BoatBanter.com - A devastating attack on the Bush Administration...

"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
An absolutely amazing segment on 60 Minutes tonight tears apart the
hypocrisy of the Bush Administration...it may well be the blow that
destroys George W. Bush. This is from Richard Clarke, who worked for
Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II.

CBS) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top
anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks,
despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

The charge comes from the advisor, Richard Clarke, in an exclusive
interview on 60 Minutes.

The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the
conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place.

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House
officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before
Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running
for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about
terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we
could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war
against terrorism."

The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen
Hadley, vehemently disagrees. He says Mr. Bush has taken the fight to
the terrorists, and is making the U.S. homeland safer.

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq,
even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.

Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld
was joking.

Clarke is due to testify next week before the special panel probing
whether the attacks were preventable.

His allegations are also made in a book, "Against All Enemies," which is
being published Monday by Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster.
Both CBSNews.com and Simon & Schuster are units of Viacom.

Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and
the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be
his terrorrism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush.

In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened
behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11.

When the terrorists struck, it was thought the White House would be the
next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of
people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the
attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

"I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words
of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The
horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about
the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We
knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the
streets of America," he tells Stahl.

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his
top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to
respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the
administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl.
"And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb
Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in
Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well,
there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing
to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in
Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA
was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying
we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's
just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"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."

Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't
until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke
says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat
seriously.

"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 director of
the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right.
There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was
supporting al Qaeda, ever."

When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still
an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell
freezes over."

By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on
terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented
level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George
Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because
he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to
happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and
months ahead. He said that in June, July, August.

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of
chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the
Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations--
meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles
International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the
border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle
stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months
before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to
hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security
Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."

Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the
inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."

In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in
Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.

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."

Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration
didn't go to battle stations.

As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link,
Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr.
Clarke and the president ever occurred."

When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us
independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an
actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."

Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of
the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and
to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their
sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on
the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the
sanctuaries available to terrorists."

When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar.
When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House,
Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank.

Stahl said to Clarke, "They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that
this is all sour grapes, because they demoted you and reduced your
leverage, your power in the White House?"

Clarke's answer: "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National
Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet
level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me
enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit."

Until two years later, after 30 years in government service.

A senior White House official told 60 Minutes he thinks the Clarke book
is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.

(Of course...what else could the Bush white house say?)

MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

He sang a different tune in 2002.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,115085,00.html

CLARKE: And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed
on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues
that had not been decided on in a couple of years.
And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know,
mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy,
including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made
public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in
effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the
administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those
issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them
decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in
February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing
Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert
action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything
that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these
decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert
action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

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What he said then is not what he says now. I guess he took lessons from
John Kerry.