The New York Times takes another dive: its editors assign Judith Miller to write a piece about Richard Clarke's book and Sixty Minutes interview, and she does exactly what one would expect a reporter enthralled by the Bush administration to do.
As Joshua Micah Marshall puts it:
Posted by DeLong at March 22, 2004 10:29 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postTalking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 21, 2004 - March 27, 2004 Archives: Paging Dr. Okrent, paging Dr. Okrent ...
We noted last night the odd and (I think now) clearly regrettable decision to have Judith Miller write the Times piece on Richard Clarke. (For general background on her inappropriateness to report this piece see this piece by Jack Shafer.)
The first point to notice is that in an article purportedly about Clarke's accusations, she provides one sentence describing his claims, with no direct quotes, before moving onto two paragraphs with direct quotes from White House Communications Director attacking Clarke.
Also note that she describes Clarke's claims thusly, that he "asserts that while neither president did enough to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has undermined American national security by using the 9/11 attacks for political advantage and ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq."
With all respect, that's simply not what he says. He does criticize Clinton and Bush. But his statements last night did not come close to putting the two presidents on a par when it came to the lead-up to 9/11.
Maybe he's wrong. Maybe he's giving Clinton a free-ride. But Miller shouldn't change what he said.
Another point.
In the version of Miller's article that ran last night there was this passage ...
Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on the grounds -- accurate ones in Clarke's view -- that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Clarke said Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that Ridge was against the creation of the department and said the department did not have to go through any more clearance with the White House than other Cabinet departments.
Miller hasn't been publishing as much of late. And someone needs to clue her into the revised rules. It's been at least a few months since reporters have willingly published demonstrably false statements from administration officials and spokespersons.
As we noted early this month Ridge went on record in May 2002 saying he was recommending that the president veto legislation that would have created his department.... Apparently, the Times already realized it had a problem because the passage has now been revised to ...
Mr. Clarke also said that Tom Ridge, the president's first domestic security adviser and head of the Department of Homeland Security, opposed the creation of his own department on grounds, accurate ones in Mr. Clarke's view, that it would be too costly and difficult to integrate with other agencies. Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Ridge had to clear major statements and actions with Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff.In an interview Sunday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, denied that.
So now Roehrkasse's denial stands but it's no longer clear what he's denying. You might say Miller has given him deniability about his denial.
The Times current article is here; but you can see the earlier version, preserved in amber shall we say, over here at the website of the Indianapolis Star.
my memory isn't what it was, but did the NYT employ people like Miller back in the eighties? I was a high school debate nerd, and I cut a lot of Times articles back then for my extemp files, and I can't remember any of their major writers being this bad on the facts back then. bad on analysis, sure.
is it just me? whom am I forgetting?
Watching 60 minutes last night gave me literal stomach sickness.
Not merely that the people in the administration have gotten thousands of Americans killed by ignoring the terrorism threat and thousands of Iraqis and others by attacking Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 (analagous, as Clarke said, to Roosevelt attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor), and that the entire world hates us more than ever.
But that we live in a nation where these blatant liars and criminals are still allowed to be in power.
I believe we're stepping awfully close to the line where our democracy is on the brink of destroying itself.
If we're stupid enough to reelect these people in November, America deserves whatever horrific fate - economic, nuclear or otherwise - the Bushies are bringing.
Posted by: PaulO on March 22, 2004 10:47 AMFor those of us who missed 60 min:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/opinion/21LETT.html
Excerpts from letters to his wife from Second Lt. Todd J. Bryant, 23, of Riverside, Calif. Lieutenant Bryant was killed on Oct. 31 by a homemade bomb while on patrol near Fallujah.
Friday, Sept. 19, 2003
I lack the words to express the whirlwind of emotions I am going through right now. We are still in Iraq, one day from getting to our base camp. So far the road has been safe, but tomorrow we get into Indian country: there have been numerous attacks along our route and frankly I am scared. Tomorrow I may see if four years at West Point and $250,000 of taxpayer money has produced an effective leader. I don't know if I will sleep tonight but I will try.
