| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Terror Advisor proud of his personal failure |
| 2004-03-20 |
| EFL hattip drudge President Bush’s former top terrorism advisor says the president isn’t doing the best job fighting terrorism. The former advisor, Richard Clarke, discusses this and other observations he made while he was a White House insider in an interview with Lesley Stahl to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. He’s a FORMER terrorism advisor for good reason - as noted below. The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, ’but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "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 [the 9/11 attacks],’" he tells Stahl. Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration’s reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies." So he advised four presidents while AQ grew. Under his watchful eye and brilliant anaylsis, he raised no alarms re: the years of planning that resulted in the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. You failed miserably in your job, loser. It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t a partisan that you should have been fired long before Bush did it. |
| Posted by:B |
| #4 Clarke's a weathervane with no credibility. When it was fashionable to criticize Clinton, after Afghanistan but before Iraq, he criticized Clinton. Now that it's fashionable to criticize Bush, he's criticizing Bush. The sad thing is that this guy kept on getting kicked upstairs every time he screwed up. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-3-20 3:48:04 PM |
| #3 I had much the same reaction as the posted commentary here -- what's THIS guy doing talking about the Bush team's terrorism record? Every time I see the "AQ could not have a tie to Iraq" formula, it's literally scary. In a passage not quoted here but getting TV play, Clarke says the FBI and CIA disputed any AQ tie to Iraq -- huh? Not sure how the FBI would even have a knowledgeable view, but of course CIA judged as of fall '02 that there had been AQ/Iraq cooperation. Clarke's narrative, at least as quoted, is at odds with very public info. In the passage cited above, he also makes an astounding assertion -- that he knew, soon after 9/11, that Iraq had no role. How did he know that? Besides this, of course, Rummy & Co. quickly took down AQ and friends in Afghanistan -- making Clarke's quote look even sillier. And lastly, how rich and illustrative is it that Clarke and the Clinton crew are saying they provided the incoming Bushies with stark warnings. It doesn't bear on whether or not the pre-9/11 Bush record merits criticism, but to highlight how much you warned the new crew after having been at the helm for 8 YEARS without taking effective action .... wow. |
| Posted by: IceCold 2004-3-20 2:51:16 PM |
| #2 Couldn't agree more, Dave. If only Jimmuh Cartuh had given a muscular response to the Iranian hostage crisis, there would have been no 9/11 and the situation we face today. Same goes for Reagan pulling us out of Lebanon after the Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks. But that was then, this is now and we're finally confronting IslamoFascism. Dick Clarke is another of the Left's Useful Idiot and I, for one, am sick and tired of these ex-admin officials getting fired and then being more than happy to "tell tales out of school" to the Lying Liberal Left media about our current Administration while the country's at war! |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-3-20 1:54:22 PM |
| #1 For me, this war has been ongoing since at least as far back as the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. A large part of the reason 9/11 happened is because we allowed it to happen; and that, in turn, was a result of our refusal to believe that a sizeable chunk of the Islamic world--if not all of it--considered itself at war with us. As much as I approved of the rest of Ronald Reagan's actions as president, he deserves as much blame for shortsightedness about the Islamic threat as his predecessor or any of his successors. And through all 25 years of head-in-the-sand neglect, this Richard Clarke clown was there giving bad advice. Bye bye, Richard. Maybe you could land that new job as EU Terror Czar... |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-3-20 1:45:18 PM |