Richard Clark: Liar! (not)

[troublemaker]

Richard Clarke: Liar!
The White House
argues that defending George Bush is the lowest crime of all.

In my four decades living in Washington DC I've never seen naked
self-destructive desperation to match the current White House smear campaign
against Richard Clarke. The attacks have all been flimsy, self-destructive and
mutually contradictory. Most damningly, to date they haven't even challenged the
substance of one sentence of Clarke's book, leaving the strong impression that
it's all factually accurate.

The White House has produced documents
from 2001-2003 that show Clarke in a terrible light because he says favorable
things about the Bush White House. So he has now been condemned as a traitor for
betraying the president in 2004 and as a liar for being loyal to the president
in 2002. Can we please pick one?

The first smoking gun is almost too
lame to mention. Clarke's resignation letter to the President from March 2003
praises Bush. How appalling!

"It has been an
enormous privilege to serve you these last 24 months," said the Jan. 20, 2003, letter from Clarke to Bush. "I will always remember the courage,
determination, calm, and leadership you demonstrated on September
11th."

Too anyone who has actually read
Clarke's book the specificity of the compliment makes it a back-handed
compliment. Clarke explicitly says in his book that Bush's leadership on the
evening of 9/11 was impressive. From that day forward, however, Clarke has
little good to say.

The next smoking gun is an email Clarke sent
Condi Rice on 9/15/01:

DR. RICE: September 15th, 2001,
so three days after the -- four days after the attack. "Note to CDR."
That's me. "When the era of national unity begins to crack in the near
future, it is possible that some will start asking questions like, did the White
House do a good job of making sure that intelligence about terrorist threats got
to the FAA and other domestic law-enforcement authorities." He then
attaches the paper, which he sent to me in July, reporting on his meeting. The
last line here is, "Thus, the White House did ensure that domestic law
enforcement, including FAA, knew that the CSG believed that a major al Qaeda
attack was coming, and it could be in the U.S., and we did ask special measures
be taken." So make what you will of it. His assessment on September 15th
was that we've taken the measures that we needed to take to button down the
country. That had been -- the meeting that he had had been in response to a
request directly from Andy Card and me to get the agencies together.

Clarke was advising Rice to lie, at least in the new post-Clarke
administration definition of all spin as lying. It's narrowly true that the FAA
was alerted and "special measures" were taken. Over time the futility
of that tepid alert and feckless special measures have been identified by almost
everyone as a signal failure of the pre-9/11 effort. Clarke knew the lack of
effective coordination with FAA was going to come out and assumed it was so
egregious that it would be a key point of press interest.

The fact
that Clarke was wasting time offering defensive talking points to Rice doesn't
suggest he's a liar. It suggests that he knew full well at the time that
such a defense would be needed. Why on Earth is this email being cited as
evidence that Clarke had no reservations about the pre-9/11 effort?

Of course, since parts of the email are classified we don't know if Clarke
volunteered these deceptive defenses himself or whether Rice requested them.
What a blackguard Clarke would be if Condi asked him for help putting the best
face on the FAA's appalling mishandling of the threat and, instead of telling
her to go to Hell he offered the requested information. The
bastard...

The major smoking gun was a background press briefing from
2002 in which Clarke defends the WH against a Time magazine piece suggesting
that Bush dropped the ball on al Qaeda. Clarke today says that Bush did indeed
botch tactical defense, so the discrepancy means he is a LIAR, and
presumably was telling the truth in 2002 and is lying today. The more sensible
interpretation is not offered; that Clarke in 2002 was lying at the request of
Condi Rice and Ari Fleisher (the two most cut-and-dried public liars in the
WH.)

This astonishing line of criticism of Clarke has boiled down to,
"This guy was so crooked he was willing to work in the Bush
administration."

If this line of argument actually works,
why not apply it everywhere? The Medicare actuary claiming he was ordered to
deceive congress can be torpedoed with ease; "this guy has zero
credibility... he withheld information from Congress!"

Spokesmen
for anything generally do not tell the "whole truth." They are
advocates for their employers. The really good ones do their job by shading and
trimming the truth without actually lying.

I don't distinguish
spinning and lying in my personal life, but then I'm not a White House political
appointee. Clarke's critics are, however, the worst sort of political hacks
whose entire livelihood is based on the idea that political spin is different
from lying. Since these spinmeisters present Clarke's press backgrounder as an
utterly destruction of his credibility there must be something in this infamous
briefing that far exceeds Washington standards of advocacy. Let's see if there
is...