The image that keeps appearing in my mind is of you at the end of that aisle as your dad put your hand in mine. All I think about is that — and how we have joined together for life. That is why I must do my best and come home safe to you. Your family entrusted you to me, and I can't take care of you if I don't take care of myself. I love you with all my heart.
Monday, Sept. 22
Today things did not go so well. We rolled out on a mission in the early afternoon. Right before we were supposed to turn around and come back we got shot at. I'm O.K. . . . These armored Humvees are pretty good but I'd rather have my tanks. We had one other guy wounded but thank God neither were serious.
Thursday, Sept. 25
Well, today we got in all kinds of contact and thank God nobody was hurt. I keep pressing the commander to try and find out how long we will be here. He doesn't know of course and says he can only speculate. The thing is if he says six months and it turns out to be 12, that will kill morale. Morale is already very low here, as you might have guessed. No mail, lots of work, the heat and bad chow will do that to a unit.
Tuesday, Sept. 30
Today was fairly uneventful. We had a mission in the morning with no incidents, thank God. Then I went to church when I got back, which was nice. Being here has made me appreciate so many things, it's funny — little things like going to Wal-Mart or IHOP. I love you so much, Jen, and I miss you more than anything. I really don't want to spend another day away from you as long as I live. I guess when I get out in three years and nine months I'll have to find a job with no business trips ever.
Monday, Oct. 20
This place is scary. It is awful to be so young and wonder every day if you will see tomorrow. Any day we don't have a mission, like today, is a good day. I try and think how much longer it is until I go home but realize any time I roll out the gate is dangerous. As far as I know we are still only scheduled to be here until March.
Saturday, Oct. 25
Today was quite disturbing. We were doing our usual route clearance when we got the call on the radio that a civilian convoy had been attacked about eight kilometers in front of us. We sped up and secured the area so we could begin giving medical assistance. There were already a couple of Bradleys there by the time we got there. So we dropped off our medic and began to pull security and had one of the Bradleys call for a medevac and we secured a landing zone for the helicopter to come in.
Well, one Suburban had been hit by a bomb and they ruptured the gas tank, causing it to catch fire. Two people died and one got rushed to the hospital before we got there. Everyone else was huddled behind one of the two remaining vans. One guy was an American contractor and he had some British bodyguards. The second van had three bodies in it, one of which was pretty gruesome because the guy's spine was severed and his head just hung there. They died as a result of small-arms fire, probably AK-47's. Made me feel good to be in an armored truck.
Thursday, Oct. 30
Today we woke up early for a mission. Went and did a route recon and came back. Right before I lay down to take a nap we got the call that there was a protest at the front gate and we had to go pull security. That lasted for 4 1/2 hours. So by the time we got back from that we had other stuff to do, so no napping for me.
But every cloud has a silver lining and mine was when the mail came! Six letters and a package! Wahoo! I have the best wife in the world. . . . All your letters were wonderful and totally made my whole week and will probably carry into November.
wcw, it is my sense (not backed, of course, by anything empirical), that the quality of journalism in general (inclusive of the times) has declined over the last 20 years.
Based on my social contacts with journalists over the years (Friday night poker games, that kind of thing) and on other pieces of entirely anecdotal evidence, my theory is that journalism used to attract people who were concerned with the truth; now journalism attracts people who are concerned with being thought clever and with achieving the prominence to end up as well-paid pundits.
Posted by: howard on March 22, 2004 11:43 AMThat's my impression, too. A successful journalist like Friedman can now probably do talks at better than $15,000 a pop. Great for the ego AND the pocketbook. People can fool themselves a long way for that kind of money. I thought that the kind of neglectful writing Judith Miller does is supposed to be monitored by senior copy editors. Doesn't that system work any more? Are they all working to shorter deadlines?
