Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence
FAIR Press Release (6/20/03)
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842
New Yorker, November 17, 2003
Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to implement Iraq invasion plan
Clark told me how he learned of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece. Shortly after 9/11, Clark visited the Pentagon, where a 3-star general confided that Rumsfeld's team planned to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. Clark said, "Rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to the problem." Clark was told that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for 9/11, had devised a 5-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.
Source: The New Yorker magazine, "Gen. Clark's Battles" Nov 17, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations, New York 11/20/03:
Our fractured alliances are a natural consequence of the contempt this Administration has shown our friends and partners. With the Kyoto Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention, the International Criminal Court, the war in Iraq and in so many ways large and small, we sent the message: "your security is your own concern, and your concerns are of no concern to us."
This is no accident. It is a function of the backward way this Administration does business. Traditionally and ideally, we Americans meet our challenges by starting with the facts, analyzing the problem, and reasoning toward a solution with our citizens and our allies. This Administration does things in reverse.
As we've seen in Iraq, they don't start with the facts and shape a policy; they start with a policy and shape the facts.http://www.cfr.org/campaign2004/pub6545/wesley_clark/restoring_americas_alliances.phpHardball, December 8 2003
MATTHEWS: We’re back with General Wesley Clark. By the way, General, packed house tonight. Big house tonight. The biggest-it’s really-it’s just seething with activity in here.
You know, you said something interesting about what happened after we were hit on 9/11, 2001, about how you got the word somewhere in the Pentagon or elsewhere that there were people already pushing for war with Iraq. Tell us about that, first, because it tells us, I think, about the mind-set of this administration going into 9/11.
CLARK: Well, I went through the halls of the Pentagon. I’d only-it must have been within a couple of weeks after 9/11. And I had been on CNN almost every day. I had been down in Atlanta and so forth. And I still felt like a military guy. You know, still looked at my sleeve, I wanted that big black stripe for general officer on there. And it felt funny, because the people-everybody that was going to be engaged in it, of course, I’d worked with them all.
So I went through the Pentagon and just kind of wanted to check in and make sure the stuff I was saying was about right in terms of what they could tell me about the intel and about their perceptions and so forth. I didn’t want to divulge any classified information, but just to sort of calibrate.
And so I went in to see Secretary Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz was there. And I went downstairs, and a guy said, sir, come in here. And I said, I don’t want to take up your time. He says, no, you need to hear this. He said, have you heard the joke? I said no, I haven’t. What joke? He said “9/11, Saddam Hussein, if he didn’t do it, too bad, he should have. Because we’re going to get him anyway.”
Of course, it wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t funny. And he didn’t tell it to me to make me laugh.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660578CNN Blitzer, May 22, 2005
CLARK: Well, with all due respect, Wolf, I think that's a selective reinterpretation of what actually happened.
The administration determined after 9/11 that going to war against the Taliban wasn't sufficient; that they wanted to go after Iraq. They used the evidence to justify going after Iraq. They were concerned that if they went to the U.N., somehow it might be deferred and postponed. So they went to the U.N. anyway at the urging of the Brits and Colin Powell, and they managed to just stay on the original time line, which had always called for an attack sometime in the spring of 2003. That's what they did.
They pushed it; they pushed the intelligence; they didn't do the preparation that was needed.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0505/22/le.01.html
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