---

The
Infamous Background Briefing (From FOX; I don't know if they edited it before
release)

Note: This
briefing was given in response to specific statements in a Time magazine article
about Sandy Berger presenting Condi Rice with a "plan" on al Qaeda,
not an overall assessment of Bush's war on terror.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let
me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point
is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton
administration to the Bush administration.

Clarke is repeating an earlier differentiation between "a
plan" and "a series of options." Classic spin--not a lie, just a
matter of word choices.

Second point is that the
Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998.
And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on
the table when that administration went out of office — issues like
aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh,
changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush
administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on
these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of
years.

Notice that the scope of
these comments is narrow; diplomatic handling of Pakistan and Uzbekistan,
funding the Northern Alliance. Clarke is accentuating the positive by focusing
on a few things that the Bush WH was tackling more aggressively than the Clinton
WH while not advertising the areas the Bush WH had bobbled. This narrow set of
issues is the topic of this briefing. Clarke's detractors have taken answers
given here badly out of context, as we will see below.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, in late
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.

The money phrase is
"vigorously pursue the existing policy," a classic
nonfalsifiable bit of spin. What does "vigorously" mean? The factual
assertions here are that the administration didn't actually cancel findings
already in place and initiated a "process" to look at
issues.

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.

More accentuation of the
positive. Citing the five-fold increase in funding for one thing doesn't address
whether other things were down-graded or ignored. The spin implication is that
the overall effort was greater than under Clinton... "add(ing) to the
existing Clinton strategy." Two points; 1) Clarke didn't say
"every worthwhile thing from the Clinton administration proceeded in the
same way." It's implied, but not really said. That's good spin. 2) Clarke's
complaints today are about the Bush teams tactical neglect pre-9/11, not about
the particulars of "strategy."

The sixth
point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the
deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then
tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new
decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the
principals.

This paragraph fully
supports Clarke's current complaints. Terrorism was downgraded to a deputy level
policy process rather than a tactical issue involving the principals.

Over the course of the summer — last
point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at
the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the
strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy
on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the
Northern Alliance assistance. And then changed the strategy from one of rollback
with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new
strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda. That is in
fact the timeline.

Now we are
getting to the heart of things. None of the five things cited here bear on
Clarke's charges of tactical neglect. As a spokesman for the administration
Clarke emphasizes increased CIA budgeting while omitting negative things like
that the FBI counter-terrorism budget was being gutted at the same time. The
diplomatic changes were favored by Clarke and he speaks as highly of them today.
The kicker is "a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of
Al Qaeda" Today we know this claim was both factual and complete
bullshit. The key words are "rapid" and
"elimination."

1)
The Bush administration spin implies a difference between roll-back and
elimination that doesn't exist. Sandy Berger's view of roll-back was roll-back
to the point where AQ was no longer a threat. There's no real difference
between eliminating AQ and eliminating the threat of AQ unless one is concerned
about their taste in music or something.

2)Clarke, accentuating the positive, doesn't volunteer the fact that the Bush
administration down-graded the Berger "roll-back" language to the
weaker "substantially erode." The rhetorical change to
"elimination" was championed by Clarke himself precisely because he
didn't think the incoming administration was taking the threat seriously enough.
Today's criticisms of Clarke overlook that he was a major part of the
administration's anti-terrorism efforts at the time. If Clarke were to say,
"I had to scream at these assholes every damn day to get them to even say
on paper they planned to eliminate AQ," and the rhetorical change was
finally made at Clarke's urging, that change was an administration action.
The WH could truthfully issue this statement, "pre-9/11 there was
tremendous resolve within the Bush administration to take terrorism more
seriously." That resolve was, of course, primarily Richard Clarke's
resolve, but he was "within the Bush administration,"
right?

3) The new strategy that called for
the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda was complete bullshit. Both
"rapid" and "elimination" are weasel words. The spin trick
here is that post-9/11 it was obvious that the only way to have rapidly
eliminated AQ was military so in 2002 we were left to assume that this wonderful
new strategy must have been military. It wasn't--it was just a piece of paper
that said our goal is the rapid elimination of AQ. Clarke, acting as an
administration spokesman, didn't say there was "a new strategy that
called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda which I thought was facially
insufficient." The actual plan started with another round of begging
the Taliban to turn Osama over to us followed by a years long process of funding
the Northern Alliance. Again,

Clarke doesn't
lie here, he just contrasts "rapid" with "five year." He
doesn't volunteer that the "rapid" plan was a three year plan. Is
three years "rapid?" To a glacier three years is quick. To a mayfly
it's slow. It's spin, not lying.