Posted by: knut wicksell on March 22, 2004 11:54 AMPoor reporting is not confined to the print media only. CBS's Charles D'Agata gave contradictory reports on the situation in Iraq in an interview to a local CBS affiliate and a couple of hours later on national CBS radio report. It appears Mr.D'Agata was tailoring his report to an anticipated conservative audience(local) and a liberal one(national newsroom?. Have a listen. It's quite remarkable whatever you think of Iraq.
http://www.620wtmj.com/620programs/charliesykes/
No matter your politics, this type of reporting completely discredits the "profession". I'm conservative and get most of my news off the internet and blogs. I check left and right sites in a sort of advesarial system of news evaluation. In the end, I thinks its simply lazy to just accept reports confirming your point of view and reject those that go against.
I haven't gotten Clarke's book yet but I have been reading Steve Coll, _Ghost Wars_. Although it is a NY Times Best Seller it hasn't generated nearly the controversy Clarke's statements have, yet it corroborates the statements Clarke makes and contradicts the statements of the administration. It is an especially damning work because of all those interesting footnotes that cite publically available sources for what is said, including Clarke's work. I would say that Coll is an exceptionally gifted historian except he is a journalist and an editor at the Washington Post. The truly terrible thing about this NYT piece, and others reporting on Clerke, is how easily these staements can be checked.
Posted by: Lawrence Boyd on March 22, 2004 12:18 PMBrad, you really should ditch the "Why, oh why" construction. It's prissy and precious, and it has an unpleasantly self-righteous air. (A simple "We Need a Better Press Corps (Judith Miller Edition)" would get your point across, I think.) It plays, in fact, to all of Americans' worst preconceptions about what liberals are like, which is hardly what we need right now.
Posted by: Steve Carr on March 22, 2004 12:29 PM"I'm conservative and get most of my news off the internet and blogs. I check left and right sites in a sort of advesarial system of news evaluation."
Brian the Charlie Sykes web site was exceptionally silly. Checking left and right news was a situation I got used to a long time ago in lands far away. I used to enjoy American papers because of their factual content, compared with the politized reporting in highly polarized and partisan societies. I think of Chile in the seventies, much of Europe in the past 20 years, Soviet newspapers, and always any and all Rupert Murdoch enterprises (who seems to capture the spirit of Soviet newspapers with worse writing and more sex). A simple check on any article is to count factual statements, those that could concievably be checked, and opinion staements. Whe the ratio of fact to opinion is inordinately high then you have information that is not credible. At the bottom the world is based on some sort of objective truth, and information itself is a valuable commodity. The tragedy of the sorts we are seeing now is that the signal to noise ratio is so low that we have an incredibly difficult time getting at it. So the administration is now in attack mode against Clarke, this follows last weeks attacks against the Spanish people and their election, which followed their attacks against Kerry as a flip flopper. At some point this behavior has to raise questions about the truthfullness of those doing the accusing.
Posted by: Lawrence Boyd on March 22, 2004 12:49 PMApropos nothing: I love your blog, but when you cite texts that cite other texts and you end up with multiple levels of indentation, it becomes completely unreadable when squeezed down the narrow left-hand column of your page. Is there any way you can allow that column to grow in width so it fills the whole browser window? (Probably there is, you would just have to replace your width=450 tags with relative tags, like width="50%".)
Posted by: JoXn Costello on March 22, 2004 12:58 PMReportage was generally no better in Mencken's day, although the competition (i.e., more papers per city) left them a little more honest. As in almost any sort of system, mediocrity rises to the top...
I think the larger story here is that the Establishment is bailing out on Bush, and signalling none-too-subtly: retired spooks started complaining throughout 2002 about what they were hearing from the inside, Rand Beers (now a Kerry man) and a few other security higher-ups left the Administration before the invasion in protest, the Army college published a study showing the Iraq to be a strategic mistake, O'Neill's book, now Clarke's book, McCain joking last week he'd just as soon be Kerry's V.P... It's become a sport! Who's next?
Wait until people start asking themselves exactly WHY Bush would have ignored the terror threat...
