Except although I know the title of that book I won't even respect it enough to type it. It's a full pack of lies, fabrications, distortions, and wildly one sided reads on reality and links stuffed into one post. The only way this could be taken apart word for word would be by compiling detailed three paragragh discussion rebuttals point for every point made, and then do the same for everything found in all of your links to other smears.
There was a cottage industry supported by Rove's machine turning out Clark hate pieces three years ago when they saw a need to take him down before he could win the Democratic nomination, and they got picked up and used by enemies of the Democratic Party from all points on the spectrum, sometimes innocently without vettting, and sometimes not. Here is a DU thread that discusses that:
"The swiftboating of Clark has already begun...."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=321522As to Kosovo, here is a good thread for people to read:
"Wes Clark in Kosovo today; getting Hero's welcome from Albanian Muslims!"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=2647330Of course why not watch Amy Goodman of Democracy Now do an hour long interview of Wes Clark about War and related matters? (or read the transcript). NATO was cleared of all war crime charges, Milosivic was not and Right Wing Serbian apologists always try to paint Serbia as the good guy in that conflict which threatened to become genoicide:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/02/1440234&mode=thread&tid=25Wes Clark talks extensively about Kosovo in this extended interview with Dan Rather. HEre is a snippet from APart III:
"DAN RATHER: What is the other picture you have marked?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: In the summer of 1998, while I was in command, another round of ethnic cleansing started. And I was warning the Pentagon about it and trying to mobilize U.S. opinion and U.S. leadership to take action to prevent it.
Well, we did take some action. We tried to undertake diplomacy. There was a lot of discussion. And meanwhile the Serbs were moving some 300 to 400,000 Kosovar Albanians -- were driven from their homes. They fled to the mountains because they had to get away from the Serb military.
And in the mountains, this is what you saw. This is a five-week-old baby who's died of exposure. And the family's preparing him for burial. When you can stop something like this, you should.
DAN RATHER: ...Hearing you speak of this is the first time I've seen you speak with real emotion.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.
DAN RATHER: Deep-seated emotion. Tell me why that is?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Why? Because you're dealing with people's lives when you're dealing with things like this, Dan. This is about life and death. It's about the difference between academic theories and discussions of deterrence and prevention and preemption, and what the real impact is on the ground of U.S. actions.
And I don't think you can be a real statesman or a real leader and be-- can connect the two. Lots of people go to school and they study it. Lots of people on the ground. But there aren't enough linkages. It's easy when you're in the United States to depersonalize all that's happening over there..."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/19/60II/main584548.shtmlAnd Frenchie who was mentioned above has a great web site of her own. See her section on Kosovo among other things:
"Rapid Fire- Silver Bullets" that debunks much of the crap that you posted about Clark:
http://rapidfire-silverbullets.com/I personally researched and wrote up two long debunking pieces, one on Clark's invovlement with Acxiom and the other regarding the London Times Op-Ed that F.A.I.R. wrote about. Each effort took over an hour to compile. I'll link to them at the bottom of this post. You linked to a dozen hit pieces on Clark, and there are stories to be told that tear apart each and every one of them, but it takes volumes to do so. Lies are easy to fabricate, disproving a falsehood is much more difficult, especially when it laced with toxic subjective comments. But the bottom line is, if it smells like a smear, it probably is one. And your laundry list "Case Against Wes Clark" stinks to high heaven.
Here is something I once wrote to another serial assassan of Wes Clark, the specific contents don't always relate to the snips you posted here, but the links you left are laced with this type of crap:
"You see, by now we have all lived through the Presidential campaign of 2004. We have all been introduced to the term "swiftboating" which did not even exist until John Kerry won the Democratic nomination. We have all seen how a plethera of sources spread lies against John Kerry that at best created a Frankenstein's monster of the truth by stitching together stray factoids and APPARENTLY unflattering comments into a newly reassembled whole that barely represented a real human being, let alone John Kerry.
