Richard Clarke: "from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq"

[sabra]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/bush-oral-history200902?currentPage=2

<snip>

Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We went into a period in June where the tempo of intelligence about an impending large-scale attack went up a lot, to the kind of cycle that we’d only seen once or twice before. And we told Condi that. She didn’t do anything. She said, Well, make sure you’re coordinating with the agencies, which, of course, I was doing. By August, I was saying to Condi and to the agencies that the intelligence isn’t coming in at such a rapid rate anymore as it was in the June-July time frame. But that doesn’t mean the attack isn’t going to happen. It just means that they may be in place.

On September 4, we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration because the technology wasn’t ready: put a weapon on the Predator and use it as not only a hunter but a killer.

We had seen bin Laden when we had it in the Clinton administration, as just a hunter. We had seen him. So we thought, Man, if we could get this with a hunter-killer, we could see him again and kill him. So finally we have a principals meeting and the C.I.A. says it’s not our job to fly the Predator armed. And D.O.D. says it’s not our job to fly an unarmed aircraft.

I just couldn’t believe it. This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of C.I.A. sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.

...

That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.

[LynnTheDem]

1. When you gotta use the dumbest lie EVER spewed to defend your actions...

"And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power ..."
-george w. bush

(Hell, even the freepers were shaking their heads over that whopper.)

...that's when everyone knows there is no defense to your actions, and you know it.

[malaise]

5. And there are people defending these murderers

They should be imprisoned for life -TREASON

[sabra]

6. Hans Blix: "to prove the negative is really not possible."

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/bush-oral-history200902?currentPage=7

<snip>

Hans Blix: In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing, because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue.

If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, that’s what we would have reported. And then I think that, at that stage, certainly the intelligence ought to have drawn the conclusion that their evidence was poor.

I now feel sorry for Colin Powell. He was given the material by the C.I.A., and we read in the newspapers how he threw out a lot of it. But he retained some. And then he came to the Security Council, and, of course, in a way, this was to tell the world that, Look, this is what we’ve found. We have the means to do it. The inspectors are very good boys and nice, and we listen to them, but they haven’t seen this, and this is what there is.

[karynnj]

8. I really can't believe that he is able to get away with such

a blatant lie - where there was real coverage of what the inspectors were doing in Iraq for at least 4 months - until Bush announced he was going to attack. (Yes I know he has lied about many things - but this was completely in public view.

[LynnTheDem]

9. USA; #53 for freedom of the press.

When the press is not free, incredibly stupid liars get away with incredibly stupid lies.

[karynnj]

14. That's for sure

It is frustrating to me that many people do not know the timeline on this - and do not realize that there was over 5 months between the IWR vote and the initiation of the war. It was during that interval when the inspectors were in for the first time in 4 years - found no WMD and got Saddam to destroy his most modern missiles. This is in sync with Bush speaking last month that "people in DC longer than he" believed the bad intelligence. (Ignoring that he distorted it and that far more was known in March 2003 than in Oct 2002. He is attempting to both spread the blame and argue that it was an understandable mistake.

[bdamomma]

2. I wish people like Richard Clarke and others bring all this

information out to prosecute these SOB's.

[sabra]

3. you should read the Vanity Fair report, all 14 pages of it...

[bdamomma]

4. thanks will do.

[Winterblues]

7. He made the point that night that Iraq had nothing to do with it.

How would he possibly know that? It turned out he was correct but to make that statement only a day or two after 9-11 without any sort of investigation seems to me presumptuous, or else he knew far more about things than anyone has let on...

[Maccagirl]

10. IIRC The Bushies have tried to destroy Mr Clarke

even spreading the rumor that he's (gasp) gay. Whether he's gay or not is immaterial to the truth he's telling (and has been telling for a long time).

[PassingFair]

11. His was the only voice of sanity in the days following 9/11.

Where IS HE in Obama's administration?

[sabra]

12. he currently is an unofficial adviser to Obama - we'll see if things become more official

after 1/20/09

[PassingFair]

13. He deserves the highest position available to him.

He should have gotten the "Homeland Security" spot.

[Gregorian]

15. The PNAC was their plan.

Show the American people the carnage. SHOW IT god damnit! Fox news has a crime of ommission on their hands. Along with others.

Show the carnage, then decrease the military budget by a factor of ten.