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Well, I just watched the interview, and I have to say that what Clarke has is very damning. From the interview""The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
"I have no idea, to this day, if the President saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer." |
Some highlights:
1.) Clarke claims to be independent, and worked with the Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations as a head terrorism official.
2.) He says that he repeatedly asked for a cabinet-level meeting with Bush's cabinet on the subject of Al Queda, and tried his best to ensure that Al Queda and terrorism were their main security concerns. However, the White House continued to ignore him.
3.) He finally got his meeting - one week before 9/11.
4.) The day after 9/11, Rumsfeld is reportedly quoted by Clarke as saying they should "bomb Iraq."
5.) Bush is reported as telling Clarke to "find a connection between Saddam and Al Queda. When Clarke redid his research and still found no connections, he was told to go back and check again. He says he doubts that Bush's advisors ever even told him news that he wouldn't like.
6.) The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, was on 60 Minutes as well, pulling for the administration. However, his evidence that Clarke wasn't giving accurate information was:A.) Clarke is angry that he was a Cabinet-level official in Clinton's administration, but was demoted to a non-cabinet level in GW's administration.
B.) Clarke is trying to get a job on the Kerry administration by publishing his book and tearing Bush apart. Of course, none of this is valid reasoning to think that Clarke is lying, but then Hadley goes on to say that he has found no evidence that Bush and Clarke's meeting in which Bush "intimidatingly" told him to "find a link" ever happened. His look of sheer horror when Leslie Stahl tells him that they did a bit of their own research and found an eye-witness to the conversation and another person who knew the conversation took place, Hadley responded "Look, I stand on what I said."
7.) On whether or not the administration ignored Clarke's warnings and never even cared about Al Queda until 9/11, Hadley gives us the well-backed-up response that Clarke is "just wrong."
By the way, Stahl played a great game of "suck the President's dick" during the interview. After half of the interview was over, and Clarke had given all of this damning evidence that the President and his advisors had ignored the Al Queda threat, Clarke says that the President risked American lives.
Stahl responds "You think the President risked American lives???"
But, to be fair, it made her look more objective towards the subject.
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