Watched Clarke on Larry King again...Took a few notes

Actually, I transcribed as much as I could for posterity. Following is a pseudo-script which is not word-for-word but does capture the essence of the responses.

There were some salient points made during the interview from Biden (regarding the president's responsibility for bring the CIA and other intelligence factions together) and the contention that Clinton ordered bin Laden's assisination and CIA didn't follow through. Wow. So here goes...


King: Why did you apologize and to whom?

Clarke: I apologized to the families and the victims personally and on behalf of the government because the government failed them, failed to protect their loved ones and despite the hard work and actions of some in the CIA and other agencies, the attacks took place. It does not matter that we tried hard, we failed…


King: Is an act of terror a failure..?

Clarke: Certainly … if you look at the entire 8 years Clinton was in office, 35 americans were killed, 3,000 were killed on 9/11.

King: You highlighted positive aspects minimized negative aspects in a memo…

Clarke: What you referring to is the attempts to undermine my credibility. Bush trying to undermine my credibility is like the pot calling the kettle black. They are trying to divert attention away from the issues I am raising. The issue is, could the Bush administration have done more to prevent 9/11 and what did they do both immediately before and after 9/11—did they divert the war on terror to fight an unnecessary costly war in Iraq?

King: Why did you praise them (in the memo)?

Clarke: I didn’t praise them…what you are referring to is a leak that was a violation... Time magazine came out with a story saying the White House had not done all they could to stop 9/11. That hurt the White House a lot. It was true. They asked me to help. I was working for the president and said I would not lie. They asked if I would at least emphasize the positive. At a time like that you have a choice: resign, lie or stay on and give a briefing and emphasize what was done. I chose to give the briefing and what the White House is saying in questioning this is that they don’t understand why I didn’t criticize them to the press then.l If I had done so, I would have been fired within an hour.

King: Who told you to do that briefing?
Clarke: National security advisor, communications advisor…

Clarke: They are scrambling very hard at the White House. They have a lot of people running around doing talk shows to besmirch me. I said in the preface of my book I knew they would let the attack dogs loose. That is what they did to Paul O’Neill. All of this is to get to address irrelevant issues rather to talk about the failure of Bush.

King: Was 9/11 preventable?

Clarke: We will never know....Let me compare it to previous periods. In December 1999 there were reports of a major attack. Clinton asked Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings to stop attacks and every day they went back and forth and shook the trees to see if there was any information. Now contrast that to the summer before 9/11 when we had even more information. Did the president ask a team to stop the attacks, did Rice hold meetings? No. If she had, and if the attorney general had, what would have happened? We know that buried in the testimony of the 9/11 Commission is testimony that two of the hijackers entered the US during the period leading up to 9/11. If that information had been shaken loose in daily briefings, Larry I believe we could have caught those two.

…If Rice had been holding meetings daily and had a hands-on attitude about national security that information would have been shaken out.

Commercial break—

Clip after commercial break:

Condoleeza Rice saying: ….Clarke came to me and asked if I would support him to become secretary of homeland security—a department he now says should have never been created so frankly, I am flabbergasted.


Return to interview---

Larry: What do you say (about Rice’s assertions)?

Clarke: I say let’s get back to the main issue. The president was being told an attack was coming. And what does the president say to Bob Woodward? Woodward says Bush acknowledged he was not on point, not focused on terrorism before 9/11. How can you not feel a sense of urgency when Tenet is telling you day after day a major attack is coming?

That is one point. The second point is, by going into Iraq, the war on terror was undermined. There are three major issues with the war in Iraq. First, going into Iraq increased our vulnerability here at home. The second issue is it inflames those in the islamic world creating even more terrorists than we can capture or kill because of the hatred due to our invasion of an islamic country. Third, it actually took troops and intelligence away from capturing bin Laden. We will capture bin Laden shortly but it won’t matter very much when we do because the terrorist organizations have grownand morphed into hydras. The point is, Iraq was not an imminent threat and by going there, we reduced the ability to fight the war on terror.


