an adversary would use or try --
RUSH: Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there.
CHENEY: Well, he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff, and I saw part of his interview last night, and --
RUSH: He was demoted.
CHENEY: It was still -- he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example with the president of Pakistan laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al-Qaeda and the importance of the -- going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al-Qaeda. This is say within three weeks of our arrival here. So the only thing I can say about Dick Clarke is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit, and the question that out to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when they -- when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?
So Cheney's claim is that Clarke "wasn't in the loop ... on a lot of this stuff."
Consider what that means.
Clarke, as we've said, was the counter-terrorism coordinator at NSC. That means he ran the inter-agency process on terrorism issues. Cheney says Clarke wasn't in the loop; but that means that he actually ran the loop.
If he was out of the loop on the central points of what the White House was doing on terrorism that means there was a complete breakdown of the interagency process.
Saying Clarke was out of the loop is less a defense of the administration than an indictment of it.
We'll be saying more on this. But I think we can already see from this and other defenses coming from administration officials that the White House's line on this is filled with clear distortions and misstatements of fact -- most of which are easily identifiable by people who have even a rough understanding of the timing and issues involved.
If they're resorting to blatant distortions and untruths this quickly they must not have a good defense.
--Josh Marshall
Paging Dr. Okrent, paging Dr. Okrent ...
We noted last night the odd and (I think now) clearly regrettable decision to have Judith Miller write the Times piece on Richard Clarke. (For general background on her inappropriateness to report this piece see this piece by Jack Shafer.)
The first point to notice is that in an article purportedly about Clarke's accusations, she provides one sentence describing his claims, with no direct quotes, before moving onto two paragraphs with direct quotes from White House Communications Director attacking Clarke.
Also note that she describes Clarke's claims thusly, that he "asserts that while neither president did enough to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has undermined American national security by using the 9/11 attacks for political advantage and ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq."
With all respect, that's simply not what he says. He does criticize Clinton and Bush. But his statements last night did not come close to putting the two presidents on a par when it came to the lead-up to 9/11.
Maybe he's wrong. Maybe he's giving Clinton a free-ride. But Miller shouldn't change what he said.
Another point.
In the version of Miller's article that ran last night there was this passage ...
Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on the grounds -- accurate ones in Clarke's view -- that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Clarke said Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that Ridge was against the creation of the department and said the department did not have to go through any more clearance with the White House than other Cabinet departments.
Miller hasn't been publishing as much of late. And someone needs to clue her into the revised rules. It's been at least a few months since reporters have willingly published demonstrably false statements from administration officials and spokespersons.
As we noted early this month Ridge went on record in May 2002 saying he was recommending that the president veto legislation that would have created his department.
(As we later learned, behind the scenes the White House was already planning to introduce the same legislation themselves. But this opposition had been the White House's public position for months, and one Ridge publicly supported.)
Apparently, the Times already realized it had a problem because the passage has now been revised to ...
Mr. Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on grounds, accurate ones in Mr. Clarke's view, that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that.
So now Roehrkasse's denial stands but it's no longer clear what he's denying. You might say Miller has given him deniability about his denial.
The Times current article is here; but you can see the earlier version, preserved in amber shall we say, over here at the website of the Indianapolis Star.
--Josh Marshall
We seem to have a bit of a contradiction, don't we?
Richard Clarke rolled out his book this evening on 60 Minutes, arguing, in brief, that the Bush administration put counter-terrorism and the hunt for al Qaida on the back burner prior to 9/11 and then after 9/11 immediately started focusing on Iraq even though there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 or even al Qaida terrorism generally.
Meanwhile, on the Washington Post op-ed page, Condi Rice has a lengthy column presenting what can only be called a very, very different picture.
The new administration heeded the warnings of the outgoing Clinton administration and not only focused closely on al Qaida and the rise in chatter in the summer of 2001 but was actually preparing a much more aggressive approach than anything that had been considered previously. What's more, the president himself sensed that not enough was being done and called for further scrutiny into the possibility of a domestic attack and a more aggressive plan to "eliminate" al Qaida.
The president, in the telling of Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley, seems to have been more engaged, forward-thinking and insightful on this issue than literally any other major player on the administration's national security team.
Even with all the vastness of the federal bureaucracy and the possible uncertainties of interpretation, there's no question that one of these two people -- Rice or Clarke -- is misleading us.
Rice was (and is) the president's National Security Advisor. Clarke was in charge of counter-terrorism policy at the National Security Council. Nothing discussed by either on this issue should be a mystery to the other. It's possible that neither is lying in a narrow factual sense. But, at a minimum, one must be giving us a deeply partial and misleading account.
(Clarke is yet to get the 'treatment' from the press. So we'll see how his statements hold up. But on this issue -- what happened pre-9/11 -- and the related yellowcake matter, Rice has already developed a track record of inaccurate, misleading, contradictory and contradicted statements -- which we'll be reviewing in future posts.)
This is why we have a press whose job it is not simply to frame this as a potent he-said/she-said but to dig into the details and find out who isn't leveling with us.
One place to start might be this claim which Steve Hadley made on 60 Minutes (and which is also echoed in Rice's editorial) ...
Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl: "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'"Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.
"All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.'
"And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations."
We've heard the swatting at flies line before. So presumably there must have been some such conversation. The White House has referenced it again and again. But what was the context? And what did it lead to? Documents must have been generated. Directives must have been written up and executed. What are the details?
Someone is not levelling with us. If the press is worth anything it should find out who, right?
--Josh Marshall
Nota Bene: Monday's New York Times story on Richard Clarke's revelations is written by Judith Miller. Quite a choice -- and problematic for a number of reasons. See Jack Shafer's latest on this from just last month.
--Josh Marshall
It's hard to say which of the Clarke revelations is most damaging. <$NoAd$>But there are many contenders. Here's another -- the video of which just aired a few minutes ago on 60 Minutes ...
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this."I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
"I have no idea, to this day, if the President saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Atrios quotes this passage from Richard Clarke's interview tonight on CBS at length. But it's worth excerpting again for reasons I note below ...
"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months."There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.
"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they 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 finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.
For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, 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.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy d