I am dangerously close to falling in love with Richard Clarke

[WilliamPitt]

FORMER WHITE HOUSE TERROR ADVISER SET TO BREAK SILENCE ON '60 MINS'

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash60.htm

FORMER WHITE HOUSE TERRORISM ADVISOR: BUSH ADMIN WAS DISCUSSING BOMBING IRAQ FOR 9/11 DESPITE KNOWING AL QAEDA WAS TO BLAME
Fri Mar 19 2004 17:49:30 ET

Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with ,'" he tells Stahl.

Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.

Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current
administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

Developing...

[BootinUp]

1. Yep, he's a Godsend

This will put some nails in Bushs coffin I believe.

[Leilani]

20. Wes Clark said this during the campaign

& people called him a "Conspiracy Nut!"

[BootinUp]

21. See post #17 :)

[Leilani]

24. Oh no!

I must be under Wes Clark Mind Control.

Or maybe it was the Homestead Act!

LOL!

[liberalnurse]

38. Ditto here!

Nails in the coffin.....Yes!

[boobooday]

2. There's a tasty little snippet of video on the CBS site

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml

But watch Leslie Stahl's face.

How can these media whores act like they do? What is up with her face?

http://www.wgoeshome.com

[BootinUp]

7. I wouldn't worry

Clarke looked very solid, Leslie has to make faces for the camera because shes the star!

[osaMABUSh]

14. It's like she doesn't want to believe it - maybe Clarke can

get on the Dennis Miller Show so DM can show him the light.

[eaprez]

3. His Crucifixion ....

...will begin on Sunday morning.

[xray s]

4. What I would put on Bush's sound system this Sunday night....

The Doors "The End"

[BootinUp]

8. Yeah :thumbsup:

[WilliamPitt]

9. Mother...I want to...

:)

[osaMABUSh]

11. And for Kerry ( a Doors fan) Mr. Mojo Risin' (LA Woman)

Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'
Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'
Got to keep on risin'
Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'
Mojo Risin', gotta Mojo Risin'
Mr. Mojo Risin', gotta keep on risin'
Risin', risin'
Gone risin', risin'
I'm gone risin', risin'
I gotta risin', risin'
Well, risin', risin'
I gotta, wooo, yeah, risin'
Woah, ohh yeah

(Hey, I'm in a Doors mood...)

[LandOLincoln]

32. Doors' fans are coming out, you mean? You betcha! Kerry and that

other guy named Clark (no e) are both Doors' fans, like a lot of Vietnam vets.

That Jimbo, he knew what was what:

"The Wes is the best...get in and we'll see the rest!" :evilgrin:

(Edit: ooops, this was supposed to be a response to #5 below, not #11 above)

[Leilani]

47. Dontcha Love Her Madly?

want to meet her Daddy

& she's walkin out the door

like she did 1000 times before.

Huge DOORS fan here!!!

[BootinUp]

41. I had to

pull out The End and give it a listen. The doors are one of the best ever no question.

[liberalnurse]

40. That is so perfect.......

I can see it now.......Great visual!

[stepnw1f]

5. Wow...

More and more people are coming out.

[hippiechick]

6. Wonder if this will raise some LIHOP questions ?

Some of the more astute sheeple out there may not be able to avoid connecting the ever-so-tentative dots .... "hmmm, they talked about war with Iraq in January 2001 ... then 9/11 happened ... then they talked about blaming and bombing Iraq on 9/12 ... how conveeeeeenient ...."


:hippie:

[burned]

10. I want to know what agenda is being served

by his waiting until thousands of people are dead before he spills his bucket of stories.

Thats like watching and letting someone starve their kid and then saying you saw it all at the murder trial.
Why did he wait?
He has blood on his hands. Its too late.

[blm]

18. Who would have listened then?

He would have been marginalized and discredited and the Bush thugs would have planted what they could to make him seem unreliable.

Sometimes you do what you have to so you can live to fight another day, and have a greater impact onthe world that saves more lives down the road.

[burned]

25. bullshit

we are talking about THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dead people. He should have been screaming about it at the top of his lungs. Just like we did. He should have joined all the other voices.

