Here it is.

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away."

The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism".

Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to hell.

Richard Clarke was supposed to be the expert who could make this argument with a straight face.

I found this at VMYTHS.COM -

"Hysteria roll call: Richard Clarke"

http://vmyths.com/resource.cfm?id=62&page=1

Now I remember some of that nonsense after reading it again. Clarke was also running on at the mouth about fictional Computer Doom. This IS my area of expertise, and to put it kindly, the guy didn't know what he was talking about. Less kindly: He's a loon. I will no longer be surprised by anything he says. I'm looking forward to "Bush didn't listen to my discussion of the space alien threat!" speech.

Al Quaeda was never connected to the first WTC bombing, if my irony-challenged memory is correct.
Iraq, however, WAS.
Howzabout that?

>...just as he had dotted every "i", crossed
>every "t" and sent the intern to the
>photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill
>gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the
>Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could
>use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan
>to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need
>to implement right away."

He he thi hi ha ha ha ..., that's funny. When you've got ZERO winning-arguments left, you can always resort to the M.-factor. Hmm, why does one get this sensation that a fair amount of people employed by Rupert Murdoch (Steyn, Simberg et al.) still seem to believe that the M.-card is still usable?

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You have many contacts
Among the lumberjacks
To get your facts
When someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect
Anyway they already expect you
To just give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Bob Dylan

The "M-card," as you call it, is Bill Clinton's legacy, such as it is.

And not that it matters, Canute (I find your dumb ad hominem attacks hilarious, actually), but I'm not now, nor have I ever been an employee of Rupert Murdoch. I can't speak for Steyn, but I doubt if he is either.

But I know that in your paranoid ravings, you imagine that Rupert rules the universe.

And your irrelevant poetry isn't very persuasive either.

Ballad of a Thin Man? In this context?

Dude. That makes no sense at all.

Something IS happening here, though, and none of us know precisely what it is. Why is Clarke being taken seriously as he contradicts himself repeatedly? Why is the Bush administration doing such a neanderthal job of spin control? Where does the Heinz family fit into all of this?

Am I the only person on earth who thinks that the whole attack could have been prevented with a simple hostage situation policy change and that all of this is being blown slightly out of proportion?

Yes. You’re looking at this with 20-20 hindsight. I don’t know your age, but it used to be fairly common for planes to be hijacked. Usually, if you stayed quiet you had a pretty good chance of coming out alive. There were even jokes about flights to Cuba Fighting a hijacker just got you dead, but didn’t change anything else. NOW, it doesn’t really matter if you might end up dead fighting a hijacker – it is still a chance, and you may save many other lives doing it.

Even if policy makers had also thought enough about this possibility, and had managed to radically increase security (and imagine the howls on that before 9/11!) they would have found another way. Just as with Pearl Harbor, the event changed the rules. We couldn’t have possibly invaded Afghanistan and do all the other things needed to at least weaken al-Qa'eda, without having most of the world (including most of the U.S.) dead set against it. Afterwords, it was “Here we come, help, get out of the way, or get trampled.”

As to why all the fuss? Simple: Election year politics. Regardless of whether Clarke is working with Democrats, they’re looking for any way to knock Bush down. From what I’ve seen, people who want to find fault are ignoring all the contradictions and points Clarke said in support of Bush, and are only paying attention to the critical bits.

>The "M-card," as you call it, it is Bill Clinton's legacy, such as it is.

Sure, but do you really believe that the M-card will be effective this time around? According to Clark; the M-factor seriously undermined the "war" on terrorism. Good to know that you can impeach a president and put your country at risk at the same time...

I'm still not quite sure whether or not you've actually watched any of Mr. Clarke's appearances on TV or read the transcripts. Whenever you've had something to say about Mr. Clark you continue to refer to what other people have to say, rather than trying to formulate an intelligent rebuttal to Clarke's accusations.

The following excerpt is from Late Edition on 03/28/04. Note that what he's saying is indeed relevant to the M-factor.

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/28/le.00.html

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WOODRUFF: Let me quickly turn you, though, back to President Clinton. You talk in your book, "Against All Enemies," about the fact that President Clinton, that there were steps that he took, that he could have done more.

Was the Monica Lewinsky scandal one of the reasons President Clinton couldn't pursue a war against terror on a more sustained basis?

CLARKE: I think it probably was. And here's why I think that. George Tenet, Sandy Berger and I went to the president and said, "We think bin Laden is going to be at a certain location in Afghanistan at a certain time." And Clinton said, "Fine, let's blow it up." And he fired a lot of cruise missiles at that location, apparently just missing bin Laden.

The reaction of the American people was not, "Great job, you're fighting terrorism with military force," something previous presidents had not done. It was, "Wag the dog," meaning, you're using this to divert attention from your own personal and political problems.

So, when we went back to him, he was prepared to authorize further attacks if we had better intelligence about where he would be. But you have to understand the environment in which all of that took place.

I still think Clinton made a mistake. I think Clinton should have bombed all of the camps, whether or not bin Laden was...

WOODRUFF: Politics got in the way, is what you're saying?

