Dr. Clarke to the operating room

Clarke Watch

It's back to school week, so I'll be out again until mid-May. I have one article I wanted to post for you about the amazing Richard Clarke, who has done such an excellent and credible job of pulling off the covers of this mis-administration. Amazingly, the press keeps wanting to talk to him about what happened before 9/11 (they won't touch his allegations that Iraq is a royal CF, though that is painfully, obviously true as well). What he has revealed is that the anti-war protesters and progressives were not only right about this administration, they had severely underestimated the extent to which Cheney and his pals failed to protect us. Clarke has forced them to admit that they knew that something was coming, and it was coming from Al Qaeda. They of course, stupidly took the bait. Now they have to argue that instead of just ignoring Al Qaeda, which is what they actually did but now can't admit, that they were warned and "fully engaged" and at "battlestations". So now they will have to explain why no fighter planes were launched when planes were hijacked, why the President kept reading a goat book to school children for 8 long minutes after he was told we were under attack, why Rumsfeld was surprised to find a gaping, smoking hole in his building. And why Bush told Bob Woodward that he wasn't "engaged" or "focused" on Bin Laden before 9/11 for Woodward's sycophantic book. The Bushies would be better off just admitting that Bin Laden was the subject of Operation Ignore and get it over with, because the proof is out there. Logically, that's what had to have happened. Plus, there are no warnings to the FAA or airlines or NORAD about the dangers, else they would have produced those things already.

I want to point you to one more article about Clarke, showing just how clever this guy is. It details some of the appearances he made yesterday on national talk shows. Here are some highlights:

Richard Clarke is doing a hell of a job staying two steps ahead of the GOP attack machine.

After Sen. Bill Frist insinuated that Clarke perjured himself while calling for declassification of Clarkes past congressional testimony, Clarke went on NBCs Meet The Press ready to up the ante:

I would welcome [my '02 congressional testimony] being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony&

&I want more declassified. I want Dr. Rice's testimony before the 9-11 Commission declassified&

&Let's declassify that memo I sent on January 25th and let's declassify the national security directive that Dr. Rice's committee approved nine months later on September 4th, and let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't&

& let's go further. The White House is selectively now finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed were covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press.

Let's take all of my e-mails and all of the memos that I've sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11 and let's declassify all of it&as well as her responses.

This is not a guy you want to mess with."

"And they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks.

And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999.

Dr. Rice chose not to do that."

"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&

He did a lot, and he was personally involved. He didn't just sit there in the morning and get intelligence briefings.

(That last line was another nice two-steps ahead move, as Bushies have been trying to show how involved Bush was because he had Tenet give him in-person briefings.)"

Read the whole thing. Clarke, who has 30 years of service and worked directly for 3 Republican presidents and one Democrat, is a lifelong registered Republican, and a hawk. It's kind of sad that the entire Democratic party is so weak that they couldn't do a thing against these thugs, and that it is taking Republicans of integrity to pull them down, but we'll take help from every corner at this point. To my Republican friends I say that I would welcome a Republican administration that ran the country with honesty and competence (one could argue that Clinton was the best Republican president this country ever had, based on a lot of his policies), but that these jokers are a rot on their party and a cancer in this country.

Clarke is waking the patient up to the problem. Surgery is in November.