BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Monday, March 22, 2004
TRASHING CLARKE. The
reductive bullet point that's been attached to former White House
anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's critique of the Bush White
House is that he's blaming George W. Bush for 9/11. The
conservatives particularly like this ("Behind the Effort to Blame
Bush for September 11," reads the subhead of a Wall Street
Journal editorial
today) because the notion is ridiculous, and thus easily swatted
aside.
The truth is that even though the
terrorist attacks could have been anticipated as one of many possible
scenarios involving Al Qaeda, the chances of stopping those
particular attacks on that particular day were minimal.
Thus, what's really disturbing
about Clarke's brief - laid out in an interview with 60
Minutes last night - is not that Bush could have stopped it.
Rather, it is that Bush and his administration dropped the intense
focus that the Clinton White House had given Al Qaeda, and that, as
soon as the attacks occurred, the Bushies immediately pressed for
evidence of a non-existent link with Iraq.
Here
is a particularly revealing passage from 60
Minutes:
"The president dragged me
into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and
said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never
said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in
absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a
report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've
done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it
with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said,
"Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very
intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that
answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a
serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA
experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and
found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared
the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced
by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and
sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
"I have no idea, to this day, if
the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to
the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around
the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees
memos that he doesn't - wouldn't like the answer."
The right, of course, is already
trying to discredit Clarke as a partisan warrior - never mind the
fact that he worked not just for Clinton but also for Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush, and, until recently, George W. Then, too, Clarke is
out pushing a new book, which I guess we're supposed to take as some
sign of moral turpitude.
But as Josh Marshall
notes
today, what's really interesting about this is how at odds Clarke's
account is with that of national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Given Rice's dubious reputation for veracity, I'd say Clarke ought to
be taken very seriously.
A NEW BOSTON BLOG. The
Boston Herald has started something called the
"Road
to Boston Blog." Written
(so far) by political reporter David Guarino, the blog began with a
"soft launch" Friday. This is the first official Herald blog -
business reporter Jay
Fitzgerald and columnist
Cosmo
Macero have been blogging
for a while, but they do it on their own websites.
The Boston Globe is taking a
different approach, with op-ed
columnists writing Web-only
pieces once a month.
posted at 8:59 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
