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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (10898)	3/30/2004 11:34:22 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Figures dont lie. A spin is a lie. Are you totally clueless? 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." siliconinvestor.com Who was the president then? Um. Er. Was it not William Jefferson Clinton? 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. Geez. Fewer terrorist attacks during Clinton's years? I stand by my prior post, Al Quaeda was building its strength, living under the Clinton radar. 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. And the fault lies with Bush? Ha! You liberal, anti-American moron. Do us all a favor and relinquish your citizenship and move to Tehran. 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.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (10898)	3/31/2004 12:14:08 AM
From: Alan Smithee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

A Long Short War - Hitchens, Christopher Clarke's Progress Guess who used to believe in the Iraq/al-Qaida connection? By Christopher Hitchens Updated Monday, March 29, 2004, at 3:20 PM PT Clarke: A Clinton man? Opposition to the Bush policy since Sept. 11, 2001, has taken one of four forms. There are those who continue to believe that there must have been some administration collusion in the planning and timing of the attacks. (I notice that yet another book alleging this has attracted endorsements from about half of The Nation's editorial board.) There are those who feel that America has antagonized the Muslim world enough already, and that the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq only makes the enemy more angry. There are those who think that Iraq is "a war too far" (to annex David Rieff's phrase) and a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaida as well as a dangerous exercise in pre-emption. And there are those who think that the Clinton administration would have done, indeed was doing, a superior job. Of course this quartet of positions is not mutually exclusive, and elements of each are to be found in one another, but the third and fourth ones have emerged as the safest and most consensual with the reception accorded to Richard Clarke's book. Among those claiming to be vindicated by his testimony are Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two senior counterterrorism figures from the Clinton National Security Council, whose not-bad book The Age of Sacred Terror, published in 2002, bears re-reading. Among other things, it contains (on Pages 230-233 and 336-338 of the paperback version) an interesting profile of Richard Clarke, who is depicted as an egotistical pain in the ass who had the merit of getting things right. This seems fair: He has been exposed as wildly wrong in saying that Condoleezza Rice had never even heard of al-Qaida—an allegation that almost amounts to the dread charge of "character assassination"—and his operatic bow to the families of the victims is fine unless you think (as don't we all?) that one shouldn't appear to exploit Sept. 11 for partisan purposes. However, when in office he worked to develop the Predator drone, pushed for aid to the Northern Alliance, and leant heavily on the CIA and FBI to stop their wicked practice of hiding information from each other, and one can picture his rage at learning that the hijackers had bought seats using their "terrorism watch list" names. The Benjamin-Simon book contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a moment—doesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror? slate.msn.com