Posted on 03/22/2004 4:59:03 PM PST by Wallaby
The official, Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Clarke, made the claim in a memo declassified yesterday and provided to Congress along with 53 other State Department documents concerning U.S.-Iraqi relations that were requested by a congressional committee investigating U.S. policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf War. The documents, which were made available to The Post by a U.S. official, provide fresh details about the administration's monitoring of Iraq's nuclear and chemical weapons programs and the controversial U.S. pre-war push to ease controls on high-technology exports as part of an attempt to cultivate better relations with Iraq before it invaded Kuwait in August 1990. |
(snip) President Bush last night defended the effort toward better relations with Iraq against this congressional criticism, saying that the United States tried to work with Saddam "on grain credits and things of this nature to avoid aggressive action. And it failed. . . . " "That approach, holding out a hand, trying to get him to renounce terrorism and join the family of nations, didn't work," Bush told a White House news conference. "And the minute he moved aggressively, we moved aggressively and set back aggression." One undated memo summarizing U.S. nonproliferation activity aimed at Iraq indicates that the Bush administration moved slowly to constrain Iraq's mass-destruction weapons programs after a Iraqi long-range missile launch in 1989 caught officials by surprise. The memo states that Clarke sought in an interagency meeting that December "to get at why U.S. intelligence didn't know Iraq had such capabilities beforehand and to galvanize the interagency community into more effective [action] against the Iraqi missile program." (snip) Clarke's memo referring to Washington's record of failure on the issue was written after the invasion. . . (snip)
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Meanwhile, while we're on the topic of the Clinton cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, here's a very interesting exchange that occurred on Moneyline News Hour with Lou Dobbs on August 20, 1998, the day of the attacks:
DOBBS: Today's attack was also based in part on information provided by Mohammed Saddiq Odeh. Odeh is a suspect in the Kenyan bombing. He was captured in Pakistan while trying to win entry into Afghanistan. Odeh told Pakistani officials he was involved in the embassy bombings, and was affiliated with Osama bin Laden. Journalist Kasra Naji is in Pakistan and joins me now by phone from Islamabad -- Kasra.
KASRA NAJI, JOURNALIST (by telephone): Yes, Lou, from inside Afghanistan, early reactions from the Taliban have given sanctuary to Osama bin Laden are angry and defiant in a sense, and early indications are, in fact, that the man may have escaped unhurt. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban is reported to have strongly condemned the U.S. bombings and speaking from Qandahar, the southern Afghan city of Qandahar where he is based he spoke to an Afghan news agency. He said that Osama bin Laden had in fact been moved to a safe place before the bombings and that he was unhurt. Omar, who is the top leader of the Taliban, also said the U.S. bombings were not aimed at Osama bin Laden rather they were directed at Afghan people and they showed amnity towards the people of Afghanistan. He definitely added that the Taliban would never hand over bin Laden. He says we will protect him with our blood at any cost -- he is reported to have said. So a defiant reaction from him, the top leader of the Taliban. The attacks came at about 10:00 local time in the evening, and when most of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban is under curfew, it is -- I think it's about 4:30 in the morning local time in Afghanistan, and I think it is too early to get any good indication of, you know, the extent of the damage to the base. And you know, what has actually happened. But also, let me add that the attacks did not come as a complete surprise, because for days both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, people expected such an attack in a sense because -- and on Wednesday, when the State Department issued a statement calling on international aid agencies to pull out their international staff because of a serious threat to them, these rumors, the rumors that the United States would attack gained strength.
DOBBS: Kasra, I have to interrupt you. Thank you and I appreciate you continuing to follow that story and of course tomorrow at daylight we will have better assessments from you. Kasra Naji, from Islamabad, thank you very much.
You have just heard the statement -- the report from Pakistan that Osama bin Laden is safe. His voice has been heard and the head of your organization, Islamic Taliban says they will hold him onto themselves until death.
Here's the relevant passage from the Washington Post story of January 22, 1999:
Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings.(Excerpted from "Embassy Attacks Thwarted, U.S. Says; Official Cites Gains Against Bin Laden; Clinton Seeks $10 Billion to Fight Terrorism," Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, A02, January 23, 1999.)While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.
Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
Given the evidence presented to the White House before the airstrike, Clarke said, the president "would have been derelict in his duties if he didn't blow up the facility."
Clarke said the U.S. does not believe that bin Laden has been able to acquire chemical agents, biological toxins or nuclear weapons. If evidence of such an acquisition existed, he said, "we would be in the process of doing something."
Now she has Blix on. I foolishly thought this guy would retire and shut up. Alas, I was wrong.