Posted by: Lee A. on March 22, 2004 01:19 PMIt's my sense that the coverage has gotten worse too.
It seems to me that the political reporters have gotten jaded, and only cover the competition, not the campaign.
Additionally, it reads more and more like the "cool kids" in high school. MoDo being absolutely hopeless in this regard.
It's all about sneering, and following the conventional wisdom.
I'm beginning to think that if some of the major papers started pulling folks off their night police beat, we'd get better reporters.
You catch hell from relatives when you screw up on that beat, but politicians, being public figures, you don't have to care much.
Maybe it's J-School.
In the old days, it was an apprentice system, and I think that a few years doing obits tends to focus one on what's important.
Posted by: Matthew Saroff on March 22, 2004 01:49 PMMiller is not the only journaliste manque on the NYT payroll...the pathetic reporting by Elizabeth Bumiller and "Kit" Seelye have been equally embarrassing by even today's declining standards of newspaper writing and reporting, as noted by Bob Somerby at his Daily Howler blog. Expect NO better from the Grey Lady as Campaign 2004 staggers toward the finish line.
Posted by: barrisj on March 22, 2004 02:03 PMI am glad the word is leaking out to the mainstream about how badly pre-911 was handled. This information has been available for some time, but the public did not wish to hear it, they wanted to believe, for reasons which remain mysterious to me, that Bush was some sort of hero, or at least worthy of being President. Perhaps it was the desire not to believe the obvious: that, through massive failure of our political and social institutions, we had a allowed someone to attain the office who was not fit for it. And, further, once he attained it, he proceded to engage in a series of blunders which have cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lies. The Onion was right "our national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over". Or as I put it myself "the Republican War on Prosperity has taken a new phase".
The simple truth is that the details to realize how badly bungled pre-911 was were available. General Clark spoke out on the matter, as did others. The material on failures at FBI was available, the blackwashing of low level agents was known.
Clarke - the bureaucrat - merely adds another voice to this already loud chorous. Facing the truth - that we have become dysfunctional as a polity and will require larger changes than merely a new President - is not going to be pleasant.
But it is necessary.
Posted by: Stirling Newberry on March 22, 2004 02:04 PMwcw, there were several famous cases in the 1980s in which the Reagan Administration had reporters or otherwise punished fired for telling the truth. One of those was Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, who reported on a massacre of villagers at the town of El Mozote by El Salvadoran death squads.
Ever since, The Times has been on a downslope. It is not just because reporters are intimidated, or even because management is intimidated.
It is because there are no great souls to shame the narcissistic personalities such as Miller.
People forget how effectively Edward R. Murrow shamed the American press into repudiating McCarthyism. He got McCarthy on his show, let him talk, and showed him up for the thug he was. Murrow shamed the press into reporting on poverty in America. He was an extraordinary presence.
There is no one of that caliber in journalism anymore. What there are are professional con men like Jack Kelley, ex-USA Today, indoctrinated at the World Journalism Institute to believe they own the truth and are therefore privileged to tell any lie.
Posted by: Charles on March 22, 2004 02:07 PMLee A. is correct one of the most important reasons for the downward trend in the quality of newspapers is lack of competition. When I was in the business there were two newspapers in our town and we spend a good part of each day trying to beat the devil out of our competition. Today, why try, you have no competition, no need to work hard, because you can't be embarrassed when your competitor beats the heck out of you.
Leslie Stahl's question last night asking Clarke, "Why you are publishing this book during a Presidential Election year?" Great question, she didn't even know she had great scoop, seemed more worried about being one of the "Inside the Beltway" crowd.
Posted by: Hal on March 22, 2004 02:16 PMStirling Newberry says, "Facing the truth - that we have become dysfunctional as a polity and will require larger changes than merely a new President - is not going to be pleasant. But it is necessary."
Hear, Hear!
Perhaps the simplest means of repair would be to say that the first American Republic was nullified on December 12th, 2000, and that all fruits of that nullification are illegal and void. This would mean voiding federal judgeship appointees, Patriot Act(s), redistricting, tax cuts, etc.
