Battle Stations

The day after Richard Clarke's 60 minutes interview Bloggers are on full scandal alert determined to leave no damning accusation unquoted. I'm fairly sure that, in the end, the whole interview will be quoted as especially damning. Still when reading a rush transcript heroically posted by sadly no. I was struck by the fact that Clarke had a fairly credible explanation about how 9/11 might possibly have been prevented if George Bush had acted like Bill Clinton.


"STAHL (exp): {The last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of intelligence chatter was back in December 1999 when Clarke was the Terrorism Czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says that President Clinton ordered his cabinet to go to battle stations, meaning they were on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles Int'l airport when this al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada driving a car full of explosives. Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before 9/11.}

CLARKE: He never thought it was important enough for *him* [Clarke's emphasis] to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject.

STAHL: Why would having a meeting make a difference?

CLARKE: If you compare December 1999 to June and July of 2001, in December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew -- never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.

STAHL (exp): {The FBI and the CIA knew that these two al Qaeda operatives [pictures displayed onscreen] both among the 9/11 hijackers, had been living in the United States since 2000, yet neither agency passed that information up the chain of command or told Dick Clarke, the White House Terrorism Coordinator.}

CLARKE: And here I am in the White House saying, something's about to happen. Tell me -- if a sparrow falls from the tree, I want to know, if anything unusual's going on, because we're about to be hit. "

Ouch. Also makes the phrase "battle stations" clear in context. Adressing this point

"HADLEY: All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas, but ...to the FBI .... So the President put us on battle stations."

Stahl neglected the obvious follow up. "When you say battle stations do you mean what Clarke means, that is ' every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack,'?"

OK so she couldn't cut and paste a transcript, but she could and should have asked how often the head of the FBI had to come to the White house to report on what he had personally done to stop al Qaeda.

Yesterday Condolezza Rice uses the phrase "battle stations" (from the center for american progress via Atrios)

?In June and July when the threat spikes were so high?we were at battle stations?The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11.? ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

I think that Bush will lose the election if Bush administration principals are regularly asked if by "battle stations" they mean what Clinton did in 99 (with description) and whether they think that might have lead to the arrest of at least two of the hijackers.