King: Dr. Rice said you asked to be the head of Homeland Security and then you are criticizing it saying it should have never been created. Is this just sour grapes?

Clarke: On the one hand I didn’t like the Department of Homeland Security. On the other hand, neither did the president or Tom Ridge. They spoke against it publicly. When Bush was told the DHS legislation was going to be passed anyway by congress and that it was going to be called the Lieberman bill, then they started acting like it was their idea and said anybody who criticized it was unpatriotic. Max Clelland criticized it, a man who lost three of four limbs for this country in combat, and they called him unpatriotic. I said because I had been doing all of these things for the last ten years, if they wanted to consider me I would be willing to serve. That doesn’t change the fact they, and I, didn’t think it was a good idea.

Clarke: I criticize both the new and old administrations in my book. Clinton failed to bomb camps we knew were breeding terrorists. He bombed them once but the public was so negative because people thought it was only because of Monica and he didn’t bomb again during that critical time when they were turning out terrorists in assembly lines sending them all over the world. …There is a lot of blame to go around and I deserve some blame the president does too.

King: Bill Clinton was in Australia when 9/11 happened. He said as soon as he heard what happened he knew it was Al Qaeda.

Important discussion about Clinton giving orders to kill bin Laden and the CIA claiming not to understand the orders—CIA claimed the orders were ambiguous. Clarke said he and Berger talked to Tenet because they know ther orders wer e given. Clarke: The CIA failed him (Clinton), they could not do it and now they say the orders were ambiguous. Clarke also says the family members of 9/11 victims caused the Commission to come into existence over the objections of the White House and they also caused its extension over the objections of the White House.


Commercial break---

Clip of Powell lying—

King: You said you believe bin Laden will be caught soon. Why?



Clarke: They have shifted back to Afghanistan where we should have been in the first place. The same people that caught Saddam are hunting bin Laden. I know some of them. They are very good at what they do but we are two years too late. We have fewer troops in Afghanistan than in the Manhattan police force because the troops were used to invade Iraq. Clearly showing how diversion from war on terror, even if we successfully build democracy in Iraq, in the meantime has repercussion since we have invaded and occupied an arabic country generating new Al Qaeda terrorists through the islamic world.

King: You served four presidents, who was strongest?

Clarke: Bush I was the strongest on terrorism. He was a national security expert. He was able to build multinational coalitions to fight Iraq. If we had to go after Iraq, at least we should have followed his lead. Bush I was a real national security professional. He did not retaliate for deaths on Pan Am flight 103 though, and the lack of retaliation by Reagan and Bush contributed the attitude by terrorists that they could hit the US and get away with it.


Panel of Experts following Clarke: Michael Isikoff, Newsweek; Judith Miller, Pulitzer Winner; Senator Chuck Hagel; Senator Joseph Biden


King: Senator Hagel what you make of what happened last half hour?

Hagel: We are seeing accusations against not just Bush but the last four administrations…The objective is to find out where the holes and gaps are and, yes, there are holes and there must be accountability to fix the problem and assure we are safer…

Biden: …One thing Clarke said that is the truth is this administration focuses on one issue. It is their weakness. They spent the first months in office focusing on missile defense. I made a speech saying they took their eye off the ball on terror. It was clear to me that the focus was on national missile defense and after 9/11 the focus was immediately on Iraq. I never met Clarke until tonight. There was a need to increase troops in Afghanistan and Colin Powell went to bat saying we had to do that and he got shut down by the Defense Department because they did not want to divert resources away from Iraq.

King: Michael Isikoff, was Clarke effective?

