Clarke, eyes wide shut... Clarke, eyes wide shut...|
Sunday, March 21, 2004 1:45 p.m. EST Kerry Connection 'Discredits' Terror Czar Clarke, Say Critics Former Clinton administration terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who has been portrayed in dozens of media accounts as a nonpartisan critic of the Bush White House's terrorism policies, faces new questions about his credibility after a report surfaced on Sunday suggesting he has close ties to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry. "One of [Clarke's] very close friends and colleagues for years - a man whom he taught a class with at Harvard, Rand Beers - is one of the top foreign policy advisers to Sen. Kerry," reported ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran. Moran told ABC's "This Week" that Clarke's close relationship with the Kerry aide "discredited" him in the eyes of critics, with the White House maintaining that "this is essentially a Democrat making these arguments" that Bush dropped the ball in the war on terrorism. Of Clarke's much-ballyhooed new book, "Against All Enemies," where the security expert charges that President Bush has done "a terrible job" fighting the war on terrorism, Moran noted that "[Republicans] say that this book is an audition for a place in the next Democratic administration." Beers and Clarke both resigned from the White House within a month of each other last year, shortly before the Iraq war started in March. When Beers made a public show of joining Kerry's campaign, it set off political smoke alarms in Washington. "I can't think of a single example in the last 30 years of a person who has done something so extreme," Paul C. Light, a scholar with the Brookings Institution, told The New Yorker magazine's Jane Mayer. "He's not just declaring that he's a Democrat," Light said. "He's declaring that he's a Kerry Democrat, and the way he wants to make a difference in the world is to get his former boss out of office." While Beers began publicly criticizing the Iraq war almost immediately, Clarke held his fire for a few months. But by last November it was clear he and Beers were on the same page. "Fighting Iraq had little to do with fighting the war on terrorism, until we made it [so]," Clarke proclaimed to interviewers. He was even critical when reacting to the news of the capture of Saddam Hussein, telling ABC News, "I don't think it's going to have a near-term positive effect on security. ... In the short term, we may have actually a worse problem." Reprinted from NewsMax.com
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With the terrorists falling all over themselves in a mad dash to publicly endorse their man, he's flip-flopping on wanting those phantom foreign endorsements, after all.
WHY JOHN KERRY IS DANGEROUS FOR AMERICA:
(a NEW virtual john kerry talks series)
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johnkerryisdangerousforamerica.blogspot.com
t appears that we now have sort of a fusion issue.
LOL.
Thanks for this thread. I find it uplifting. It reminds me how very, very lucky we are that the Clintons are out of the White House.
The “Peace Talks” were little more than a photo-opt for Bill Clinton as he held priminister Barak and Arafat at Camp David hostage. The sham didn’t work – all smoke and mirrors for more US $$s – Clinton the peace maker – NOT!
Does anyone recall what this actually cost the United States in tax dollars for Arafat-the-terrorist?
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Lopez: What exactly was U.S. reaction to the attack on the USS Cole? Miniter: In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked. At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack "sufficient provocation" for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?" Instead of destroying bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke's plan had been implemented, al Qaeda's infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day. Clinton's Loss? |
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a disgruntled ex-employee's abrupt 180, suffice it to say Simon & Schuster published it, 60 Minutes and CBS promoted it and the parent company, Viacom, and its friends on the political left, from the clintons to Kerry, have in the past, and will in the future, "profit" from it. |
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--anonymous |
 link to movie - Frank Lloyd Wright |
Thus, Vanity Fair's glamorous Marilyn-Monroe spread of Monica's digitally reduced spread was answered by Vogue's lushly Elizabethan, gauzy-focus, hindquarter-cropped-pleated-and-flounced, Queen-hillary-for-President cover. And now we have hillary clinton doing a Martha Stewart, who herself, is purported to have been "done" by the aforementioned errant rogue (notwithstanding the plain fact that Martha is more well-known for her tarts than for being one). Seems hillary clinton is now writing a book titled "An Invitation to the White House" in which she will follow the format of the Martha Stewart classic, "Entertaining", claim multifarious Martha-Stewart talents and wrap her indecorous and corrupt, backwoods, backroom style of White House "entertaining" in Martha-Stewart elegance and purity. (NB: Written years before Martha ImPloded.) "The clinton White House has been noted for the...innovation of its events," said Carolyn Reidy, president of Simon & Schuster's (aptly named) Trade Division, the book's publisher. hillary clinton's spokeswoman, Marsha Berry, added that the book will focus on how the clintons have "advanced the availability" of the White House by increasing the number and diversity of people; that it will "highlight the access that the clintons have given to more people, more types of entertainment..." It should be emphasized that it was without