The second Republic would begin with the same Constitution and pre-per curiam legal system, with the objective of crafting a system less vulnerable to corruption by money, crooked media and vote tampering.
As radical as this would be, it's probably a simpler solution in the long run than almost any other.
Posted by: Charles on March 22, 2004 02:19 PMMr. Boyd
You may find tailoring a story to one's audience silly, but I do not especially from a CBS correspondant. CBS just happens to be the home of 60 minutes and is owned by the same company that owns Dick Clarke's publisher. Can you say "cross promotion".
If Clarke had such serious concerns why wait until the start of the 2004 campaign. His claims don't pass the smell test. He trys to portray Clinton as a terrorist hawk in agressive pursuit. He claims Clinton's attention led to the capture of the prospective LA airport bomber. I remember an alert border guard caught him because he was sweating so much and looked nervous. The border guard asked him to open the trunk and he took off running. It had nothing to do with war room meetings. Clarke was involved in the Sudanese aspirin factory bombing which he blames on bad intelligence. Now that is rich. We had two embassies blown up, a war ship attacked and WTC '93 with only one untimely cruise missile attempt at OBL to show for it while Clarke was the MAN. Me thinks he dost protest too much.
This guy will be exposed if his record his appropriately scrutinized. The American people are not news junkies. They'll judge on common sense, and I just don't think people are going to buy this line that Clinton was tough on terrorism and Bush is weak. Its just laughable on the face of it.
Clarke also goes on about no tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda. WTC '93 was planned by the nephew of Al Qaeda's top operations guy. The only WTC '93 fugitive found refuge in IRAQ. There is much more circumstantial evidence to contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Sadaam also had the unfortunate claim to 17 security council resolutions, Palistianian suicide bomber benefactor, Kurd gasser, and mass murderer. Iraq is a large oil producer and neighbor to problematic countries in the war on terror. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Iraqi democracy looked pretty good on a strategic level.
Now, many leftists will say Clinton could not attack Afghanistan because he could not rally support. I'm not buying it but this line does lead one to believe opportunities must be capitalized on when they are presented. Iraq was in a window of opportunity.
Clarke is a little thinker and petty partisan. Hope he gets great prospective spot in a would-be Kerry administration.
Posted by: Brian on March 22, 2004 02:25 PM"If Clarke had such serious concerns why wait until the start of the 2004 campaign"
Because that is when they would be listened to?
Posted by: Stirling Newberry on March 22, 2004 03:23 PMwhere's the evidence that Clarke is a Democratic partisan? Are we just reaching into a drawer and grabbing everything we can throw?
It's also been claimed that the fact that Clarke wrote a book discredits him. Jesus. The perfect know-nothing refutation.
When Clarke was demoted, counterterrorism was demoted with him. That was one of his points. Ashcroft's budgets support Clark's story, the indifference to the Hart Report supports Clark, John O'Neill (FBI guy killed on 9/11) supported Clark, Paul O'Neill supported Clark, a British diplomat supports Clarke.
Until Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice stand up side by side and voluntarily confess, there are going to be some people who believe that their performance was flawless.
The partisanship issue cuts both ways. Anyone who started digging up everything they could on Clarke (sonic booms in Libya!! cyberterrorism!!) once Clarke testified pretty much outs himself as totally partisan. I don't really think that Brian's research was dedicated to figuring out whether Clarke was credible or not. Looks more like he was looking for kitchen sinks to throw.
Posted by: Zizka on March 22, 2004 03:41 PMBut Zizka, surely you want to welcome Brian to the struggle against the concentration of media ownership, an issue i'm sure he never thought of until the official right-wing anti-Clarke talking points were issued....
Posted by: howard on March 22, 2004 03:49 PMBrian writes: "If Clarke had such serious concerns why wait until the start of the 2004 campaign"
He didn't. The lead time on a book like this is pretty long. Likely he started work on it the day he resigned.
