“Clouded his memory”
Not even Time magazine’s Romesh Ratnesar seems very impressed with Richard Clarke’s veracity:
The accounts of high-level conversations and meetings given by Clarke in various television appearances, beginning with the 60 Minutes interview, differ in significant respects from the recollections of a former top counterterrorism official who participated in the same conversations and meetings: Richard Clarke. In several cases, the version of events provided by Clarke this week include details and embellishments that do not appear in his new book, Against All Enemies. While the discrepancies do not, on their own, discredit Clarke’s larger arguments, they do raise questions about whether Clarke’s eagerness to publicize his story and rip the Bush Administration have clouded his memory of the facts.
Read — once again — the whole thing.
Yet Even More on Clarke
Stephen Green points to this Time piece TIME.com: Richard Clarke, at War With Himself, in which Romesh Ratnesar notesWhile the discrepancies do not, on their own, discredit Clarke’s larger arguments, they do raise questions about whether Clarke’s eager…
Yeah, read the whole thing, and you’ll see that the article doesn’t refute what Clarke has to say; it merely takes him to task for including “details and embellishments” in interviews that were not in the book. WTF? Books get edited. Publishers worry about length. It makes complete sense that a spoken-word description of a written event would be more detailed. I’m not saying Clarke doesn’t have an agenda or that everything he says is demonstrably true, but if people are going to try to discredit him, they’ll have to better than this.
Criminy, you have people like Condoleeza Rice, who is an expert on nothing aside from a geopolitical relic claiming that Clarke “doesn’t know what he’s talking about”? Give me a break. He’s forgotten more about terrorism than Dr. Rice ever knew. (Not that we’d ever know WHAT she has to say on the subject, since she can’t be bothered to testify in public …)
And so what if Clarke’s description of Bush’s little “find if there’s a link to Saddam” speech differs in the details? Nobody denies the meeting took place.
Ratnesar’s biggest howler may be this one: “Despite Clarke’s contention that Bush wanted proof of Iraqi involvement at any cost, it’s just as possible that Bush wanted Clark to find disculpatory evidence in order to discredit the idea peddled by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Baghdad had a hand in 9/11.”
Who is he trying to kid? Bush was trying to get them to find evidence that Iraq was NOT linked to 9-11? Don’t the president’s actions over the past two years make this suggestion completely preposterous? Even if it were true, then why, after Clarke and others confirmed there was no link, did the president and his band of court jesters spend considerable time and energy (and ultimately, lives) selling the opposite notion to the American people.
Clarke’s stories may not all be airtight, but they hold a hell of a lot more water than Bush’s.
SUMMMING UP RICHARD CLARKE
Dan Drezner pretty much hits the nail on the head. Remember the common line that every Washington memoir can be subtitled If Only They Had Listened To Me, and you will go a long way towards understanding the basis and…
Crock:
He blew his credibility with me when he said that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake in the war on terrorism.
It wasn’t, of course. It was perhaps his most brilliant move.
Why Clarke Has a Problem
Here’s the bottom line on Clarke: if one comes out and declare’s oneself the Great Bearer of Truth, then it is natural for one’s veracity and reliability to be questioned. And so, when persons like Senator Daschle claim that the…
Ah the tried and true. “Yeah, well, so what if he’s exaggerating and distorting? Look over there!”
Clarke is making the accusations, Clarke has the burden of proof. He’s failed.
The thing is, that Clarke was one of the guys positing a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The chemist for the first WTC bombing in 1993 fled to Iraq after the bombing, which was alledgely paid for by Al Qaeda. Iraqi chemists were helping bin Ladan make VX precursors in the Sudan, at the “asprin factory”
Maybe he too has been around Washington so long that he can be on both sides of any issue.