But those who practiced that unholy art form practiced first on Wes Clark. Much of the slander you link to actually seems laughable now given what we now all know about Wes Clark, but back then it was more effective because, in the classic political hit job tactical move, Clark's enemies attempted to negatively define him to Democratic voters before Clark could define himself. Hence all the faked hysteria about Clark's "favorable" comments about Bush, and him being a "trojan horse" for Republicans. How many fund raisers has Clark done for Democrats by now? Well over a hundred I would estimate conservatively.
Same thing for the Iraq war. Clark never supported going into that war and everyone by now knows it. You underestimate the sophistication of most internet readersreaders. These smears against Clark have been deconstructed and debunked endlessly and only reflect back negatively on those who continue to throw them out.
Obviously with the push of a computer button you can link to a collection of a thousand different lies and distortions that no one can possibly have the time or space to individually refute all of, live, in a single message bopard reply. But we all understand swiftboating now, we can smell it when we see it, and yor links literally stink.
No, it isn't exclusively Republicans who swiftboat Wes Clark. There will always be some on the left who are so adamantly predisposed to distrust or even hate the American military that they will spin each and every event in Clark's life in the most negative possible light, and then take it further. There is also a whole stable of Serbian Milosovic apologists who turn out endless anti-NATO propaganda tracts meant to discredit the United States and those Americans who helped take Milosevic down, and these sometimes get picked up by military hating American leftists also.
But not everything is as it seems in politics. When virtually everything you just linked to was written, Wes Clark was a candidate in Democratic primaries trying to appeal to our left of center activist base. If one were to posit for a moment that the Republican Party had something to fear about General Clark, a former Supreme NATO Commander who demolished Bush's arguments concerning his chosen campaign issue, national security, how do you think they would attempt to bring Clark down? By painting him as a wild eyed Liberal that Michael Moore and George McGovern embraced? Hardly, at least not initially. No they would paint him as a sinister ploy injected into politics by ruling conservative interests to undermine liberal issues, values, and causes that Democratic primary voters cared about.
I always found it interesting that many of the exact same lies about General Clark appeared in both Right and Left wing sources, and I found it amusing when a right wing mentality slipped through the cracks and burst through in supposedly left wing critiques of Wes Clark. My favorite is the attempt to link General Clark to what happened in Wacco Texas with the Branch Dividian cult. Yes there was a human tragedy, though where to fix blame for it can be hotley disputed. Still it turns out that Wes Clark literally had nothing to do with it. That's not my point though. My point is that Wacco is a right wing rallying cry. It is well documented that Timothy McVeigh worked himeself up to a frenzy over Wacco, and Right wing Republicans in Congress attempted to take Janet Reno down over it. It's always particuarly laughable to read attempts to smear Wes Clark over Wacco, but be my guest to peddle all of the smears".
REGARDING ACXIOM:
Robert O’Harrow, the Author of "No Place to Hide" thinks well of Clark
Robert O'Harrow Jr. is a reporter for the Washington Post who wrote the Book "No Place To Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society"
Here is a partial reveiw of that book from Publisher's Weekly which I obtained at Amazon.com:
"The amount of personal data collected on ordinary citizens has grown steadily over the decades, and after 9/11, corporations that had been amassing this information largely for marketing purposes saw an opportunity to strengthen their ties with the government. But what do we really know about these data collectors, and are they trustworthy? O'Harrow, a Pulitzer finalist who covers privacy and technology issues for the Washington Post, tracks the explosive growth of this surveillance industry, with keen attention to the problems that "inevitable mistakes" along the way have created in mainstream society, from victims of identity theft who have been placed in financial jeopardy to travelers detained at the airport because of the similarity of their names to those of criminal suspects. O'Harrow gives the government's push for increased surveillance heavy play, but he effectively presents the story's many sides, as when he juxtaposes the perspectives of a Justice Department attorney, a civil liberties activist and Senator Patrick Leahy in the first chapter."
