Posted on 07/03/2004 10:14:04 AM PDT by killjoy
Thanks for the ping!
Sounds like this guy could scarf up some of that money that Michael Moore is claiming he'll give to anyone who can find errors in his movie. Of course, with people like Chris Lehane, late of Algore's staff, folks will have to undergo the rigors of trying to find out exactly what Michael Moore considers a lie.
Saudi Departures from United States
Deceits 12-15
Skeleton in Clarke 's Closet
By Boston Herald editorial staff
Thursday, March 25, 2004
http://news.bostonherald.com/opinion/view.bg?articleid=440 ~ [This is the original URL but it does not work now, you will have to search the archives of the Boston Herald. Alternatively, google the title for confirmation that others picked up the article as well in the same wording]
Former counterterrorism official and now tell-all author Richard Clarke was at it again yesterday, scorching Bush administration officials in testimony before the national Sept. 11 commission.
We'd like to know how Clarke squares his contention that he was the only one in the Bush administration truly committed to thwarting terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks with this: It was Clarke who personally authorized the evacuation by private plane of dozens of Saudi citizens, including many members of Osama bin Laden's own family, in the days immediately following Sept. 11.
Clarke 's role was revealed in an October 2003 Vanity Fair article. ``Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,'' Clarke told Vanity Fair. ``My role was to say that it can't happen unless the FBI approves it. . . And they came back and said yes, it was fine with them. So we said `Fine, let it happen.' ''
Vanity Fair uncovered that the FBI never fully investigated the passengers on those privately chartered flights (one of which flew out of Logan International Airport after scooping up a dozen or so bin Laden relatives.) But Clarke protested to Vanity Fair that policing the FBI was not in his job description.
Isn't that convenient?
The same sanctimonious Clarke who now claims National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice didn't even know what al-Qaeda was, could have stopped the bin Laden airlift singlehandedly.
Why didn't he appeal to Rice, or even President Bush [related, bio] himself in one of those one-on-ones in the Situation Room, to block the flights? Surely it would have been helpful to determine - without a shred of doubt - that those passengers knew nothing about the Sept. 11 plot or the modus operandi of their notorious relative.By all accounts, Clarke made hundreds of decisions in the days after Sept. 11, many clear-headed and right.
Approving those special flights seems like a wrong one, but it was a judgment call made in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history.
Perhaps it was the best decision he could make under the circumstances. It's too bad Clarke cuts no one in the Bush administration the same slack he so easily cuts himself.
It's nice that Boston has a newspaper that will print what the Kennedy/DNC-controlled Globe would surely never print - - the truth.
BUMP
bump for a later read.
Keeping
This article is a keeper.
When will Moore be tried for treason? He should be.
But as Ann Coulter pointed out, when we gave Jane Fonda a pass, we implicitly decided that treason is no longer a punishable offense.
The Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times ~ big surprise huh?
From: https://bostonglobe.com/aboutus/cohistory.stm
<snip>
On October 1, 1993, The Globe and Affiliated Publications merged with the New York Times Company in the largest, single newspaper merger and acquisition in U.S. history. The Boston Globe thus became a wholly-owned subsidiary of The New York Times company. It was a historic merger that marked the beginning of an alliance of two great newspapers and two great newspaper families - The Taylors of The Globe and The Sulzbergers of The Times - in American newspaper publishing.
<snip>
Boston Herald
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/03720736.asp
<snip>
FOR AT LEAST 50 years the Globe and the Herald have competed for the affection and loyalty of Greater Boston and New England. As the city’s dominant dailies — and, since the early 1970s, as Boston’s only seven-day papers — they fought in the 1950s and ’60s over the Herald’s receipt of a license to operate a television station, an exception to the Federal Communications Commission’s ban on cross-ownership. Herald owner Robert "Beanie" Choate tried to get the Taylor family, which owned the Globe, to sell to him; but the Taylors refused, and unleashed a future executive editor, Robert Healy, on the FCC story. With a surreptitious assist from future House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Healy demonstrated that Choate had improperly sought to influence the chairman of the FCC, forcing the Herald — by then the Herald Traveler — to sell to the Hearst Corporation in 1972.
<snip>
In the ’90s, the papers pulled an unusual ownership switch: the locally owned Globe was sold by the Taylor family to the New York Times Company for $1.1 billion (half of the Times Company’s valuation), while Murdoch sold the Herald to Purcell for an estimated $15 million to $20 million. Suddenly it was the Herald that enjoyed local ownership and the Globe that was controlled by an out-of-town corporation. The Globe’s status as the city’s — and the region’s — largest and most influential media institution remained unchallenged. But the Herald, under Andy Costello, Andrew Gully, and co–managing editor Kevin Convey (now editor-in-chief of Purcell’s Community Newspaper chain), continued what Chandler had begun, putting out an aggressive alternative to the Globe that competed hard on breaking news, local politics, business, and sports, while offering underrated arts-and-entertainment coverage as well.
<snip>
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com. Read his daily "Media Log" at BostonPhoenix.com.
The film shows CBS and CNN calling Florida for Al Gore. According to the narrator, “Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy….All of a sudden the other networks said, ‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.’”
bookmark for later
Free Republic -
First of all, this is what Koch heard Moore say and therefore it is hearsay: “I don’t know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is three times more likely that you will be struck by lightening than die from an act
of terror.” Then, based on hearsay, Koch stretched the comment into the Koch-interpreted precedent that "it shows where he was coming from long before he produced “Fahrenheit 9/11” and "Moore's point, however, was willfully oblivious to the fact that al Qaeda did not intend 9/11 to be the last word; the organization was working on additional attacks, and if the organization obtained the right weapons, millions of people might be killed".
This is a common and quite annoying deception by arrogant Republicans - the innuendo via hearsay that Democrats and liberals do not take the War on
Terrorism seriously and are weak on counterterrorism measures. The problem that Free Republic has with me - a Democrat and liberal - is that I do
counterterrorism research. I have had the last word in two discussions here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1134467/posts?q=1&&page=54
and
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1163918/posts.
I will tell you - the counterterrorism researchers that I know procede from the caveat that arrogant Republicans and angry Democrats will not share critical information in this election year and that both will be blamed for security gaps that lead to an attack. In other words, counterterrorism research will be ignored in favor of the substandard intellectualism of hearsay and innuendo
This is my hypothesis -
IMO, the plans for the Iraq go back to 1991 with Paul Wolfowitz's and Dick Cheney's anger that Bush Sr did not finish off Saddam. Richard Clarke suggests an overexpenditure perhaps even an obsession with Iraq by the Bush Administration that appears to be more of a deviation from the War on Terrorism than a contribution. Again, the 9/11 Commission does not go back far enough ie a '2/26 [1993] Commission' would have come to the same conclusions as the 9/11 Commission with regard to Al Qaeda Cult
ideology/threat assessment and actionable intelligence/security gaps.
Bump for later reading...
RNC Bump !!!
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