No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Clarke on the Clinton successes against terrorism

This is from Joe Conason's interview with Richard Clarke published March 24, 2004 in Salon. [Note: you can get a one-day right to view the articles by watching a commercial.]

The vice president commented that there was "no great success in dealing with terrorists" during the 1990s, when you were serving under President Clinton. He asked, "What were they doing?"

It's possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn't know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn't notice.

This is from the guy who was the White House Counter Terrorism Czar in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses. It certainly exposes the lie the Bush administration has been peddling that Clinton did not do anything against terrorists except send out a few cruise missiles against the training camps in Afghanistan.

Clarke goes on to explain why he was given the job in the Bush White house:

Why did they keep you on, if they were so uninterested in what you were focused on? And then why did they downgrade your position?

They said, in so many words, at the time, that they didn't have anyone in their Republican coterie of people that came in with Bush, who had an expertise in this [counterterrorism] area [and] who wanted the job. And they actually said they found the job a little strange -- since it wasn't there when they had been in power before.

Dr. Rice said that.

Yes, Dr. Rice said that. And the first thing they asked was for me to look at taking some of the responsibilities, with regard to domestic security and cyber-security, and spinning them off so that they were no longer part of the National Security Council.

Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by [former national security advisor] Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.

Dr. Rice now says that your plans to "roll back" al-Qaida were not aggressive enough for the Bush administration. How do you answer that, in light of what we know about what they did and didn't do?

I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

It should be very obvious why so many members of the White House are running to the media to attack Richard Clarke. He is the person with the best standing to show how very outrageous their effort to run Bush for reelection based on his war against terror really is.





posted by Richard at 3:01 AM