Wow! This is dishonest!

Clark published an op-ed that called for a 'different kind of war' which would be fought more by police, FBI, INTERPOL and CIA and world-wide counterparts all co-operating on a grand scale never seen before. (I am paraphrasing here) Most of which would be fought behind the scenes, maybe using 'special forces' but military and traditional warfare as a last resort.

That was September 15 2001. He knew what to do right away.

I am convinced that had he been in command at that time, the terrorist threat would have already been diffused for the most part, by now.

We have seen in the past several years that the most successful efforts to round up terrorists has been completed using the above strategy which Clark had in the papers THREE DAYS afterwards.

And we have also seen the results of using traditional warfare. Disastrous.

After three solid years of Clark watching, I am convinced that he has what it takes to grasp complex issues rapidly and disseminate them into applicable solutions just as fast. That is the type of person who needs to be running the USA.

Everyone else seems more pre-occupied with coming up with a position. Well, by the time someone like Hillary or Edwards has found their 'position' and taken the stance calculated to gain approval, the shit has already hit the fan.

America needs leadership, not little girls and boys still seeking parental approval before they decide.(If you can even call 'positioning' deciding - I think 'positioners' are that way because they can't decide.

Want proof that I am right? Well, I have watched on countless occasions when Edwards or Kerry took the words right out of Clark's mouth AFTER they saw it meet with enthusiastic approval. That is leadership. When your ideas get adopted by your opponents. (Well, it is also plagiarism but that's another post)

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2006/11/25/12733/213/120#c120

Kerry came to his worldview over the course of a Senate career that has been, by any legislative standard, a quiet affair. Beginning in the late 80's, Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations investigated and exposed connections between Latin American drug dealers and BCCI, the international bank that was helping to launder drug money. That led to more investigations of arms dealers, money laundering and terrorist financing.

Kerry turned his work on the committee into a book on global crime, titled ''The New War,'' published in 1997. He readily admitted to me that the book ''wasn't exclusively on Al Qaeda''; in fact, it barely mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism. But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.

''Of all the records in the Senate, if you don't mind my saying, I think I was ahead of the curve on this entire dark side of globalization,'' he said. ''I think that the Senate committee report on contras, narcotics and drugs, et cetera, is a seminal report. People have based research papers on it. People have based documents on it, movies on it. I think it was a significant piece of work.''

More senior members of the foreign-relations committee, like Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, were far more visible and vocal on the emerging threat of Islamic terrorism. But through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals -- Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.

Through his immersion in the global underground, Kerry made connections among disparate criminal and terrorist groups that few other senators interested in foreign policy were making in the 90's. Richard A. Clarke, who coordinated security and counterterrorism policy for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, credits Kerry with having seen beyond the national-security tableau on which most of his colleagues were focused. ''He was getting it at the same time that people like Tony Lake were getting it, in the '93 -'94 time frame,'' Clarke says, referring to Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser. ''And the 'it' here was that there was a new nonstate-actor threat, and that nonstate-actor threat was a blended threat that didn't fit neatly into the box of organized criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism. What you found were groups that were all of the above.''

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.

link

Want proof that I am right? Well, I have watched on countless occasions when Edwards or Kerry took the words right out of Clark's mouth AFTER they saw it meet with enthusiastic approval. That is leadership. When your ideas get adopted by your opponents. (Well, it is also plagiarism but that's another post)

Kerry had seen money laundering first-hand as an assistant district attorney prosecuting drug lords outside Boston in the late 1970s. In the Senate he became extensively involved in the mid-1980s investigation into money laundering by the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

It was during the investigations into BCCI and its ties to Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega that Kerry’s interest was solidified. In 1988, he authored the first U.S. law, called the Kerry Amendment, to impose sanctions on countries that do not cooperate with U.S anti-money laundering (AML) efforts.

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