QUESTION: When was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: Well, the president was briefed throughout this
process.

This is not a lie. There
is no claim the president was briefed on the particulars of anything whatsoever,
or that he offered meaningful input--just that at some point somebody told Bush
some deputies were putting together something on AQ.

From Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, page 39.

"Until September 11, however, Bush
had not put that thinking (that Clinton's response to al Qaeda emboldened bin
Laden) into practice, nor had he pressed the issue of bin Laden. Though Rice and
others were developing a plan to eliminate al Qaeda, no formal recommendations
had ever been presented to the president.

"I know there was a plan
in the works. . . . I don't know how mature the plan was," Bush recalled. .
. .He acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national
security team. There was a significant difference in my attitude after September
11. I was not on point (before that date), but I knew he was a menace, and I
knew he was a problem."

QUESTION: But when was the final September 4 document?
(interrupted) Was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: The document went to the president on September 10, I
think.

Again, not quite a lie. It
"went to" the President insofar as it went towards the oval office,
though the President never saw it before 9/11.

QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the (Aug.
12, 2002) Time (magazine) article that the Bush administration was unwilling to
take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of
animus against the — general animus against the foreign
policy?

CLARKE: I think if there was a general
animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing
with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council
leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the
same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team
to me.

A classic
non-denial denial.

JIM
ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything
that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions,
and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is
that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's
correct.

Of course
the Bush administration stopped thousands of things that the Clinton
administration "was doing" throughout government, so Clarke's answer
is a lie if maliciously taken out of context. In context Clarke is approving a
reporters summation of the preceding paragraphs dealing only with long range
strategic policy planning regarding al Qaeda.

This briefing is about paperwork--policy statements and such.
Within that narrow scope the Clinton administration hadn't been
"doing" anything at all, nor was the Bush administration. There was
nothing to be stopped.

In a broader sense,
perhaps the WH thinks Clarke should have volunteered that Bush had stopped the
Clinton plan to assassinate Bin Laden by pulling both Predator surveillance and
cruise missile submarine support. Perhaps he should have but this briefing
wasn't about efforts to assassinate Bin Laden. Clarke preemptively narrowed the
scope to the few areas he could truthfully say flattering things about the
WH.

ANGLE:
OK.

QUESTION: Are you saying now that there was
not only a plan per se, presented by the transition team, but that it was
nothing proactive that they had suggested?

CLARKE:
Well, what I'm saying is, there are two things presented. One, what the existing
strategy had been. And two, a series of issues — like aiding the
Northern Alliance, changing Pakistan policy, changing Uzbek
policy — that they had been unable to come to um, any new conclusions,
um, from '98 on.

Very slick.
Clarke isn't willing to say the Clinton strategy handed off to Bush wasn't
proactive, only that it existed, and thus wasn't new. If Clinton had been
bombing the Taliban every day it wouldn't have been a "new plan." It
would have been the existing policy. This word game is played out throughout the
briefing.

QUESTION: Was all of that
from '98 on or was some of it ...

CLARKE: All of
those issues were on the table from '98 on.

ANGLE:
When in '98 were those presented?

CLARKE: In October
of '98.

QUESTION: In response to the Embassy
bombing?

CLARKE: Right, which was in
September.

QUESTION: Were all of those issues
part of alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to
pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There
was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a
description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the
threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two
years, and which were still on the table.

color="#000080"]Notice that Clarke is separating current strategy and future
planning. The seemingly mere "what the existing strategy had been"
actually includes the entirety of Clinton era anti-terrorism efforts. The issues
"on the table" since 1998 were still on the table, but were being
debated anew. Fair enough.

QUESTION:
So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any
sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want
to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan,
strategy — there was no, nothing new.

The key here is
"new." The Clinton strategy in place at the end of his administration
was not "new" because it was already in place. Assume hypothetically
that Clinton had formed a policy in 2000 that Bin Laden must be assassinated in
2001. Even though such a policy would be a de facto forward looking
recommendation to the incoming administration it wouldn't have been new
because it dated from 2000. This entire section is a typical Washington word
game.

QUESTION: 'Til late
December, developing ...

CLARKE: What happened at
the end of December was that the Clinton administration NSC principals committee
met and once again looked at the strategy, and once again looked at the issues
that they had brought, decided in the past to add to the strategy. But they did
not at that point make any recommendations.