The Trial of John KerryDecember 10, 2003
Truthout | Perspective
by William Rivers PittOne of these days, this will be a textbook case for political science professors to use as a teaching tool.
Here is a Democratic candidate for the Oval Office in a year when the liberal base of the party is almost completely unified in its disgust for the sitting Republican President. The candidate, a Senator, has a 20-year liberal voting record to admire: He is peerless on the environment, a staunch defender of a woman's right to choose, completely reliable across the whole spectrum of gay rights issues, totally solid on education, an advocate for campaign finance reform and health care reform, and will fight to the death to keep Social Security fully funded and reliable. It is the liberal base of the party that turns out to vote in the primaries, so the candidate's record gives him an immediate advantage. [snip]
...Kerry's campaign suffered a blowout several weeks ago when he fired his campaign manager, an act that led to the resignations of several other prominent staffers. While this may have ultimately been a healthy bloodletting, it caused the national press to write stories about "The Ailing Kerry Campaign," obscuring any and all policy discussions that would have served his run. [snip]
There are but a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Time has grown short. In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken's living room was comprised of:
Al Franken and his wife Franni;
Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker;
David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker;
Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine;
Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek;
Jeff Greenfield, senior correspondent and analyst for CNN;
Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times;
Eric Alterman, author and columnist for MSNBC and the Nation;
Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/author of 'Maus';
Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post;
Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate;
Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and author;
Jonathan Alter, senior editor and columnist for Newsweek;
Philip Gourevitch, columnist for the New Yorker;
Calvin Trillin, freelance writer and author;
Edward Jay Epstein, investigative reporter and author;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who needs no introduction.
Can you say ELECTION MANIPULATION???
Preparing for The Next Pearl Harbor Attack
J. Michael Waller
Insight on the News
June 18, 2001, Monday
Pg. 20
Meanwhile, say insiders, the administration is trying to clean up the mess left by its predecessor. Clarke, Clinton's former national infrastructure chief whom Bush kept on, now admits that his first attempt under the Clinton administration to deal with infrastructure defense was a set of policies "written by bureaucrats" and that they were wholly inadequate. He attacked a 1999 Clinton/Gore infrastructure-protection plan as one that "could not be translated into business terms that corporate boards and senior management could understand."He warns, however, that the private sector's failure to regulate itself only invites more government regulation. Due to the nature of the threat to the U.S. homeland, Clarke argues that the government must insist on cooperation from the private sector - especially because more than 90 percent of the country's critical infrastructure is in private hands. "There is a unique challenge here," Clarke recently told a CSIS gathering. "For the first time in our history, the armed forces cannot defend us from the foreign threat. They cannot surround the power grid. Therefore, we are asking the private sector to defend not only itself, but the country as well."
This is going to be a HARD election, information-wise; I'll need the Cliff Notes
On Dennis Miller's panel, David Horowitz said that the attack upon a president at war was unprecedented. He is right.
We are dealing with flat-out evil. I recommend heavy doses of prayer and reading of the Psalms.
Clarke and Kerry: Great minds think alike.
MR. CLARKE: I think the largest threat is obviously posed by international narcotics smuggling, which costs a number of lives and costs an enormous amount of money. But more and more, we see that the people who are engaged in international narcotics smuggling are also engaged in other businesses, other illegal activities.
"We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens," says Clarke, brushing aside suggestions that a preoccupation with bin Laden has caused errors in judgment, such as the decision to retaliate for the attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 by bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, suspected of producing chemical agents. "We should not have a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law," Clarke says.Excerpted from "An Obscure Chief in U.S. War on Terror," Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post, April 2, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition, Pg. A01.He compares the current threat of global terrorism with the situation faced by Western democracies in the period leading up to World War II, when appeasement carried the day. Imagine what would have happened, he says, had Winston Churchill come to power in Britain five years earlier and "aggressively gone after" Nazi Germany. Hitler would have been stopped, but in all likelihood, Clarke says, Churchill would have gone down in history "as a hawk, as someone who exaggerated the threat, who saber-rattled and did needless things."
VERY INTERESTING article regarding National Commission on Terrorism, whose findings and recommendations were published in summer of 2000. (sorry I don't know how to link properly)
"Chartered two years ago by Congress, the commission released a report last week that unleashed a dire drumbeat about a coming wave of violence on American soil.
"But behind this dramatic and headline-grabbing report, the facts are these: The National Commission on Terrorism's warnings are a con job, with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel. Evidence of this fraud comes not from civil libertarians or American friends of some guerrilla army, but from the top G-man himself: FBI Director Louis Freeh."
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