Tuesday, March 30, 2004

 

Clarke part XXX

Clarke Vs Kristol

Kristol on Clarke in the April 5 Weekly Standard

"Clarke and the New York Times are certainly free to argue that the Bush administration has not done a good job in fighting the war on terror. They are free to argue that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But neither Clarke nor the New York Times has even attempted to make the case that the Bush administration bears any true moral responsibility for failing to avert al Qaeda's attack on 9/11."

Clarke on 60 minutes Sunday 21 March
I am still using the sadly no rush transcript


"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.

STAHL: No one told you. No one told you.

CLARKE: Leslie, if we had put their picture on the CBS Evening News, if we had put their picture on Dan Rather, on USA Today, we could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance."

Kristol's claim is demonstrably false.

Clarke has attempted (with success I think) to argue that the Bush administration bears some true moral responsibility for failing to prevent 9/11. I know 60 minutes is obscure and that there are only 16,000,000 witnesses of this attempt, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that Kristol is lying and should stop pretending that he is a journalist.

posted by Robert permalink and comments6:33 PM