So I'm reading the book and can see why the admin is so concerned. It's quite detailed and explains what is meant by the talking points we've been hearing about for the past week and 1/2.
And ... you're super smart. What is this telling me?
It's telling me that:
1. You are a troll.
2. You never seem to contribute much with any facts/links to support yorself.
3. Nothing is credible for you from some else. The only credible facts and information you will eat is the sweet shit that comes out of this current administration's assholes.
2. You never seem to contribute much with any facts/links to support yorself.
3. Nothing is credible for you from some else. The only credible facts and information you will eat is the sweet shit that comes out of this current administration's assholes.
I'm about 1/2 way through the book so far, plan on finishing it on my well deserved vacation next week, and I'm really hooked. With the exception of the first chapter that talks about being in the White House on 9/11, the book is told chronologically and I'm up to about 1996. Clarke really presents a compelling case that the government wasn't able to handle the threat that terrorism presented. The institutional inertia was just too powerful to overcome. The Atlanta Olympics provides a great example of how ill-prepared for terrorism the US was and still remains. The book also makes a very compelling case that Clinton not only took the threat seriously, but was personally involved in the fight. The book includes a quote from Clinton speech in which he talks about how the US is now at war with terror in an eerily similar way as Bush does now.
I haven't gotten to the Bush II administration, except as noted above, yet, but Clarke takes every opportunity to make pot shots about Iraq.
I guess I can sum up what I've gotten to so far as such. Reagan was right about the USSR when everyone else was wrong, but he ignored terrorism (even encouraged it when it suited the anti-Soviet agenda) and set the precedent for the US not retaliating to terrorist attacks. Bush I similarly didn't retaliate to terrorism, but did a great job on Iraq even if he didn't go far enough. Clinton took terrorism seriously and agreed that it was the most pressing post Cold War threat, but was hampered by bureaucratic resistance and political posturing.
Well, I've all but finished the book. I'm up to the second recommendation for fighting the WoT (about 280 pages in).
I can tell why the Bush administration went after Clarke as fiercely as they did. This is the most thorough, logical, and damning criticism of the WoT as I have read. Clarke really goes out of his way to show how misguided the Bush administration has been. He also passionately conveys the frustration that he and others felt with the Bush team. He was the first of three Terror Czars to quit so far under Bush. There has been an exodus of people from government since 9/11 that left in frustration. All of the top administration members resisted him at every step along the way even after 9/11.
Now that is not to say that all of the criticism falls at the feet of the current White House. The FBI, CIA, and DoD, are so opposed to almost all reforms that they are going to cause the death of more Americans. Even when the heads of said departments wanted change, the rank and file employees simply ignored them and even worked to undermine them. The amount of bureaucratic resistance is nothing less then anti-American.
Some questions to think about:
Why were more cops patrolling Manhattan then military that invaded Afghanistan?
How was the Clinton administration able to stop multiple terror attacks both at home and abroad, while fighting a multi-front battles against the DoD, the FBI, the CIA, and last but not least the Right who tried to bring him down at every turn?
A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.
So I looked forward to reading "Against All Enemies." Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism--a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints--and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright--and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.
I was wrong on all counts. Forthright? One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded. About this he doesn't say a word. The whole premise of "Against All Enemies" is its value as an insider account. But Mr. Clarke was not a Bush insider. When he lost his right to brief the Cabinet, he also lost his ringside seat on presidential decision-making.
Mr. Clarke's ire is largely directed at the Iraq war, but its preparation was left to others on the National Security Council. He left the White House almost a month before the war began. As for its justification, he acts as if there is none. He dismisses, as "raw," reports that show meetings between al Qaeda and the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, going back to 1993. The documented meeting between the head of the Mukhabarat and bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996--a meeting that challenged all the CIA's assumptions about "secular" Iraq's distance from Islamist terrorism--should have set off alarm bells. It didn't.
There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam's son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.
Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke's testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)
He fails to mention that President Clinton's three "findings" on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan's intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision--bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes--as a diplomatic necessity.
While angry over Mr. Bush's intelligence failures, Mr. Clarke actually defends one of the Clinton administration's biggest ones--the bombing of a Sudanese "aspirin factory" in 1998. Even at the time, there were good reasons for doubting that it made nerve agents. He fails to mention that in 1997 the CIA had to reject more than 100 reports from Sudan when agency sources failed lie-detector tests and that the CIA continued to pay Sudanese dissidents $100 a report, in a country where the annual per-capita income is about $400. The soil sample he cites, supposedly showing a nerve-gas ingredient, is now agreed to contain a common herbicide.
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
Or, better, "Against All Evidence." Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts. The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda's "chief operational leader" in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001. He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that "he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime." An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam's payroll for years.
Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt. He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
In recent days we have been subjected to a great deal of Mr. Clarke, not least to replays of his fulsome apology for not doing enough to prevent 9/11. But he has nothing to apologize for: He was a relentless foe of al Qaeda for years. He should really apologize for the flaws in his book.
