Does any of this sound familiar? A multi-year bureaucrat in the White House quits and then suddenly writes a tell-all book claiming that Bush did all kinds of horrible things, including a promotional interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes? Yeah, it should, it is the same thing that happened with the Paul O’Neil story a bit back. That story ended up being so bogus that O’Neil eventually recanted pretty much everything he said, placing the blame on CBS news for twisting what he was saying. And, what do you know, this story has quickly been shown to be bogus, too. The proof of that follows:
There is something else O’Neil and Clarke have in common, which is the first part of the puzzle. Not only did both men have books to sell (Clarke’s book, [gee, what a coincidence!] went on sale today), but Viacom, CBS’ owner, was selling both books. And of course, 60 Minutes did not acknowledge this fact, except, reportedly, on CBS radio and on their website. But it was nowhere in the television broadcast. And at what point does all this become paying for a story? Oh, wait, we have already passed this point. Congratulations to 60 Minutes for introducing tactics normally reserved for the tabloids to “serious journalism.”
Clarke charges that 1) Bush was ignoring the threat of al Qaeda before 9-11, 2) Bush is doing a terrible job in the war on terror, and 3) Rumsfeld and others focused excessively on Iraq.
Some of this is refuted by others in the White House. For instance, Stephen Hadley, described as “[t]he No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council” says Clarke is simply wrong about the failure to go to battle stations, even to watch for homeland threats:
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.
Meanwhile, Dan Bartlett reports that, for a man who claimed that the warnings were so clearly there, Clarke seemed to be oblivious to the gathering threat of al Qaeda:
Clarke said he eventually got to address a Cabinet meeting on terrorism months after his initial request, and only a week before the attacks.
Bartlett said Clarke used the opportunity "to talk about cyber-security."
We’re going to talk more about that issue (cyber-security) in a minute.
Further, he recommended measures that wouldn’t have done a thing to prevent al Qaeda and indeed were being done prior to 9-11:
Bartlett said Clarke offered five recommendations to battle al Qaeda when the Bush administration took office.
"All of those recommendations were focused on overseas efforts that would have been nothing to prevent the attack on 9/11," he said. "All of those recommendations were being acted upon. It did not have to wait for a meeting that would take place in September."
Meanwhile, about a year ago George Smith wrote a send off for Clarke when he left office entitled: Richard Clarke's Legacy of Miscalculation.
Some highlights:
The outgoing cybersecurity czar will be remembered for his steadfast belief in the danger of Internet attacks, even while genuine threats developed elsewhere.
That’s right, folks, he is one of those idiots who thought that what we should really be worried about is, gasp, cyberterrorism!
In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.
He also had a history of suggesting ineffective responses to terrorism. For instance:
In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.
In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.
So here is a man who left a legacy of ineffectual responses to terrorism, criticizing Bush’s response to 9-11. Huh.
Indeed, according to his own self-promoting interview with pbs, long before he realized there was money in criticizing Bush, he claimed he had pretty much a free hand in the Clinton years:
The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat -- we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved.
Powerline also notes the “shameless[]” distribution of blame here:
And he claims that Bush ignored terrorism "for months"--unlike his former boss, Bill Clinton, who ignored it for years.
He also notes that it was quite reasonable to believe that Saddam might be behind the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, seeing that Saddam had tried to do it in 1993. Like let’s equate this to a murder investigation. Suppose someone attempted to murder a person eight years ago. Then you find that person dead. Who do you look at first? Gee, maybe the person you know attempted the murder in the past? Is that such an unreasonable thing?
As for his claim that Bush was not paying enough attention prior to 9-11, in the pbs interview, made long before he was being paid for his anti-Bush views, he said the following:
Q: A lot of people looked at Sept. 11, and said "Massive intelligence failure. Haven't seen an intelligence failure like this since Pearl Harbor." What's your opinion on that allegation?
A: I think it's a cheap shot. I think when people say, no matter what event it is, they say, "Oh, it was an intelligence failure," they frequently don't know what the intelligence community said prior to the event. In June 2001, the intelligence community issued a warning that a major Al Qaeda terrorist attack would take place in the next many weeks. They said they were unable to find out exactly where it might take place. They said they thought it might take place in Saudi Arabia.
We asked, "Could it take place in the United States?" They said, "We can't rule that out." So in my office in the White House complex, the CIA sat and briefed the domestic U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, Immigration, Federal Aviation, Coast Guard, and Customs. The FBI was there as well, agreeing with the CIA, and told them that we were entering a period when there was a very high probability of a major terrorist attack. Now I don't think that's an intelligence failure. It may be a failure of other parts of the government, but I don't think that was an intelligence failure.
So in summary what have we got a man who ran Clinton’s failed anti-terror policy, claiming Bush didn’t do enough. Furthermore, all evidence suggests that he was busy chasing the windmill of cyber-terrorism at the time he claimed he was promoting the al Qaeda threat. Finally, he once called it a “cheap shot” to suggest we had sufficient warning, but when you flashed enough money in front of his face, suddenly he takes the opposite tact. And, anyway, it is not like as if he recommended any action that would have prevented 9-11, seeing that the Bush administration had enacted all his recommendations prior to 9-11.
Bombshell? No, bogus. Simply bogus.
And we should question the journalistic ethics of CBS for promoting this story that its parent company paid for [Updated to be more accurate].