Posted by: Steven Rogers on March 22, 2004 03:52 PMIn this 1998 speech,
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/lansdowne/clarke.htm
Richard Clarke admits that in 1997 when Saddam was hassling UNSCOM inspectors, the Clinton Administration mistook three teenage hackers who gained access to DOD logistics computers for Iraqi "cyber-warfare" to cripple the logistics buildup for a bombing campaign.
It wasn't irresponsible of the Clinton Admin. to think that. And it certainly wasn't irresponsible for the Bush Admin on 9-12 to suspect that there was an Iraqi connection to the previous days attacks. In fact, it would have been irresponsible not to take that possibility seriously (which Clarke in the speech spells out as a future possibility).
Saddam Hussein had the motive--get the U.S. to cut and run, and leave him free to dominate the Saudia penninsula. The means--billions of dollars in oil revenues to finance the attacks. And the opportunity--Iraq harbored terrorists.
Geo. W. Bush comes out as the grown up in this episode. And six months ago on Jim Lehrer's Newshour, Richard Clarke praised him for being so.
Posted by: Patrick R. sullivan on March 22, 2004 05:35 PM"wcw, it is my sense (not backed, of course, by anything empirical), that the quality of journalism in general (inclusive of the times) has declined over the last 20 years." writes Howard
Howard, here's a little something empirical:
http://www.newsguild.org/gr/gr_display.php?storyID=1689
"Two recent studies, one focused on government coverage and one on environmental reporting, drive the point home. “Government: In and Out of the News,” a study released this summer by the Washington, D.C.-based Council for Excellence in Government, examined more than 400 hours of network evening news programs and more than 13,000 front-page newspaper stories during the first year of three presidential administrations. Among its findings: coverage of the federal government has declined sharply-and what there is of it increasingly skews toward the executive branch, slighting Congress and the courts.
Perhaps as disturbing: the study's finding that nearly two-thirds of all sources quoted or cited in print and on television were in government service, an imbalance that tends to promote the status quo. Moreover, newspapers grew less likely over the period studied to turn to independent “experts” and to cite foreign sources, and even local newspapers “almost never” cited state and local officials in stories about the federal government, ignoring local perspectives on national issues.
A more comprehensive overview of declining news coverage-and how that decline has been propelled by the hollowing out of newsrooms-is provided by a 135-page study released in September by the nonprofit Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources. Titled, “Matching the Scenery: Journalism's Duty to the North American West,” the study focuses mostly on environmental and growth issues but makes observations that apply to virtually any complex news beat and how it's covered by second- and third-tier newspapers."
Here are two places to visit for an objective look at news coverage:
http://www.campaigndesk.org/
http://www.factcheck.org/
Posted by: Dubblblind on March 22, 2004 05:43 PMDubblblind, thanks for the leads: i will pursue them further. The fact that my impression is accurate is, in a sense, a scary thing: i'd rather that it hadn't been.
Patrick, once again, it's hard to figure out what point you're trying to make with this relentless goggling on richard clarke. You appear to be making one of the following points: a.) it was too a good idea to invade iraq; b.) once upon a time, richard clarke said nice things about rice and/or bush.
The first remains as silly today as it was 14 months ago - in fact, sillier, since we now know that there were no wmds, there were no wmd programs, there were no meaningful links to al qaeda, and that nation-building isn't going to be a liberation cakewalk of universal happiness that the american public just can't wait to keep spending blood and treasure on.
The second is simply silly: richard clarke was a government bureaucrat. Of course he's going to say nice things about his employers - he probably said nice things about nixon, ford, carter, reagan, bush I, and clinton and their various NSAs as well. What of it? How does that change the vivid detail he provides of what we already knew: that the backbone administration underestimated the threat of terrorism, and then once it got religion, converted the threat of terrorism into an excuse to carry out a program many of its members had wanted back when they were underestimating the threat of terrorism: invading iraq.
Posted by: howard on March 22, 2004 06:03 PMWhat was Patrick trying to say?