As for O'Harrow and Clark, they appeared together at a Center for American Progress Conference sometime in 2005. O'Harrow said this about Clark and Acxiom at that event:
"...There is a guy that I think many of us in the room respect and admire deeply, General Clark, and he serves as a great example of someone who was deeply involved in representing a company called Axiom. And Axiom was one of those companies that responded with – I know that from my reporting – very patriotic motives. They had a lot of that as a marketer and they shared it and they shared it to good effect; it helped. They also saw ways that they could change their business model and become part of the security industrial complex. And one of the people that was helping open doors for Axiom in Washington was General Clark. The reason I raise that is because I kept finding that General Clark got to places before I did and people spoke admiringly of his ability to say what he knew, to say what he didn’t know, to play it straight, and to in every case do it in the smart way, which is why people respect him."
Clark speaking to O'Harrow at that event:
"Can I just say one more thing about this impulse to privacy that you’ve mentioned, Bob, because when I was doing this – and I want to say this because Nuala is here, because when the government starts working programs and it does know where they go and where they going they are always cautious because everybody knows that these programs that do data are very sensitive. Before the government could even get a grip on some of these programs, when the word comes out on them they are blasted before people even understand it. So on the one hand, I understand exactly why there is an impulse for privacy. People – companies like Axiom were told, “Look, you just can’t compete for this contract if you talk about this to the press because we don’t know what the program is and we want to have – we want to be able to –“ this is – I’m speaking for the government – “We want to be able to see what data you have available. We want to figure out if we can use it, and we don’t want to have to answer a million enquiries from the press about it until we get it done. Then we’ll run it through.”
You know, my instinct on it was a little bit different than the government’s, but I didn’t have any influence on them. I mean, my instinct would have to bring in the ACLU and to say, “Please create a group that’s sort of like a trusted group that we can bounce ideas off of and we want to run these ideas by you. And if you have strong objections, we want to hear them. We want to hear them right upfront. What we ask is that you will work with us in a collaborative sense so that – you know, you tell us before you run out to the Washington Post the next day and we have got (unintelligible.)” So, you know, we are just exploring ideas. We want to try to put this together and I do think there is a need for that. There is a need for enough privacy in governmental decision-making that the government can come out with programs and then have a chance to explain them, not to take anything away from the press because that balance is a dynamic balance. It’s fought by and maintained by hardworking reporters who make a lot of phone calls and get turned down a lot, but it’s a very important public duty.
So I am not sure if the balance is right is what I am saying. I don’t know if it’s right and that is one of issues we ought to explore."
Taken from:
“NO PLACE TO HIDE: WHERE THE DATA REVOLUTION MEETS HOMELAND SECURITY”
MODERATOR:
P. J. CROWLEY, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
FEATURING:
GENERAL WESLEY K. CLARK
JAMES X. DEMPSEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY
NUALA O’CONNOR KELLY, CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
ROBERT O’HARROW, JR., REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST; AUTHOR, NO PLACE TO HIDE
“NO PLACE TO HIDE: WHERE THE DATA REVOLUTION MEETS HOMELAND SECURITY”
http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/0504transcript.pdfRegarding The London Times and F.A.I.R.:
"First let me preface this by saying that I am generally very positive about FAIR. I have a personal friend who does work for them. FAIR founder Jeff Cohen comes up to my part of the woods with some regularity, I've been at several meetings with him and a I have a personally autographed copy from him of "Cable News Confidential", which is a great book. Having said that, no one gets it completely right all of the time, and they didn't with Clark this time.
