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Joe Conason interviews Richard Clarke! (a must)

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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 09:12 AM
Original message
Joe Conason interviews Richard Clarke! (a must)
yes, it is Salon.com so if you're not a subscriber, you'll need to get the day pass but..................

<snip>

You said on "60 Minutes" that you expected "their dogs" to be set on you when your book was published, but did you think that the attacks would be so personal?

Oh yeah, absolutely, for two reasons. For one, the Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset. That's the first reason. But the second reason is that I think they're trying to bait me -- and people who agree with me -- into talking about all the trivial little things that they are raising, rather than talking about the big issues in the book.

Why did you write the book now? That's a question they raise. Did it occur to you that this would be an election year and it would be especially controversial because of that, and that these commission hearings were coming up?

I wanted the book to come out much earlier, but the White House has a policy of reviewing the text of all books written by former White House personnel -- to review them for security reasons. And they actually took a very long time to do that. This book could have come out much earlier. It's the White House that decided when it would be published, not me. I turned it in toward the end of last year, and even though there was nothing in it that was not already obviously unclassified, they took a very, very long time.

more


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xchrom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 09:16 AM
Response to Original message
1. the bushco way
facist style loyalty.
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Catfight Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 09:18 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Yes
Hitler had loyalist too that were willing to do the killing for him. Again, Richard Clarke, American Hero!
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jean Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 09:20 AM
Response to Original message
3. lol - he said he voted for McCain in 2000
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MSgt213 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 09:29 AM
Response to Original message
4. Very good article. You sure can tell who the adult is between him and the
Bush administration.
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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 10:01 AM
Response to Original message
5. kick
this is a REAL interview! goes way further than 60 Minutes...
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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 12:29 PM
Response to Original message
6. unbelievable
the threads that die and the threads that thrive... <sigh>
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Richardo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:05 PM
Response to Reply #6
13. *Always* kick a Conason column...
:thumbsup: nostamj!
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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:27 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. and kick again
if necessary...
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blm Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:32 PM
Response to Reply #6
16. Heheh...will keep this baby kicked, nostamj.
Especially when true patriotism is on display.
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leftchick Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 12:40 PM
Response to Original message
7. thank you nos...
this is juicey stuff! :)
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Spazito Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 12:40 PM
Response to Original message
8. Excellent read!
Thanks for the link! After reading this, I am even more interested, if that's possible, in Clarke's testimony.
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Bandit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 12:56 PM
Response to Original message
9. Here is four more questions and answers with very interesting answers.
Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that you were not "in the loop," and that you're angry because you were passed over by Condi Rice for greater authority. And in fact you were dropped from Cabinet-level position to something less than that. How do you respond to what the Vice President said?

The vice president is becoming an attack dog, on a personal level, which should be beneath him but evidently is not.
I was in the same meetings that Dick Cheney was in, during the days after 9/11. Condi Rice and Dick Cheney appointed me as co-chairman of the interagency committee called the "Campaign Committee" -- the "campaign" being the war on terrorism. So I was co-chairing the interagency process to fight the war on terrorism after 9/11. I don't think I was "out of the loop."

The vice president commented that there was "no great success in dealing with terrorists" during the 1990s, when you were serving under President Clinton. He asked, "What were they doing?"

It's possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn't know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn't notice.

Why did they keep you on, if they were so uninterested in what you were focused on? And then why did they downgrade your position?

They said, in so many words, at the time, that they didn't have anyone in their Republican coterie of people that came in with Bush, who had an expertise in this area who wanted the job. And they actually said they found the job a little strange -- since it wasn't there when they had been in power before.

Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.
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Mandate My Ass Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 12:57 PM
Response to Original message
10. He backs up John O'Neill's assertions
that not only were the Bushies not focused on terrorism, they put hurdles in place that prevented the experts from participation/action that was deemed necessary to thwart terrorist attacks and address vulnerabilities.

I loved the part about how the Bush II admin. came in with the same outdated foreign policy retreads that existed during Bush I: Russia, Iraq, Star Wars.
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RedEagle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:02 PM
Response to Reply #10
11. Important Stuff
Keep it Kicked!
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dweller Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:03 PM
Response to Original message
12. nice find
:kick:

dp
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Bandit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:08 PM
Response to Original message
14. A few more tidbits
Edited on Wed Mar-24-04 01:09 PM by Bandit
Dr. Rice now says that your plans to "roll back" al-Qaida were not aggressive enough for the Bush administration. How do you answer that, in light of what we know about what they did and didn't do?

I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January <2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.[br />

You criticize both the Bush and Clinton administrations, although I have to say the press coverage of your discussion of the Clinton administration varies considerably from what is actually in your book ...

I'm glad you noticed.

I did notice that ... How different were the two administrations in their approaches to terrorism?

Well, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration didn't have an approach to terrorism. They'd never gotten around to creating an administration policy. It was in the process of doing so, but it hadn't achieved that. And it was clear that the national security advisor didn't like this kind of issue; she didn't have meetings on this issue. The president didn't have meetings on the issue of terrorism.

Were you aware of the Saudi airlifts of their nationals after 9/11, at the time that they were happening?

What I am aware of is that sometime after 9/11, in the days immediately thereafter, the Saudi embassy requested to evacuate some of its nationals because it feared there would be retribution. That information came to me and I was asked to approve it. I said no, I would not approve it, until the FBI approved it. And I asked the FBI to approve it, to look at the names of people on the flight manifests, and the FBI approved it.

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Bandit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 01:36 PM
Response to Original message
17. One more as to his relationship with Rand Beers
Were you concerned about your friendship with Rand Beers being used, as it is now, to suggest that you did this in order to help John Kerry in his presidential campaign?


This is the most interesting charge against me -- that I am a friend of Rand Beers, as if that's some terrible thing. Who is Rand Beers? Until a year ago, he was someone who was working for George Bush in the White House. He worked for George Bush's father in the White House. He worked for Ronald Reagan in the White House. But now it's a terrible thing to be a friend of Rand Beers? He and I have been friends for 25 years. I'm not going to disown him because he's working for John Kerry. He's my friend, he's going to stay my friend, we teach a course together . He works for John Kerry. I don't.
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Bandit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 02:01 PM
Response to Original message
18. Kick
:kick:
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nostamj Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-24-04 02:55 PM
Response to Reply #18
19. get back up there! n/t
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