[blm]

28. Name one voice that was allowed to be heard

and given credence by the media.

Bush was going into Iraq one way or another. Better Clarke lay low, gather his evidence and expose them at a point when they can be defeated.

The intel community has been gathering up on sides here and an epic battle is about to be waged. Those patriots like Wilson, Beers, Clarke, and their allies in the intel community against the Bush loyalists.

You might not like the pace of it, but, the results may very well be the salvation of this nation and the world.

[BootinUp]

29. The fact is, the public

was not in the mood to question the President after we were attacked. They were going to follow Bush and his hunt for WMD. And the RW machine had the media runnin scared, better not question the feuher or you'll be the next example.

[Blue_Roses]

34. WOW--what a powerful statement

"The fact is, the public was not in the mood to question the President after WE were attacked. They were going to follow..."

This sums up the RW propaganda machine in a nutshell and they FEED on it while spooning it to those naive enough to listen.

[BootinUp]

36. ok

I misunderstood you at first. thanks

[Blue_Roses]

44. How

so?

[BootinUp]

45. As a result

of a couple shots of whiskey, I thought you were saying I had fallin for the RW spin at first read.

[Blue_Roses]

46. No

way. I've read your posts here and I "hear" ya! I live in Arkansas for God's sake so I listen with an "even" ear on anything to do with Clark. However, I moved from Texas a few months ago so I know how that crap goes as well, so that's how I know how the RW "propaganda" machine works.

I don't have a primary till May so I have tried to support all our candidates even though I've had my "favorites." It doesn't matter now cause in May we will be full steam into this campaign--and that's OK!

I think your comment is important and hits the nail on the head! Here's to another beer friend!:toast:

[BootinUp]

42. My posts are usually

very short and to the point. :toast:

[Jane Austin]

43. Clarke has said this before

Or someone who was with him has. Anyway, their briefings of the Bush crew have been told and told.

And Clarke was reviled for it, and when he wasn't reviled he, and anybody who quoted him, was ignored.

[teach1st]

12. Reminds me of the old joke..

"Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.'

"What are you looking for?"
"My keys"
"Where did you loose them?"
"In the living room"
"Then why are you looking here in the kitchen?"
"The light's better in here."

And now a new joke: Why did the moron bomb Iraq?

[Killarney]

13. go Richard Clarke, it's your birthday

[Sparkly]

15. I'm even more interested

in what Clarke was telling them -- or trying to tell them -- *before* 9/11. Didn't he develop the strategy against Al Qaeda that the Bushies ignored? Wasn't he trying to get them to heed warnings of attack in the weeks preceeding 9/11? I want to hear more about that.

[Adelante]

16. Well, well

I guess Wes Clark wasn't so crazy after all. I hope all the mediawhores eat their dirty words.

"Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation."

[BootinUp]

17. Your still under

his mind control...when I snap my fingers you will wake up. *SNAP*

Clark's toungue would catch fire if he told a lie as a candidate. Someday it will be recognized.

[Leilani]

22. Remember whaen Wes said he had friends at the Pentagon

& they said Bush was trying to use 9/11 to attack Iraq.

He was called a conspiracy crazy!

At least someone backs him up now,

[LoneStarLiberal]

19. Nice...But I Still Worry

You know, Will, the only thing I worry about with the whole puddle of fungible rhetoric on Iraq is how this whole issue has gone from one of proactively removing an imminent danger to one of getting rid of a bad, bad man who did bad things to people.

It seems to me that even if it is revealed that the Bush administration wanted to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq from the first minute of his unelected Presidency and that all the smokescreen about 9/11 and Al-Qaeda affiliation and all the other ruse and illusion they've used to justify invading Iraq was revealed as just that, ruse and illusion, most people STILL WILL NOT BE SWAYED by it because of this bullshit moral equivalence argument the administration likes to trot out.

Because Saddam Hussein was an unambiguously evil fucker who spawned at least one whelp who was even more evil than he was on his worse day (Uday), there's a preponderance of evidence to these points that makes people sitting on the fence feel O.K. about the whole charade instead of being outraged that we were deceived into war.