The surest sign of an attempt to smear General Wesley Clark "from the left" is the painstakingly cut up and reassembled way in which some of his critics attempt to present the comments Wes Clark made in the London Times on April 10th 2003. The fact that every comment that Clark made in that Op-Ed that points out the problems with Bush's Iraq policy are surgically removed, often to the ludicrous extent of joining together phrases seperated by 13 paragraphs of text through the magic of three dots (such as... this) should be all the evidence needed to make anyone suspicious that the material being quoted from is being manipulated to fit someone's covert agenda. FAIR wasn't the source for the Frankenstein's monster version of Clark's Op-Ed, but they obviously ran with it here.
This comment is simply a flat out wrong assertion of an opinion:
"After the fall of Baghdad, any remaining qualms Clark had about the wisdom of the war seemed to evaporate"
And my above assertion is easily backed up simply by reading from the full source material that allegedly shows that Clark lost all qualms about the wisdom of the war. It is the absolutely most simple fact check one should always do if one is seeking Fairness and Accuracy In the Media, but F.A.I.R. didn't even bother to do that simplest of steps here.
First they extracted and commented on this from Clark:
"Already the scent of victory is in the air." Though he had been critical of Pentagon tactics, Clark was exuberant about the results of "a lean plan, using only about a third of the ground combat power of the Gulf War. If the alternative to attacking in March with the equivalent of four divisions was to wait until late April to attack with five, they certainly made the right call."
Let me point out for starters that Clark's qualms never included any doubt that the U.S. military could invade and depose Hussein, that was never in question for Clark. What was in question for him was the wisdom of doing so, not our ability to do so. That is a classic bait and switch against Clark, implying his praise of a military strategy somehow shows he wavored on his opinion of going to war in the first place. Whether or not Clark had earlier expressed doubt about a certain military tactic is not the point to FAIR's piece and they know it. The point of the artical was to question whether Clark opposed invading Iraq when we did, not to go over Clark's expressed opinions on how such an invasion would best be managed if launched.
But that is the least of FAIR's inaccuracy here. What follows is a horrible job of cut and paste editing to create a wildly distorted image. Let's look at what FAIR chose not to quote, shall we? Like the sentance immediately following "Already the scent of victory is in the air" which just so happens to be "Yet a bit more work and some careful reckoning need to be done before we take our triumph." What's that? Do I detect an unreported qualm? In fact FAIR chose to look right past the next two paragraphs (numbers two and three of Clark's Op-Ed, which go on to detail with amazing foresight the problems that lay ahead for Bush's occupation of Iraq:
"In the first place, the final military success needs to be assured. Whatever caused the sudden collapse in Iraq, there are still reports of resistance in Baghdad. The regime’s last defenders may fade away, but likely not without a fight. And to the north, the cities of Tikrit, Kirkuk and Mosul are still occupied by forces that once were loyal to the regime. It may take some armed persuasion for them to lay down their arms. And finally, the Baath party and other security services remain to be identified and disarmed.
Then there’s the matter of returning order and security. The looting has to be stopped. The institutions of order have been shattered. And there are scant few American and British forces to maintain order, resolve disputes and prevent the kind of revenge killings that always mark the fall of autocratic regimes. The interim US commander must quickly deliver humanitarian relief and re-establish government for a country of 24 million people the size of California. Already, the acrimony has begun between the Iraqi exile groups, the US and Britain, and local people."
How does FAIR square those concerns from Clark with the subjective bias of their reporting? How do those statements support their assertion that "After the fall of Baghdad, any remaining qualms Clark had about the wisdom of the war seemed to evaporate"? They simply don't, that's how. They obvioulsy assume that the reader doesn't have access to the full original piece. Maybe they never looked at the full original piece themselves, which really would be unforgivable from an organization like FAIR that prides itself on accuracy and fairness.
FAIR fast forwards through Clark's Op-Ed piece to next cite this quote from it:
"Many Gulf states will hustle to praise their liberation from a sense of insecurity they were previously loath even to express. Egypt and Saudi Arabia will move slightly but perceptibly towards Western standards of human rights."