CLARKE: I think it was a factor, Judy.

WOODRUFF: Could President Clinton have done more to educate the American people about the al Qaeda threat to change the public?

CLARKE: If you look, beginning in 1996, in his last four years in office, President Clinton gave about 40 speeches where he mentioned terrorism, five speeches that were devoted just to terrorism. He did a lot, but, frankly, if you look at the media play on those speeches, the media didn't pick up those speeches. When he made a speech on terrorism, it wasn't on the front page, it wasn't on CNN.

Because only 35 -- I hate to say it this way, because every life we lost is one too many -- but 35 Americans died over the course of those eight years at the hands of al Qaeda. And based on that level of problem, Clinton authorized the unprecedented assassination of bin Laden and his top lieutenants, and he fired cruise missiles at him, and he launched a major covert action program.

WOODRUFF: So you're saying, given the...

CLARKE: He did a lot, and he was personally involved. He didn't just sit there in the morning and get intelligence briefings.
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>And not that it matters, Canute (I find your dumb ad hominem attacks hilarious, actually),

My "attacks" (as you call them) are only ad hominem if they are irrelevant to the thread. You’ve not been able to produce much original thinking (on Clark), It’s therefore relevant to take a closer look at your news sources (and links), and especially Fox News. I would guess that to most people living outside the US, the “fair and balanced” network looks like a caricature of a state-run television, parroting the White House’s daily talking points, no matter how unsubstantiated. An interesting view on Fox has been articulated by longtime investigative journalist Bruce Page and who’s core theses is that:

"Murdoch offers his target governments a privatized version of a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth. His price takes the form of vast government favors such as tax breaks, regulatory relief (as with the recent FCC ruling on the acquisition of Direct TV), monopoly markets and so forth. The propaganda is undertaken with the utmost cynicism, whether it's the stentorian fake populism and soft porn in the UK's Sun and News of the World, or shameless bootlicking of the butchers of Tiananmen Square."

Stentorian fake populism? That sounds a lot like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

In "Birds Of A Feather" (which started all of this), one of your links was to this article:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,115085,00.html

Joining in the effort to discredit Clarke was Fox News. In a fair and balanced below-the-belt strike, Fox released the transcript (with WH approval) of a 2002 background briefing Clarke gave to reporters about the "war" on terrorism. Note that background briefings are supposed to remain confidential. Doesn’t confidentiality exist solely between a source and a reporter? If someone speaks "on background," wouldn’t the only ethical way in which a reporter can divulge the person's name be if the source changed his mind and decided to go on the record. By violating Clarke's confidentiality, Fox News allowed the administration to effectively recast the confidentiality arrangement to be one that exists not between source and reporter but between the source's employer and the reporter's news organization. However, now that the WH is panicking, confidentiality - among other things - seems to be going down the tubes.

Based on the “facts” as presented by Fox, you said:

>Which Dick Clarke are we supposed to believe? >The one who's just got a new book out in an
>election year, after not getting the plumb
>administration job he wanted, or the one who was
>the administration spokesman at the time? I'm so
>confused."

Hmm, isn't your first answer speculative and irrelevant, and your second one demonstrably false? (A spokesperson isn't really "anonymous", is he?) You didn't even try to counter Clarke's allegations.

Your modus operandi around here - in non "space-related" stuff - seems more often to be character assasination instead of refuting arguments and facts. Therefore, how can one take your charges of ad hominem "attacks" seriously?

>..but I'm not now, nor have I ever been an employee of Rupert Murdoch.

Hmm, so you are telling us that you are writing your columns and not getting paid for it by Fox? Rand, that's good for you!

>I can't speak for Steyn, but I doubt if he is
>either

You're right Rand, my mistake; Steyn apparently is doing most of his work for Hollinger Inc.

>But I know that in your paranoid ravings, you
>imagine that Rupert rules the universe

I would guess that the second part of your sentence could easily have been formulated by someone in the Apollohoax-crowd who doesn't appreciate the sheer size of the universe. One might expect that a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security, would rater have taken a more "terrestrial" approach to make a point.

>And your irrelevant poetry isn’t very persuasive
>either.

Who said that it's "my" poetry?

Let's try another one:

"You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows"

BD

>Ballad of a thin man? In this context?

Surely something is happening here, and definately someone doesn’t know what it is (he he).

Maybe Rand knows what I’m talking about

Check out the transterrestrial archives:

http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/001571.html

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>>Lumberjacks?
>>Whence the lumberjacks
>>How am I supposed to take anything *you* say
>>seriously after that

>Regarding the lumberjacks: "Because something is
>happening here, but you don't know what it is";
>do you Rand? I took the liberty to rearrange
>some of the lyrics from "Ballad of a Thin Man"
>in response to your incomplete reply to Mr.
>Lindroos' post (surely, you yourself set a high
>standard around here, don't you?):

>>That's a nice set of strawmen, Marcus.
>>Hollow, ephemeral, >>strawfilled...ummmmmmm...strawfilled...
>>[VOICE="Homer Simpson"]
>>gggghhhhhrrrrrhhhgggg...straw-filled...
>>[/VOICE]
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