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Clarke also said as much in his testimony, but I thought it might be worthwhile having another source.

Not that the press will stop claiming that Bush/Condi demoted him.

There is a very, very interesting article in the New Yorker magazine regarding O'Neill. What is interesting is that Condi Rice asked Clarke to name his replacement since he wanted to move on to Cybersecurity. His choice was O'Neill. The gist of the article implied that the relationship between Rice and Clarke was quite cordial at that point. I have this theory that his friend Rand Beers who is an operative of the Democratic party has persuaded Clarke to come out in favor of trashing Bush to the benefit of Kerry. Sort of like getting a spy to "flip." Obviously Clarke is so focused that he might be amenable to such an agenda especially if he felt he had been slighted. This would be his way of effecting payback. His actions today do not correspond to his words he had at the time in the Bush administration.

Q: Let me ask you about a couple of events. In 1997, he gives the Chicago speech where he says, "We should expect an attack." He's talking in that same period of time about, or a little after, of cells within the country. How common was this belief at FBI and NSA?

RC: In 1997, I think there were only a handful of us who knew that there were Al Qaeda cells in the United States. When my boss, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, would ask the FBI in a formal meeting, "Is there an Al Qaeda presence in the United States?" their formal answer would be, "We don't know of one, and we don't think there is one." But if you asked O'Neill, or you had asked me, a few others, including some people in the CIA, the answer would have been, "We can't prove it yet, but we see the smoke, and where there's smoke, there's fire." Sure, there were cells. We weren't able to prove it at the time.

Golly, kinda like a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda without the paperwork evidence.

The ability of Clarke to ignore his own words is astounding.

Forget the demotion angle.

There is a lot of stuff in here that is different to what he says in interviews and the book and his testimony.

There are a lot of nuggets of info about what did or didn't happen under Clinton--and some additional supporting info about the Bush administration actions before 9/11.