Isikoff: Yes. The apology was dramatic. It was the first time anybody has apologized and he did a good job with the attempts to undermine his credibility less by his own testimony and more by what the commission has released which emphasizes and fleshes out the details supporting Clarke’s charges that this was not a high priority. …

Judith Miller: Isn’t it amazing how no one admits wrongdoing? …He was the first to say, “I am sorry” but failed. I think those who were watching..I remember doing a series of articles in the New York Times about Al Qaeda and I didn’t get a single call from the other media about this extraordinary series. Something else Clarke said is true. He said in a democracy like ours it’s hard to get attention for these things or take action unless there are body bags…

King to Hagel: Did any of what Clarke said give you pause…?

Hagel: Larry I have never taken a partisan approach about national security or war. It’s serious when a nation sends soldiers off to die. I would say that what was said by Clarke needs to be probed, these are areas Biden and Lugar and the Foreign Relations Committee have questioned over the last two or three years and it must not be put in the cylinders of partisan politics because the threats are enough but it’s impossible to develop a policy if you polarize a nation.

Biden: My criticism, if any, is the implication that the first Bush administration didn’t move and Clinton didn’t move on terrorism. The context of Clinton wanting to move on terrorism was wag the dog. You had people on this show week after week accusing Clinton of Monica. It shouldn’t have affected him but it did. A lot of those criticizing also said it was wrong to violate the sovereignty of Afghanistan in capturing bin Laden. This myopic focus took their eyes off the ball…I got hell for a speech on 9/10/01 when I said the Bush administration was not doing anything about terror.

Commercial---

Clip of Clarke talking about diverting the 9/11 attacks:
Remember in the millenium we succeeded in diverting attacks and it was good news but not good news when we had to make the case for funding because there were no body bags to point to to convince them to allocate money and make govermental arrangements…

Clip of *---

King: Michael Isikoff are you surprised that Clinton said he directly ordered the CIA to get bin Laden and the CIA says they did not get the order?

Isikoff: The CIA says they never understood the order was as encompassing as Burger and Clarke say it was. It would be interesting to hear what Clinton has to say. The most fascinating thing Clarke did was lay out a plausible scenario on which 9/11 could have been prevented if the urgency had been heeded. The CIA and FBI both knew two of the hijackers were in the US yet there was no concerted governmental attempt to find these guys. There was a late bulletin from the FBI. What Clarke suggests is if there had been an all out public man hunt…which sounds plausible….it might have deterred them and might have disrupted the plot.

Judith Miller: I think Homeland defense problem and defending against Al Qaeda is that terrorists have to be lucky once and we have to be lucky all the time. It is requires excellent intelligence and wht we call actionable intelligence. I don’t think we really kinow if we could have prevented 9/11. What is shocking, is instance after instance, time after time, the firewall between the CIA and the FBI…this has happened for years.

Isikoff: They say the problems with the firewall between the CIA and the FBI were corrected. These guys came early 2000…so that’s as clear an example as we have is one arm of the government is not talking to the other…

Biden: …As president of the US, you shake the tree that breaks down the walls…

A few more questions were asked of Hagel, such as did they see improvements resulting from the inquiry. Then calls were taken.

... finding another one available...

I think it can be summed up with: "D'oh!"

In other news, its sickening to see Judith Miller taken seriously. Shit, I can lie too. They should put me on.

She's not a credible person. Believed everything from the Iraqi National Congress and printed it. Said that her job wasn't to investigate, it was to report what the government says.

Not only does she get to write for the "Newspaper of Record" HAHAHA, but she gets her stuff picked up by most other papers in the country. Isn't that ENOUGH of a chance to shape public opinion? NOOOO, they have to put her on Larry King TOO.

They are desparate. It's laughable.

on bin Laden was excellent?

It seems they didn't WANT to have that intelligence in circulation nor did they want any witnesses to that effect. They didn't want to know because they WANTED 9/11 to happen....

That's also why they didn't order fighter jets into the air.

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people."

well, me too. the fact is that the "chatter" which caused the clinton administration to act to foil the millenium plot was there again in july and august of 2001 and condi et. al. dropped the ball.