Thursday, July 22, 2004
9/11 Commission "balances" ignored urgent Clarke pleas with complete crap rhetorical question to exonerate Bush administration's disinterest in terror
(p 201) (emphasis added)
Within the first few days after Bush's inauguration, Clarke approached Rice in an effort to get her - and the new President - to give terrorism very high priority and to act on the agenda that he had pushed during the last few months of the previous administration. After Rice requested that all senior staff identify desirable major policy reviews or initiatives, Clarke submitted an elaborate memorandum on January 25, 2001. He attached to it his 1998 Delenda Plan and the December 2000 strategy paper." We urgently need ... a Principals level review on the al Qida network," Clarke wrote.
He wanted the Principals Committee to decide whether al Qaeda was "a first order threat" or a more modest worry being overblown by "chicken little" alarmists. Alluding to the transition briefing that he had prepared for Rice, Clarke wrote that al Qaeda "is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy." Two key decisions that had been deferred, he noted, concerned covert aid to keep the Northern Alliance alive when fighting began again in Afghanistan in the spring, and covert aid to the Uzbeks. Clarke also suggested that decisions should be made soon on messages to the Taliban and Pakistan over the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan, on possible new money for CIA operations, and on "when and how ... to respond to the attack on the USS Cole."
The national security advisor did not respond directly to Clarke's memorandum. No Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda was held until September 4, 2001 (although the Principals Committee met frequently on other subjects, such as the Middle East peace process, Russia, and the Persian Gulf ). But Rice and Hadley began to address the issues Clarke had listed. What to do or say about the Cole had been an obvious question since inauguration day. When the attack occurred, 25 days before the election, candidate Bush had said to CNN,"I hope that we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act and take the necessary action. There must be a consequence." Since the Clinton administration had not responded militarily, what was the Bush administration to do?
Aw, bummer. The Clinton administration tied Bush's hands by failing to pass a war on to him. A war a couple days old, (p 193):
"In other words, the Yemenis provided strong evidence connecting the Cole attack to al Qaeda during the second half of November, identifying individual operatives whom the United States knew were part of al Qaeda. During December the United States was able to corroborate this evidence.
The quality of that intelligence runs circles around the intelligence Bush used to convince the nation to launch into Iraq. But what was the Bush administration to do?
// posted by Erik @ 7/22/2004 04:52:00 PM
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