Posted on 03/26/2004 10:15:28 AM PST by cricket
Stamford, CT -- Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT), chair of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, expressed concern today about recent claims by former Clinton and Bush Administration official Richard Clarke that the Bush Administration failed to respond to the terrorist threat prior to September 11.
Noting Clarke told the subcommittee in June, 2000 that there was: “no need for an assessment” of the terrorist threat, Shays stated, “Mr. Clarke is engaging in revisionist history, apparently for personal partisan reasons. The fact is, when he had the authority and responsibility to craft U.S. counterterrorism policies, he consistently failed to articulate a cogent strategy or plan to Congress.”
Prior to September 2001, three national commissions - Bremer, Gilmore and Hart/Rudman - had concluded the U.S. needed a comprehensive threat assessment, a national strategy and a plan to reorganize the federal response to the new strategic menace of terrorism. The National Security Subcommittee, which Shays chairs, held 20 hearings and two formal briefings before September 11th on terrorist threats and preparedness.
Shays noted that at a briefing on June 28, 2000, he asked Mr. Clarke, then serving as President Clinton’s Special Assistant and National Coordinator, Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, when an all-source threat assessment and strategy would be completed. His answer: “No assessment has been done, and there is no need for an assessment, I know the threat.”
Earlier that year, at the Department of Defense Worldwide Conference on Terrorism, Mr. Clarke’s assistant, Ms. Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, was asked when a national strategy to combat terrorism would be completed. She said Mr. Clarke’s office was developing a national strategy, and the plan would be completed over the next several weeks. No national strategy to combat terrorism was ever produced during the Clinton Administration.
“The task of responding to the terrorist threat is too important to be lowered to partisan bickering,” said Shays. “The bottom line is, the failure to respond to the terrorist threat was systemic, not political. It spanned several administrations and pervaded the intelligence community.”
“Lowering this debate to this partisan level serves neither the American people nor the cause of fighting terrorism to which Mr. Clarke is so committed,” Shays added.
Letters from the Subcommittee to Mr. Clarke following his testimony, and to Dr. Condoleezza Rice regarding concerns about Mr. Clarke's performance, are attached.
Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT) is Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, International Relations, and Emerging Threats, Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Government Reform and has held over 50 hearings on terrorism.
Letters to Mr. Clarke and Dr. Rice (PDF) http://www.house.gov/shays/news/2004/march/clarke.pdf
Goss Questions Truthfulness of Clarke’s 2002 Testimony- could launch investigation soon
This absolutely without a doubt refutes everything and anything we've heard from this man and the former administration that they had a plan and Bush failed to act on it!
This shows this man to be a liar with no credibility and these whole hearings to be a sham! I mean without a doubt we all know there was serious intel failures, but for this man to be saying what he's saying, and then to read these letters from the subcommitee on terrorism and intelligence to and from him in 2000.
I've yet to hear one thing in the media on this! All that Fox or any of the major media has to do is show these letters from the subcomittee before 9/11 to the public and this would completely lay to rest who this man is!
And that the former Administration not only didn't have a plan, but that this man is a lying POS!
I looked everywhere on all the news programs last night to see if this would be brought up and revealed. Nowhere did I see it! O Rielly, and many others are still giving this man credibility! Why? I'm just completely disgusted!
Gary Aldrich losing bin laden
The next is a 3 part VERY long series by the wash compost
Ghost Wars : The CIA and Osama bin Laden, 1997-1999 A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan
The CIA and Massoud. Legal Disputes Over Hunt Paralyzed Clinton's Aides
We have a real task here; to educate as many as possible to the fraud that is being passed off, as an altruistically motivated sucker punch to President Bush!
Anyone post on opposition sites? I don't - but if there are some good ones; please let me know. EXCEPT DU; that place is worse than hell; and really don't want to go there!
Know some/many of you all have been taking the opposition on for awhile; but maybe more of us need to 'go forth'. . .and share the truth.