even a trace of irony or the slightest smirk that both women related the above. On closer inspection, hillary clinton's bizarre behavior is more than simple Ivana Trump-eting. It is vulgar, compulsive, shameless, smarmy, contemptuous, demagogic, megalomaniacal, in-your-face naked clintonism. It is one thing for the frumpy, chipmunk-cheek, huge-hindquarter fishwife to insinuate her image -- albeit Elizabethan-shrouded and low-res-clouded -- onto the cover of Vogue; but it is quite another for the corrupt harpy to trumpet White House access even as new charges emerge of the clintons' rapes and other predations, of the clintons' corrupt quid-pro-quo arrangements with a menacing and motley assortment of drug dealers, gun runners and nuclear weapons makers. For hillary clinton to vaunt White House access just as the clintons' China treason is becoming increasingly, patently manifest to all requires a certain level of contempt for the people and for the country that is uniquely clinton. Thank heaven for small favors... Or as the real Martha Stewart would say, |
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 COMMENT: The above inculpatory remark by the impeached erstwhile ersatz prez is illustrative of
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Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history. Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
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A Fish Rots from the Head Investor's Business Daily
Ijaz, an admitted Clinton supporter who helped negotiate these opportunities to nab bin Laden, said, "The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening." Ijaz says that three months before bin Laden's men blew up the USS Cole in Yemen, he "brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings (in Tanzania and Kenya)... But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer." Clinton's apparent boredom with vital information extended beyond Sudanese intelligence officers to his own intelligence officers. His first CIA director, James Woolsey, couldn't get a meeting with Clinton in the two years he served. Woolsey left the Clinton administration disgusted with its slovenly approach to national security. ... To hear Clinton now say "We must do more to reduce the pool of potential terrorists" is thus beyond farce. He had numerous opportunities to reduce that pool, and he blew it. The pool, in fact, grew larger on Clinton's watch, as he spent his final days giving pardons to drug dealers, Puerto Rican terrorists and Marc Rich, a fugitive who topped America's most-wanted list.
In this light, Clinton's order to the CIA that it not use "unsavory characters" to collect information pushes irony to its outer limits. |
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The Easy Part  (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE) |
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INTERVIEW Osama bin Laden (may 1998)
Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.
The American people, by and large, do not know the name bin Laden, but they soon likely will. Do you have a message for the American people?
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Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden? Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration: 1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.  hillary talks:ON TERROR (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE) |
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The Democratic Party's Problem Transcends Its Anti-War Contingent2
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by Mia T, 4.6.03 Mia T, June 9, 1999 Helloooo? That the Democrats have to be spoon-fed what should be axiomatic post-9/11 is, in and of itself, incontrovertible proof that From's advice is insufficient to solve their problem. From's failure to fully lay out the nature of the Democrats' problem is not surprising: he is the guy who helped seal his party's fate. It was his Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that institutionalized the proximate cause of the problem, clintonism, and legitimized its two eponymic provincial operators on the national stage. The "Third Way" and "triangulation" don't come from the same Latin root for no reason. That "convince" is From's operative word underscores the Democrats' dilemma. Nine-eleven was transformative. It is no longer sufficient merely to convince. One must demonstrate, demonstrate convincingly, if you will… which means both in real time and historically. When it comes to national security, Americans will no longer take any chances. Turning the turn of phrase back on itself, the era of the Placebo President is over. (Incidentally, the oft-quote out-of-context sentence fragment alluded to here transformed meaningless clinton triangulation into a meaningful if deceptive soundbite.) Although From is loath to admit it -- the terror in his eyes belies his facile solution -- the Democratic party's problem transcends its anti-war contingent. With a philosophy that relinquishes our national sovereignty -- and relinquishes it reflexively… and to the UN no less -- the Democratic party is, by definition, the party of national insecurity. With policy ruled by pathologic self-interest -- witness the "Lieberman Paradigm," Kerry's "regime change" bon mot (gone bad), Edwards' and the clintons' brazen echoes thereof (or, alternatively, Pelosi's less strident wartime non-putdown putdown)… and, of course, the clincher -- eight years of the clintons' infantilism, grotesquerie and utter failure -- the Democratic party is, historically and in real time, the party of national insecurity. The Democrats used to be able to wallpaper their national insecurity with dollars and demogoguery. But that was before 9/11.