Somewhere around 58%-61% of Americans (as represented in some recent poll) already think George Bush is untrustworthy. And you can damned well bet that the Republicans aren't going to go down fighting under Marquis of Kingsbury rules...they are going to wed themselves and their cynical manipulation into a referendum on the military and all the dead and wounded men and women who served in Iraq.

Stopping to think about it, shouldn't what Paul O'Neill had to say about Bush and the documents he provided have damned President Cornelius to electoral doom? They should have...but they didn't, and this will not damn him either. All these things in addition to Medicare-gate, Niger-gate, and TRMPAC-gate need to have heat turned up under them, but they need to be kept at a nice steady rolling boil instead of being heated up and cooked out individually. Putting all these failures together in a congruent pattern of lies, deception, corruption, and malfeasance can seal Bush's fate; cooking these things off individually only nickel-and-dimes him while allowing him to remain "above the fray" of his disastrous administration of repression.

I think this is an issue that needs to be pursued, but I don't think Kerry needs to invest a whole lot of time pounding away on it. The places to make up ground on Bush and Cheney are with jobs, education, civil liberties, and our administration's foreign policy, not exclusively on our administration's foreign policy.

[TomSeaverr]

23. I'm convinced our Party is

never going to be tough enough. They won't call Bush out on this. Just like they fail to remind the country that Bush was the President when 9/11 happened in the first place. yet we are suppose to believe he is strong on defense??????? Puh Please. Speak up and stop being so scared

[BootinUp]

26. Things have changed

This website and hundreds of others and average people pitching in their nickles and dimes are the result of our party getting F*ckin pissed off! The leaders of the party saw the rise of Dean and Clark and they got the message. You will see both Dean and Clark continue to hammer on Bush all the way to November. Bush is goin down.

Of course this movement of the base that started all this can't let up, people need to stay engaged. I am not to worried about that, after all Bush gives us new incentives every day.

peace

[LoneStarLiberal]

27. I'm More Concerned About The Big Picture

What I'm more concerned about than simply talking about what a failure Bush is as an economic leader/military leader/compassionate conservative/moderate/whatever else he's tried/ is that we're seeing a pattern of flare-ups here that aren't being utilized as a whole. First there was Niger-gate. Then it got shunted into the investigatory process. Since then we've seen at least two episodes that have brought outrage up to heightened levels about inside information that should have caused a huge stir (Paul O'Neill's book and documentation and the Medicare intimidation swindle).

These things did cause a huge stir, but the point is that there isn't any integration to them. These things need to be discussed in a framework of what the Bush administration is really all about: Lies, deception, financial scams, and bullheaded ignorance. If we talk about the Medicare intimidation within the context of the the Plame intimidation and Bush's characterization as being unattentive (from O'Neill's stuff) and we mention all these things together, then we've got something to stick in peoples' minds.

By only talking about these things as individual incidents, we're wasting opportunities against an enemy that is not wasting theirs.

[countmyvote4real]

35. How can that happen when the mainstream press is *'s pocket?

We have to force them to focus on it. Tomorrow, 3/20, there will be hundreds of anti-war protests across the country. Some even started today.

We have to get up from the computer and take it to the streets.

[Bread and Circus]

30. It's funny cuz Wes Clark got sent up the flagpole for this, Will Pitt....

I wonder, what are your thoughts now on what Wes Clark was saying?

[WilliamPitt]

33. I always thought Clark made some epic statements on this stuff

and he had the cred to back it up.

[peacetalksforall]

31. The traitor factor combined with a Republican Senate, Congress,

Suprmeme Court,and Right Wing Media makes it extremely difficult to bring him down. The only chance our country has of stopping before we go completely over the cliff with these thieving liars is to sway some media and many more of the blind followers. Some of the not-so-blind are spinning with disbelief at what they are learning, but will probably not revert to their fromerly adoring position no matter what trick the thieving liars pull out of their bag.

[Paragon]

37. Get your hands off my man, bitch!

:silly:

[WilliamPitt]

39. Slap fight! Slap fight!

:)