FORMER WHITE HOUSE TERRORISM ADVISOR RICHARD CLARKE'S LEGACY OF MISCALCULATION
Posted by --- Jim Robinson.
____________________________________________________________________________________
FORMER WHITE HOUSE TERRORISM ADVISOR RICHARD CLARKE'S LEGACY OF MISCALCULATION
securityfocus.com ^ | Feb 17, 2003 | By George Smith
Posted on 03/19/2004 4:52:05 PM PST by Jim Robinson
The outgoing cybersecurity czar will be remembered for his steadfast belief in the danger of Internet attacks, even while genuine threats developed elsewhere.
The retirement of Richard Clarke is appropriate to the reality of the war on terror. Years ago, Clarke bet his national security career on the idea that electronic war was going to be real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and Iraq have shown, real action is still of the blood and guts kind.
In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.
September 11 spoiled the fun, though, and electronic attack was shoved onto the back-burner in favor of special operations men calling in B-52 precision air strikes on Taliban losers. One-hundred fifty-thousand U.S. soldiers on station outside Iraq make it perfectly clear that cyberspace is only a trivial distraction.
Saddam will not be brought down by people stealing his e-mail or his generals being spammed with exhortations to surrender.
Clarke's career in subsequent presidential administrations was a barometer of the recession of the belief that cyberspace would be a front effector in national security affairs. After being part of the NSC, Clarke was dismissed to Special Advisor for Cyberspace Security on October 9th in a ceremony led by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and new homeland security guru Tom Ridge. If it was an advance, it was one to the rear -- a pure demotion.
Instead of combating terrorists, Clarke would be left to wrestle with corporate America over computer security, a match he would lose by pinfall. Ridding the world of bad guys and ensuring homeland safety was a job for CIA wet affairsmen, the FBI, the heavy bomb wing out of Whiteman Air Force Base -- anyone but marshals in cyberspace.
Information "Sharing" and Cruise Missiles
The Slammer virus gave Clarke one last mild hurrah with the media. But nationally, Slammer was a minor inconvenience compared to relentless cold weather in the east and the call up of the reserves.
But with his retirement, Clarke's career accomplishments should be noted.
In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.
In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.
Trying his hand in cyberspace, Clarke's most lasting contribution is probably the new corporate exemption in the Freedom of Information Act. Originally designed to immunize companies against the theoretical malicious use of FOIA by competitors, journalists and other so-called miscreants interested in ferreting out cyber-vulnerabilities, it was suggested well before the war on terror as a measure that would increase corporate cooperation with Uncle Sam. Clarke labored and lobbied diligently from the NSC for this amendment to existing law, law which he frequently referred to as an "impediment" to information sharing.
While the exemption would inexplicably not pass during the Clinton administration, Clarke and other like-minded souls kept pushing for it. Finally, the national nervous breakdown that resulted from the collapse of the World Trade Center reframed the exemption as a grand idea, and it was embraced by legislators, who even expanded it to give a get-out-of-FOIA-free card to all of corporate America, not just those involved with the cyber-infrastructure. It passed into law as part of the legislation forming the Department of Homeland Security.
However, as with many allegedly bright ideas originally pushed by Richard Clarke, it came with thorns no one had anticipated.
In a January 17 confirmation hearing for Clarke's boss, Tom Ridge, Senator Carl Levin protested that the exemption's language needed to be clarified. "We are denying the public unclassified information in the current law which should not be denied to the public," he said as reported in the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News.
"That means that you could get information that, for instance, a company is leaking material into a river that you could not turn over to the EPA," Levin continued. "If that company was the source of the information, you could not even turn it over to another agency."
"It certainly wasn't the intent, I'm sure, of those who advocated the Freedom of Information Act exemption to give wrongdoers protection or to protect illegal activity," replied Ridge while adding he would work to remedy the problem.
Thanks for everything, Mr. Clarke.
George Smith is a Senior Fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense affairs think tank and public information group. He also edits the Crypt Newsletter and has written extensively on viruses, the genesis of techno-legends and the impact of both on society.
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