Note in particular Madeleine Albright's shocking reason given at the time of the USS Cole attack why the clinton administration should not respond militarily. It tell us everything we need to know about the clintons. It tell us why clinton redux is an absolutely suicidal notion. Notwithstanding their cowardice, corruption, perfidy, and to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, their essential cluelessness, the clintons, according to Albright, made their decision not to go after the terrorists primarily for reasons of their own legacy and power. The clintons reasoned that inaction would MAXIMIZE THEIR CHANCES TO RECEIVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. No matter that that inaction would also maximize the terrorists' power, maximize America's danger. For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers. William J. Broad
But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- clinton's wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton's campaigns, clinton's pushing of the test ban treaty, clinton's concomitant sale of supercomputers, and clinton's noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another clinton apologia by The New York Times. But even a Times apologia cannot save clinton from the gallows. Clinton can be both an absolute (albeit postmodern) moron and a traitor. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does" applies. The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or *mens rea* runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare. Calling his position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone," (if he must say so himself) clinton believed that if he could get China to sign it, he would go down in history as the savior of mankind. This was 11 August 1995. (There would be an analogous treasonous miscalculation in the Mideast: clinton failed to shut down Muslim terrorism, then in its incipient stage and stoppable, because he reasoned that doing so would have wrecked his chances for the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, according to Richard Miniter, Madeleine Albright offered precisely the Nobel-Muslim factor as a primary reason for not treating the bombing of the USS Cole as an act of war.) It is precisely the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening inaction to the attack on the USS Cole and the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening token, ineffectual, August 1998 missile strikes of aspirin factories and empty tents that eliminate "bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance" as the rationale for the latter decision and support "wag the dog," instead. Taken together, feckless clinton inaction and feckless clinton action serve only to reinforce the almost universally held notion: the clinton calculus was, is, and always will be, solely self-serving. In the case of the non-response to the attack on the Cole, an unambiguous act of war, the clinton rationale, according to no less than Madeleine Albright, was a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by Arab appeasement. i.e., a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by bin-Laden-emboldenment. And in the case of the curiously-timed, ineffectual (and, therefore, bin-Laden-emboldening) token missile strikes, the clinton rationale was Lewinsky-recantation distraction -- clearly not bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance. (This is not to say there wasn't a Nobel factor here, too. Obsolete intelligence, bolstered by the redundancy of a clinton tipoff, ensured that both bin Laden and the Mideast Muslim ego would escape unscathed.) Mia T, "WAG THE DOG" revisited WASHINGTON -- Two Norwegian public-relations executives and one member of the Norwegian Parliament say they were contacted by the White House to help campaign for President Clinton to receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his work in trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East. Clinton Lobbies for Nobel Prize: What a Punk AIDES PUSH CLINTON FOR THE NOBEL Mia T, Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers
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THE CLINTONS--AMERICA'S BIGGEST BLUNDER
Hear Bush 41 Warn Us--October 19, 1992*
 *Thanx to Cloud William for text and audio
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Lib Author Regrets Voting (TWICE!) for clinton
"Sickened" by clinton's Failure to Protect America from TerrorismMUST-READ BOOK FOR DEMOCRATS:
How clintons' Failures Unleashed Global Terror
(Who in his right mind would ever want the clintons back in the Oval Office?)The Man Who Warned America
(Why a Rapist is Not a Fit President)UDAY: "The end is near… this time I think the… Americans are serious, Bush is not like Clinton."
Excellent quote, Mia...MUD
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Against Selected Enemies 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.
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.
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illary clinton's equal and inapposite reactions seem to be, at first blush, instances of the immutable First Law of The Betrayed and Humiliated Wife: Outdo the errant hubby's doxy...at all cost. 
neocommunist political movement, a tipsy-topsy, infantile perversion of the Marxist-Leninist model, global in scope, beginning in the post-cold-war, unipolar 1990s, led by the '60s neoliberal baby-boomer "intelligentsia," that seeks power without responsibility, i.e., that seeks to dilute American power by concentrating power in said '60s neoliberals while yielding America's sovereignty to the United Nations, i.e., while 
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.