Richard Clarke: NYC Subway Cyanide Plot Probably "made up."

leveymg

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Mon Jun-19-06 01:02 PM
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Richard Clarke: NYC Subway Cyanide Plot Probably "made up."

Edited on Mon Jun-19-06 01:32 PM by leveymg

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/19/10418/7989

SNIP

Clarke doubted the specificity of the report, as well as the players who were cited in the threat. Now, this is the same man who warned Rice and Bush about Al Qaeda back in 2001, and frankly, I don't see much reason for him to be lying about much, when he has been proven to be accurate in his assessments (other than my disagreement on bag searches on the subways) and he certainly has the experience and the country's best interests in mind when he speaks.

So, when he said the following, I knew that it would get buried in the hoopla of "see how the great Dear Leader thwarted another terror threat" and "you can never forget how much certain people want to kill us because of our freedoms":

"There's reason to be skeptical," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, who is the former chief of White House counterterrorism. "Just because something is labeled in an intelligence report does not mean every word it is true."

He says the information describing the plot would have been just one of the hundreds of threats that would have been collected in 2003.

Furthermore, the specificity of the report is suspect, he said.

"Whenever you get reports that are this specific, they are usually made up," he said.

Clarke noted the report detailed a particular time period for the attack, and that Osama bin Laden's top deputy himself weighed in.

Clarke said Zawihiri and bin Laden are too isolated to have that kind of direct control over a plot inside the United States. He also thinks the terrorists would have carried out the attack if the plot was as advanced as Suskind reported.

"Frankly if there was a team in the United States that was ready to do this, they would have done it," Clarke said.

****

To add my two cents worth here. There are good reasons why we didn't hear about this from BushCo earlier. Number 1, the attack plot was called off before U.S. intelligence is alleged to have even learned about it -- essentially, it never really existed, so it hardly shows daring-do and decisive action by Dubya in ordering the perpetrators tracked down. The author of the book, Ron Suskind, does try to spin the story to make the Boy King sound heroic.

Secondly, the gas generator idea was tried in the mid-1990s by a well-financed, technically sophisticated messianic cult in Japan without a great deal of success. Explosives in a backpack are more effective - that's why bombs remain the terrorist's weapon of choice against soft targets, such as subway cars and cafes.

Third, there's "Ali", the al-Qaeda informant who Suskind tells us about. It's not explained what happened to the CIA mole inside of AQ, but one can assume he's not there anymore. The only surprise in Suskind's account is the admission that BushCo and the spooks were lying to us all along when they claimed we had no human sources inside AQ. Now, they tell us there were. Why let the cat out of the bag now? -- if that much is true, that's the real mystery here. Or, did Bush-Cheney out him, too?