OK, lets rewind their tape a bit. What did they skip right over that directly preceded that comment by Clark? Here it is in it's full original context:
"As for the diplomacy, the best that can be said is that strong convictions often carry a high price. Despite the virtually tireless energy of their Foreign Offices, Britain and the US have probably never been so isolated in recent times. Diplomacy got us into this campaign but didn’t pull together the kind of unity of purpose that marked the first Gulf War. Relationships, institutions and issues have virtually all been mortgaged to success in changing the regime in Baghdad. And in the Islamic world the war has been seen in a far different light than in the US and Britain. Much of the world saw this as a war of aggression. They were stunned by the implacable determination to use force, as well as by the sudden and lopsided outcome.
Now the bills must be paid, amid the hostile image created in many areas by the allied action. Surely the balm of military success will impact on the diplomacy to come — effective power so clearly displayed always shocks and stuns. Many Gulf states will hustle to praise their liberation from a sense of insecurity they were previously loath even to express. Egypt and Saudi Arabia will move slightly but perceptibly towards Western standards of human rights."
How can anyone defend such clearly biased selective editing as "fair"? Remember all of these quotes from F.A.I.R were stitched together to support their bold assertion that Clark lost all qualms about the Iraq invasion. So of course they had to ignore the part of Clark's Op-Ed where he said the folowing, becauase they disprove the contention that they were making:
"The real questions revolve around two issues: the War on Terror and the Arab-Israeli dispute. And these questions are still quite open. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and others will strive to mobilize their recruiting to offset the Arab defeat in Baghdad. Whether they will succeed depends partly on whether what seems to be an intense surge of joy travels uncontaminated elsewhere in the Arab world. And it also depends on the dexterity of the occupation effort. This could emerge as a lasting humiliation of Iraq or a bridge of understanding between Islam and the West.
But the operation in Iraq will also serve as a launching pad for further diplomatic overtures, pressures and even military actions against others in the region who have supported terrorism and garnered weapons of mass destruction. Don’t look for stability as a Western goal. Governments in Syria and Iran will be put on notice — indeed, may have been already — that they are “next” if they fail to comply with Washington’s concerns."
Clark's Op-Ed was full of dire warnings about what could easily go wrong, and Clark was saying this at at time when other leading Democrats inside the United States, like John Edwards, were still saying that the United States was right to invade Iraq, and were still viewing it as a total victory; Mission Accomplished.
And nothing could be more blatently intentionally misleading than F.A.I.R. making this claim:
"Clark closed the piece with visions of victory celebrations here at home: "Let's have those parades on the Mall and down Constitution Avenue."
It nicely helped F.A.I.R. make its intended point to say Clark closed his piece that way, the only problem though is that it isn't true. Here is how Clark actually closed his Op-Ed:
"Is this victory? Certainly the soldiers and generals can claim success. And surely, for the Iraqis there is a new-found sense of freedom. But remember, this was all about weapons of mass destruction. They haven’t yet been found. It was to continue the struggle against terror, bring democracy to Iraq, and create change, positive change, in the Middle East. And none of that is begun, much less completed.
Let’s have those parades on the Mall and down Constitution Avenue — but don’t demobilize yet. There’s a lot yet to be done, and not only by the diplomats."
Clark closed his piece by saying "Mission Not Accomplished" after presenting a two page shopping list of qualms about the Bush invasion of Iraq. FAIR's piece was nothing more than a subjective opinion piece using the tools of progaganda. They should be embarassed by it.
Clark is right about U.S. military power in a straight out simple war where the objective is to defeat an enemy in battle. But Clark was never warning about a U.S. lack of military superiority. He was warning about the lack of a sane U.S. foreign policy, and the dangers that presents America with in the world, where the objective can't simply be deposing a foreign head of state and calling that a mission accomplished."
Link to original Op-Ed in London Times PUBLISHED 3 WEEKS BEFORE BUSH LANDED ON AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER POSING IN FRONT OF "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" BANNER:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1128726.ece
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