Mr. Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
I don't know what book that guy read, but it was not the book I read. In fact I can safely assume that he didn't read the book. If he did he would have read that the two things that get the most attacks from Clarke are bureaucratic inertia and politicians getting in the way of any actual change.
What did you think of the book Scott? Or are you just like this op-ed writer and refuse to read it too?
Oh, and thanks for adding some constructive points. I'm glad that you didn't just copy and past an entire response from a GOP op-ed writer and actually engaged in an adult conversation about a book. You've really added a lot to this discussion.
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
I don't know what book that guy read, but it was not the book I read. In fact I can safely assume that he didn't read the book. If he did he would have read that the two things that get the most attacks from Clarke are bureaucratic inertia and politicians getting in the way of any actual change.
What did you think of the book Scott? Or are you just like this op-ed writer and refuse to read it too?
Oh, and thanks for adding some constructive points. I'm glad that you didn't just copy and past an entire response from a GOP op-ed writer and actually engaged in an adult conversation about a book. You've really added a lot to this discussion.
Heh.
Just bought the book yesterday. Looking forward to reading it this weekend.
While the sudan issue is complicated, you should just note that citing miniter is about as low as one can go. Go look back at any of the articles where he cites 'inside information.' He's a one-man disinfo machine. A couple examples:
1. regarding aug 6 2001 PDB
Quote:
3 Richard Miniter, in a radio interview on Democracy Now, Tuesday, September 23, 2003. The host was Amy Goodman. Peter Lance was also a guest. When Lance mentioned the same reported title of the memo as Franken, Miniter said, ?I have the memo. That?s not the title of the memo.? This writer confirmed the fact in an e-mail received from Miniter: ?Yes, the Aug. 6, 2001 memo was just the Pres. Daily Briefing and had no title.?
From fankenlies.
Except franken isn't the one lying here, it's miniter. Hell even Fleischer demonstrated this:
Quote:
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters yesterday said the headline on the document was, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States." But sources who have read the memo said the headline ended with the phrase "in U.S."
Richard Miniter was on Fox and Friends this morning. Now I was still half asleep, but it seemed that he was only on for a few minutes. He said that he's been interviewing David Kay, and that Kay has more info. Kay said that he has found silkworm missiles with special cannisters to hold sarin gas. He also said that Iraq had the capability to refine Anthrax better than any other country in the world, including the US.
He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
Comments
Originally posted by Scott
And ... you're super smart. What is this telling me?
It's telling me that:
1. You are a troll.
2. You never seem to contribute much with any facts/links to support yorself.
3. Nothing is credible for you from some else. The only credible facts and information you will eat is the sweet shit that comes out of this current administration's assholes.
Bon Appetite.
Originally posted by Artman @_@
It's telling me that:
1. You are a troll.
2. You never seem to contribute much with any facts/links to support yorself.
3. Nothing is credible for you from some else. The only credible facts and information you will eat is the sweet shit that comes out of this current administration's assholes.
ZING.... mmmmm, yummy.
I haven't gotten to the Bush II administration, except as noted above, yet, but Clarke takes every opportunity to make pot shots about Iraq.
I guess I can sum up what I've gotten to so far as such. Reagan was right about the USSR when everyone else was wrong, but he ignored terrorism (even encouraged it when it suited the anti-Soviet agenda) and set the precedent for the US not retaliating to terrorist attacks. Bush I similarly didn't retaliate to terrorism, but did a great job on Iraq even if he didn't go far enough. Clinton took terrorism seriously and agreed that it was the most pressing post Cold War threat, but was hampered by bureaucratic resistance and political posturing.
It's a real page turner.
I can tell why the Bush administration went after Clarke as fiercely as they did. This is the most thorough, logical, and damning criticism of the WoT as I have read. Clarke really goes out of his way to show how misguided the Bush administration has been. He also passionately conveys the frustration that he and others felt with the Bush team. He was the first of three Terror Czars to quit so far under Bush. There has been an exodus of people from government since 9/11 that left in frustration. All of the top administration members resisted him at every step along the way even after 9/11.
Now that is not to say that all of the criticism falls at the feet of the current White House. The FBI, CIA, and DoD, are so opposed to almost all reforms that they are going to cause the death of more Americans. Even when the heads of said departments wanted change, the rank and file employees simply ignored them and even worked to undermine them. The amount of bureaucratic resistance is nothing less then anti-American.
Some questions to think about:
Why were more cops patrolling Manhattan then military that invaded Afghanistan?
How was the Clinton administration able to stop multiple terror attacks both at home and abroad, while fighting a multi-front battles against the DoD, the FBI, the CIA, and last but not least the Right who tried to bring him down at every turn?
Why has our attention be focused on States?
Against Selected Enemies
Richard Clarke should apologize for his book.
