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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (40771)	3/29/2004 9:55:25 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Excellent piece by Krauthammer.... Chutzpah award goes to Clarke chicagotribune.com. Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post Writers Group. Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington March 29, 2004 WASHINGTON -- It is only March but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for 9/11--after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing. The 1990s were Al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS' "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt (them) down country by country." What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened." It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest? Clinton had one justification after another for going on the offensive: American blood spilled in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the embassy bombings of 1998, the undeniable act of war in the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Response: A single, transparently useless, cruise missile attack on empty Afghan tents, plus a (mistaken!) attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. As Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen testified, three times the CIA was ready with plans to assassinate Osama. Every time, President Clinton stood them down, because "We're not quite sure." We're not quite sure--a fitting epitaph for the Clinton antiterrorism policy. They were also not quite sure about taking Osama when Sudan offered him up on a silver platter in 1996. The Clinton people turned Sudan down, citing legal reasons. The "Frontline" interviewer asked Clarke whether failing to blow up the camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a "pretty basic mistake." Clarke's answer is unbelievable; "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals." This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week--the one who told the 9/11 commission under oath that "fighting terrorism in general and fighting Al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration--certainly (there was) no higher priority"--is a liar. Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made Al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia (!) above fighting Al Qaeda. Clarke gives Clinton a pass and instead concentrates his ire on Bush. For what? For not having pre-emptively attacked Afghanistan? On what grounds--increased terrorist chatter in June and July 2001? Look. George W. Bush did not distinguish himself on terrorism in the first eight months of his presidency. Whatever his failings, however, they pale in comparison to those of his predecessor. Clinton was in office eight years, not eight months. As Clarke himself said in a 2002 National Security Council briefing, the Clinton administration never made a plan for dealing with Al Qaeda and never left one behind for the Bush administration. Clarke says he pushed very hard for such critical anti-Al Qaeda measures as aid to and cooperation with Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. By his own testimony, the Clinton administration then spent more than two years-- October 1998 to December 2000, the very time the 9/11 plot was hatched--fruitlessly debating this and doing absolutely nothing. Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, doing it now for himself. ---------- E-mail: letters@charleskrauthammer.com Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

To: lurqer who wrote (40771)	3/30/2004 1:25:22 AM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Bush's Secret Storm By E. J. Dionne Jr. President Bush had two big things going for him in this year's election. He was seen by a majority of Americans as a straight shooter. And he was viewed as the natural leader in the war on terrorism. Now both perceptions are in jeopardy. That explains the ferocity of the White House attack on Richard Clarke. But the attack on Clarke, the White House's former anti-terrorism expert, could prove to be the fatal mistake of the Bush campaign. Instead of undermining Clarke's credibility, the White House has called its own into question. It is also calling new attention to the administration's standard operating procedure since Sept. 11, 2001: Do whatever is necessary to intimidate and undercut all who raise questions about the president's handling of terrorism, answer as few of those questions as possible and keep as many secrets as you can. That is why the Clarke story just keeps getting bigger. There has been much hand-wringing about how partisan the discussions of Sept. 11 have become over the past week. But Clarke did not create the partisanship, and it was not born last week. An administration that had a united country behind it after Sept. 11 spent two years playing politics very hard to push back all challenges. If the administration had been less defensive earlier about what went wrong, it would not be facing such a serious and awkwardly timed mess now. Recall that in May 2002, word leaked that Bush had received an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, suggesting that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was plotting to hijack U.S. airliners. Democrats jumped on the news. Why, asked Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, did it take so long "for us to receive this information? And what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?" Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, spoke in a similar vein: "What the American people want to know is, exactly what did the White House know, and, more importantly, what was done about it?" Daschle and Gephardt were trashed. Vice President Cheney denounced "incendiary" commentary by opposition politicians and declared that such politically incorrect thoughts were "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." And the questions abated. This time, the Bush administration pulled the same levers to silence Clarke -- and the questions didn't stop. On the contrary, inconsistencies in the administration's pre-Sept. 11 story were, finally, big news. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice's furious attacks on Clarke got her trapped in a series of statements that contradicted other administration officials and sometimes herself. And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will surely come to regret his vicious speech on Friday accusing Clarke of, among other things, "profiteering." Frist all but accused Clarke of perjury. He alleged that classified testimony Clarke gave to Congress in July 2002 contradicted what Clarke is saying now. "It is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media," Frist said. "But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress, it is a far more serious matter." Frist called for declassifying Clarke's congressional testimony. How weak were the underpinnings of Frist's form of McCarthyism Lite? So weak that Clarke easily one-upped Frist and the administration in his appearance Sunday on "Meet the Press." Clarke endorsed declassifying his testimony in full, and any other relevant documents. Rice, in the meantime, defended the administration's refusal to let her testify before the commission in public and under oath. All of which raises the question: Who appears more interested in having the whole truth come out, Clarke or the administration? That's why many Republicans think Rice has to testify. Last week certainly hurt Bush politically by halting the momentum of his attacks on Sen. John Kerry -- and by putting attack politics under unusually harsh scrutiny. But the larger lesson is that delaying accountability and keeping secret what should be public almost always backfires. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who died a year ago this week, made the war on secrecy one of the last great causes of his public life. In 1997, he noted -- presciently, in light of the problems leading to Sept. 11 -- that when government agencies keep secrets from each other, top officials are denied the information they need when they need it. "Secrecy," Moynihan declared, "can confer a form of power without responsibility about which democratic societies must be vigilant." The bitterness of last week is explained by the mischiefs of partisanship, but even more by the costs of secrecy. washingtonpost.com lurqer