[Coop]

Lame. They wasted paper to print this?

[Frank_Discussion]

WTF? This is idiotic. The press has gone to the dogs, and it's nothing but mongrels.

[Defiant]

Isn't it interesting that the notes reveal a White House that has character? Imagine if the notes were found from a Clinton aide. It would say something like, "We have to pull out the FBI files. Say he's a flamer, attack his Grandma, call Peter Jennings and have him do a hit piece."

[jos65]

And your point is??????????????????????????

[caisson71]

"Found notes", that's convenient. This is really sound reporting....."a Pentagon official said",....roadapples.

[irish guard]

Let's see, in the old days you needed two sources to corroborate a story.......now you can pick some sh*t off the floor of a Starbucks and assume it is fact.

I ahve a great idea...let's all go down to Starbucks and drop all kinds of lies, handwritten on napkins, all over the floor.

I am sure some paper jockey saw a White House person drop them, but never confirmed the source and the UPI ran with it.....

[js1138]

This just in. Secret notes reveal Republican plan to tell the truth.

[zencat]

Get ready for the Clarke memo scandal.

[reagandemocrat]

Leave notes in a Starbucks near Rumsfeld's home? Sounds like a set-up. "Don't throw me into the brier patch!"

[Feiny]

This just proves the press will report anything.

I wonder if the guy who left the notes is still employed?
Directions to Rumsfelds home are now in the hands of ultra leftist kooks....wonderful. He'll have to move.

[rogueleader]

This is great.

You know how all Starbucks baristas look like they've just stepped out of the 60s, except with more tatoos and piercings?

Anytime the Republican Party wants to spread some disinfo, just "accidentally" leave some handwritten notes at a DC-area Starbucks.

Great idea, eh?

[Notwithstanding]

The part the meadie will continue to ignore - the factual refutation of Clarke's primary lie:

One of Clarke's most damaging allegations is that he crafted an anti-terrorism plan -- a National Security Presidential Directive -- to take on al-Qaida in January 2001. The NSPD was not approved until Sept. 4, and neither was it substantially changed in the intervening months, according to Clarke. He has challenged the White House to release both documents to allow for a side-by-side comparison.

The notes address this matter, saying the plan to attack the Taliban existed before Sept. 4.

"The NSPD wasn't signed till Sept. 4 but had an annex going back to July (with) contingency plans to attack Taliban," the notes say.

That point is related to another in the notes. The briefing says commission member Jamie Gorelick, a former general counsel of the Defense Department under President Clinton, was pitting Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage against Rice. Under sworn testimony, Armitage contradicted Rice's claim the White House had a strategy before Sept. 11 that called for military operations against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

[NativeNewYorker]

A nation at war, mourning its dead, with homeland innocents slain en route to work, has a press corps obsessed with undermining a govt focused on preventing a further domestic slaughter.

I keep asking: IS IT TREASON YET?

[faithincowboys]

Keystone Kops. What are we doing???

[HarryCaul]

Nothing surprising or even controversial here.

Of course, "Eric" should get a talking to, at the least. It's one thing to leave behind political strategy notes, but does this guy have a clearance?

[ravingnutter]

Insight often has reported on Clinton-era officials and Republican defectors who have tied Bush's national-security strategy in knots since the beginning of his presidency [see "Blinded Vigilance," Oct. 15, 2001; "Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon," June 17, 2002; and "Democrats Subvert War Intelligence," Jan. 6-19]. Indeed, this magazine reported on Sept. 7, 2001, just four days before the terrorist attacks, that Clinton holdovers continued to run the U.S. intelligence community [see "Ground Down CIA Still in the Pit" at Insight online] without needed reforms to deal with post-Cold War threats such as international terrorism [see sidebar, p. 19]. Days after the carnage, even the president's most bellicose critics in Congress, including Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), were on CNN saying as publicly as they could that they were reconsidering their long-held positions that limited the fight against the terrorist enemy and piously alluding to the need to repeal a post-Watergate executive order banning assassinations abroad.

At that point the president's own defense and security team was still taking shape. His top NSC special assistant for intelligence programs, Mary K. Sturtevant, had been on the job only eight weeks before the 9/11 attacks. For months, Sen. Levin personally had held up the confirmation hearings of Bush's appointees who were to design the U.S. antiterrorism strategy - Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Programs J.D. Crouch and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman - refusing for apparently partisan purposes to allow them to take office until late July 2001. While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs - a fact that helps explain why it took eight months for the Bush administration to draw up a strategic operational plan to destroy al-Qaeda.

Making matters worse for the Pentagon leadership after 9/11 were the machinations of a network of senior Clinton political appointees who still held sensitive posts, including Peter F. Verga, Clinton's deputy undersecretary of defense for policy integration, which was a major intelligence post. Senior administration sources tell Insight that Verga made himself useful to the Rumsfeld team but beavered to curry favor at the top, in part by "sniping and playing bureaucratic games" to make life difficult for the incoming defense policy team. Even today the divisive Verga holds a senior homeland-security post at the Defense Department.

Insight

[Steve_Seattle]

This is a very strange story. A Pentagon official just happens to leave sensitive notes in a coffee shop, and the notes just happen to fall into the hands of someone who forwards them to a liberal advocacy group. And the notes just happen to have a map showing directions to Rumsfeld's house. Isn't there something bizarre about this story? Doesn't it suggest that someone in the administration is working as an agent for the Dems?

[TexasCajun]

The loyal liberal democrat socialist who found the notes certainly knew where to take it.

[Snuffington]

"Stay inside the lines. We don't need to puff this (up). We need (to) be careful as hell about it," the handwritten notes say. "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."

Wow. What a sizzling revelation! The White House told its folks to be calm and not to do anything outrageous over this. The perfect non-scandal scandal!! Election shocker written all over it!

[Zathras]

This doesn't make sense!
I don't walk around with memo's from MY work. They stay on the computer or locked in secure drawers.