BY RICHARD MINITER
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.
So I looked forward to reading "Against All Enemies." Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism--a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints--and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright--and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.
I was wrong on all counts. Forthright? One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded. About this he doesn't say a word. The whole premise of "Against All Enemies" is its value as an insider account. But Mr. Clarke was not a Bush insider. When he lost his right to brief the Cabinet, he also lost his ringside seat on presidential decision-making.
Mr. Clarke's ire is largely directed at the Iraq war, but its preparation was left to others on the National Security Council. He left the White House almost a month before the war began. As for its justification, he acts as if there is none. He dismisses, as "raw," reports that show meetings between al Qaeda and the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, going back to 1993. The documented meeting between the head of the Mukhabarat and bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996--a meeting that challenged all the CIA's assumptions about "secular" Iraq's distance from Islamist terrorism--should have set off alarm bells. It didn't.
There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam's son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.
Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke's testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)
He fails to mention that President Clinton's three "findings" on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan's intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision--bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes--as a diplomatic necessity.
While angry over Mr. Bush's intelligence failures, Mr. Clarke actually defends one of the Clinton administration's biggest ones--the bombing of a Sudanese "aspirin factory" in 1998. Even at the time, there were good reasons for doubting that it made nerve agents. He fails to mention that in 1997 the CIA had to reject more than 100 reports from Sudan when agency sources failed lie-detector tests and that the CIA continued to pay Sudanese dissidents $100 a report, in a country where the annual per-capita income is about $400. The soil sample he cites, supposedly showing a nerve-gas ingredient, is now agreed to contain a common herbicide.
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
Or, better, "Against All Evidence." Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts. The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda's "chief operational leader" in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001. He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that "he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime." An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam's payroll for years.
Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt. He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
In recent days we have been subjected to a great deal of Mr. Clarke, not least to replays of his fulsome apology for not doing enough to prevent 9/11. But he has nothing to apologize for: He was a relentless foe of al Qaeda for years. He should really apologize for the flaws in his book.
Mr. Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
What did you think of the book Scott? Or are you just like this op-ed writer and refuse to read it too?
Oh, and thanks for adding some constructive points. I'm glad that you didn't just copy and past an entire response from a GOP op-ed writer and actually engaged in an adult conversation about a book. You've really added a lot to this discussion.
Originally posted by Scott
Looks like Clark has some splainin' to do.
Against Selected Enemies
Richard Clarke should apologize for his book.
BY RICHARD MINITER
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
Shocking. Calling Sudan our allies?
Originally posted by HOM
I don't know what book that guy read, but it was not the book I read. In fact I can safely assume that he didn't read the book. If he did he would have read that the two things that get the most attacks from Clarke are bureaucratic inertia and politicians getting in the way of any actual change.
What did you think of the book Scott? Or are you just like this op-ed writer and refuse to read it too?
Oh, and thanks for adding some constructive points. I'm glad that you didn't just copy and past an entire response from a GOP op-ed writer and actually engaged in an adult conversation about a book. You've really added a lot to this discussion.
Heh.
Just bought the book yesterday. Looking forward to reading it this weekend.
Originally posted by Scott
Looks like Clark has some splainin' to do.
Against Selected Enemies
Richard Clarke should apologize for his book.
BY RICHARD MINITER
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
While the sudan issue is complicated, you should just note that citing miniter is about as low as one can go. Go look back at any of the articles where he cites 'inside information.' He's a one-man disinfo machine. A couple examples:
1. regarding aug 6 2001 PDB
3 Richard Miniter, in a radio interview on Democracy Now, Tuesday, September 23, 2003. The host was Amy Goodman. Peter Lance was also a guest. When Lance mentioned the same reported title of the memo as Franken, Miniter said, ?I have the memo. That?s not the title of the memo.? This writer confirmed the fact in an e-mail received from Miniter: ?Yes, the Aug. 6, 2001 memo was just the Pres. Daily Briefing and had no title.?
From fankenlies.
Except franken isn't the one lying here, it's miniter. Hell even Fleischer demonstrated this:
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters yesterday said the headline on the document was, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States." But sources who have read the memo said the headline ended with the phrase "in U.S."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true
2.
Richard Miniter was on Fox and Friends this morning. Now I was still half asleep, but it seemed that he was only on for a few minutes. He said that he's been interviewing David Kay, and that Kay has more info. Kay said that he has found silkworm missiles with special cannisters to hold sarin gas. He also said that Iraq had the capability to refine Anthrax better than any other country in the world, including the US.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1036116/posts
And also: http://bbs.clubplanet.com/showthread/t-199985.html
As Richard Miniter himself says:
I was wrong on all counts.
So what else is new, Dick?
Originally posted by Scott
BY RICHARD MINITER
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
Oh, and this crackpot theory again?
Anyway, more on her here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...12.bergen.html
Do yourself a favor and get some remotely credible sources next time.