Now & Then
Richard Clarke then:
And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we’ve now made public to some extent.
And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.
So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.
Richard Clarke now:
Richard Clarke said on “60 Minutes” last night that (a) Bush ignored al Qaeda from January to early September 2001, despite being warned a major attack on the U.S. was imminent.
Will the real Richard Clarke please stand up?
UPDATE: Went over to the Instaman, only to find he’d posted damn near the exact same thing two hours ago. Some days, you just can’t win. Then again, everybody is going to be on this story today.
Unless you’re CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and the Al Frankenstein station.
I think we found the long-awaited Democratic running mate. This guy’s involved in more flip flops than John Kerry on a fly fishing trip outside on an IHOP where Ross Perot is inside playing Pong against Anne Heche.
Instapundit meant it as sarcam I’m sure, but you can’t help but wonder if Karl Rove’s grubby little hands really had something to do with this. What started out as a nice little hit piece against Bush has turned into a full blown disaster for Clarke, CBS, the Clinton administration, and Congresional Democrats. The whole book rollout and 9/11 testimony by Clarke was so bungled and contradictory that it almost looks intentional. At least you would hope, after this piece of work was responsible for our national security for about a decade. It’s amazing we’re not all dead…
Re: Mike M
Nah, Kerry managed to flip-flop in the same sentence.
More on Clarke and the Coverage of the Story
A background briefing that Clarke gave to the press in 2002 seems to vitiate his testimony today. Dodd Harris and Rosemary Esmay are both discussing this. Further, one would think that good journalist would use this kind of info in…
The Bush Administration focused on Al Qeda before they ignored it. Sound famaliar?
Don’t blame Clinton for doing too little, Sep. 11 hadn’t happened.
Blame Bush for doing too little, Sep. 11 hadn’t happened.
Blame Bush for doing too much, Sep. 11 has happened.
For all the publicity that Clarke
No Smoke from the “Smoking Gun” on Clarke
. . . anyone who believes that this document undermines the credibility of what he is saying now is not thinking very clearly.
Let me explain: imagine that in a couple of years Colin Powell writes his memoirs of the Bush era (which I hope will have…
Talk radio is all over this, also, as well as Fox News. The mainstream media is again keeping their finger on the trigger while they jam the gun into the front of their waistband.
glenn just posted a link to this
http://www.cnsnews.com/pdf/2004/911commissionLetter.pdf
seems like a smoking gun against clarke.
don’t forget that cbs was conflicted out the wazoo for the interview…
this is truly hilarious, but deeply disturbing