MOST INTERESTING! PBS interview with Richard A. Clark...March 20, 2002.
He obviously was very high on John O'Neill. He was in the Clinton Administration, as well as in the Bush Administration ...
pbs.org
>>>>>>>>>President Clinton's national coordinator for counterterrorism, he is currently President Bush's special adviser for cyberspace security. In this interview he talks about the attributes that made John O'Neill stand apart in the world of counterterrorism, sketches Al Qaeda's threat and how it came into focus for U.S. intelligence, and discusses some of John O'Neill's battles, including the USS Cole investigation. This interview was conducted March 20, 2002.<<<<<<<<
KLP Note: The interview is long, but worthwhile reading particularly as he was in both Administrations and one can see where some of his bias'es are, especially now in light of his upcoming book.
This was telling, I thought. He never once mentioned Iraq in the entire interview...BUT surely he knew about Salman Pak training camp in Iraq....and that Saddam was directly funding terrorists....didn't he? Looks like he felt they should have taken out the training camps.
>>>>>>>>> (Q)Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?
(A) Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained," well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen -- the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened.<<<<<<<<<< |