Posted by: Zizka on March 22, 2004 07:28 PMIt's the Dowdification of journalism. Maureen Dowd, while still supposedly a straight campaign correspondent, used her front-page "reports" as audition space to showcase a minor talent for sniggering. (Most famously, the crack about Clinton coming back to Oxford “where he didn’t inhale, didn’t get drafted, and didn’t get a degree”.) She succeeded in parlaying this one trick into a job as regular NYT columnist and the Pulitzer Prize which seems to come automatically with that position.
What's the lesson for reporters with punditry ambitions? The Times' ace correspondent now is David Halbfinger, and his recent writing looks very much as if he's trying to duplicate that Dowd "magic":
"John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand. Should he ski, or snowboard? Or maybe both? He gave no clue where he stood."
Get ready for the twice-weekly Halfbinger when Safire retires. Unless Judith Miller beats him out.
Posted by: Jeffrey Kramer on March 23, 2004 02:46 AMZizka,
Thank you for not doctoring a quote attributed to me. It really shows a new level of maturity for you.
Clarke is a partisan. I pointed to the evidence. You choose not to address it. He said there was a terrorism war room headed by Clinton prior to 2000 and implied this led to the capture of the prospective LA aiport bomber. The reality was the bomber was caught by a border guard who was under no special alert. War room was irrevelant. He was twisting facts to make Clinton look good and he was presenting unbelievable(Condoleeza Rice did not know of Al Qaeda) evidence to make Bush look bad.
Verdict: Partisan
Posted by: Brian on March 23, 2004 04:22 AM"Patrick, once again, it's hard to figure out what point you're trying to make with this relentless goggling on richard clarke."
I'm doing what doesn't occur to many who post here is the appropriate thing; dig out the facts and reason validly from those facts.
" The first remains as silly today as it was 14 months ago - in fact, sillier, since we now know that there were no wmds,"
Sheesh! Howard, we're trying to judge the proprietary of something that happened on Sept 12, 2001--should Bush have tried to find out whether or not Iraq was involved in the previous day's attack. What we found out in 2003 is irrelevant to that.
" there were no wmd programs,"
Not true, and David Kay has recently said there were. But even if there weren't, Bush couldn't have known that on 9-12-01.
" there were no meaningful links to al qaeda,"
Again, the question is what did Bush know on 9-12-01.
" and that nation-building isn't going to be a liberation cakewalk of universal happiness that the american public just can't wait to keep spending blood and treasure on."
Yet again, this is irrelevant to the decision Bush faced 9-12-01.
"The second is simply silly: richard clarke was a government bureaucrat. Of course he's going to say nice things about his employers..."
Pathetic. You can't get even the simplest facts straight. He made the comments in Oct. 2003. He'd been retired about 10 months.
"What was Patrick trying to say? "
That Clarke's description of the decision making process on national security matters in the Bush Administration in 2003 is the polar opposite of what he Told Lesley Stahl last Sunday. He's not telling the truth in one instance or the other.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on March 23, 2004 08:24 AMClarke's a bald bace liar. I just saw him on Charlie Rose and he again tried to pass of this view of Clinton in the terrorism war room meeting almost daily. He said this led to catching millenium bomber. Charlie pushed him saying(quite correctly) that it was only due to an alert border guard not Washington alertness. Clarke came right back boldly She caught the guy do to an alert from Washington.
I googled the news reports and every single one says the same thing. The guy was simply nervous looking and a search of the car showed bags with powder. In quotations, they thought the guy was a drug smuggler. A one point a border guard shook a vile of liquid he thought was a drug which turned out to be a form of nitroglycerin.
NO ALERT OF TERRORISM.
Why tell the lie. He obviously trying to make Clinton look good and Bush bad.
He's a petty partisan, bureaucratic failure and the mainstream media and liberal wingnuts are eating it up.
Posted by: Brian on March 23, 2004 04:35 PMOnly when we have nothing to say do we say anything at all.
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