QUESTIONS: Had those issues evolved at all from October of
'98 'til December of 2000?

CLARKE: Had they evolved?
Um, not appreciably.

ANGLE: What was the problem?
Why was it so difficult for the Clinton administration to make decisions on
those issues?

CLARKE: Because they were tough
issues. You know, take, for example, aiding the Northern Alliance. Um, people in
the Northern Alliance had a, sort of bad track record. There were questions
about the government, there were questions about drug-running, there was
questions about whether or not in fact they would use the additional aid to go
after Al Qaeda or not. Uh, and how would you stage a major new push in
Uzbekistan or somebody else or Pakistan to cooperate? One of the big problems
was that Pakistan at the time was aiding the other side, was aiding the Taliban.
And so, this would put, if we started aiding the Northern Alliance against the
Taliban, this would have put us directly in opposition to the Pakistani
government. These are not easy decisions.

ANGLE: And
none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was
...

CLARKE: No, that's not true. In the spring, the
Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by
a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer
carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize
that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away
from the Taliban. So that's really how it started.

Here Clarke offers a
specific instance of something Bush did that Clinton did not--Bush considered
lifting the sanctions on Pakistan.

QUESTION: Had the Clinton administration in any of its work on
this issue, in any of the findings or anything else, prepared for a call for the
use of ground forces, special operations forces in any way? What did the Bush
administration do with that if they had?

CLARKE:
There was never a plan in the Clinton administration to use ground forces. The
military was asked at a couple of points in the Clinton administration to think
about it. Um, and they always came back and said it was not a good idea. There
was never a plan to do that.

All
true. What is withheld is the observation that there was never a plan in the
Bush administration to use ground forces either. Funny that no reporter
asks.

(Break in briefing details as reporters and
Clarke go back and forth on how to source quotes from this
backgrounder.)

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we
could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there
was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since
October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came
into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's
right.

Again, this is masterful
spin. one, there was no plan (to invade Afghanistan or otherwise
militarily attack AQ); two, there was no delay (how could there be a
delay if there wasn't a plan?); and that actually the first changes since
October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came
into office? The "first changes" referred to are changes in narrow
policy regarding Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Northern Alliance. This exchange
leaves the implication that Clinton didn't do anything at all after 1998 but
actually says nothing of the sort.

QUESTION: It was not put into an action plan until September 4,
signed off by the principals?

CLARKE: That's
right.

I am always amazed how bad
reporters are at their jobs! They love running their own mouths so much that
they're forever asking multiple questions at once and letting the subject pick
which ones to answer. Clarke accepts the reporter's own formula that approval by
principles equals "put into action." Of course nothing was "put
into action" or even approved by the President, but the principals did
indeed sign off on 9/4.

QUESTION: I
want to add though, that NSPD — the actual work on it began in early
April.

Look how good Fox's
transcript is. Do you think this is a question or something Clarke said?
Hmmm...

CLARKE: There was a lot of in
the first three NSPDs that were being worked in parallel.

ANGLE: Now the five-fold increase for the money in covert
operations against Al Qaeda — did that actually go into effect when it
was decided or was that a decision that happened in the next budget year or
something?

CLARKE: Well, it was gonna go into effect
in October, which was the next budget year, so it was a month away.

QUESTION: That actually got into the intelligence
budget?

CLARKE: Yes it did.

QUESTION: Just to clarify, did that come up in April or
later?

CLARKE: No, it came up in April and it was
approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other
thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination
strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and
just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the
NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.

Again, the proposed increase in funding was real. Fair
enough.

QUESTION: Well can you clarify
something? I've been told that he gave that direction at the end of May. Is that
not correct?

CLARKE: No, it was March.

QUESTION: The elimination of Al Qaeda, get back to ground
troops — now we haven't completely done that even with a substantial number of
ground troops in Afghanistan. Was there, was the Bush administration
contemplating without the provocation of September 11th moving troops into
Afghanistan prior to that to go after Al Qaeda?

CLARKE: I can not try to speculate on that point. I don't know
what we would have done.

This is
technically true. Clarke knew full and well there was no Bush plan for armed
intervention in Afghanistan but he declines to speculate and truthfully says,
"I don't know what we would have done." He doesn't volunteer
that he does know what we would not have done.

[troublemaker]

1. Moderator: Please retain this one.

This is a dupe, but with formatting corrected. Please kill the earlier version. Thanks.

[RhodaGrits]

2. Excellent work, Thanks for posting it. n/t