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Posted on 09/23/2006 10:59:28 PM PDT by Gail Wynand
Laurie Mylroie, a noted author and middle east expert as well as 1992 Clinton campaign advisor on Iraq, evaluated the Richard Clarke book which President Clinton repeatedly and heatedly based his defense of his terror record to Chris Wallace on Fox News. Ms. Mylroie, described the Clarke book as "riddled with errors" and statues further that, "Clarke's book, Against All Enemies is, essentially, an attempt to blame the Bush administration for 9/11, while exonerating Clinton (and therefore Clarke). The reality is quite the reverse." Ms. Mylroie contends that Clarke's story "systematically distorts" key information, and she explains the central failing of the Clinton terror policy was its emphasis on treating terror incidents as subject for criminal prosecution rather than foreign policy matters, effectively denying intelligence agencies access to key evidence and information.
Clinton on the other hand repeatedly told Fox News that " And all I’d say anybody who wonders whether we did wrong or right. Anybody who wants to see what everybody else did, read his [Clarke's] book" in response to question over the sufficiency of his administrations responses to terror over eight years, roughly the entire period from the 1993 WTC attack, until just before 9/11.
"Yay! It's Rove's promised October Surprise"
10 days ahead of schedule, too. No wonder David Gregory and Bill Maher hate the guy so much!
BTTT!
Today, I saw a CIA guy, who was on the ground at the time, say that Clinton was unable to "pull the trigger".
This was on FNC.
Actually, there's a picture of the 42nd President of the United States just above the word "naughty" in my dictionary.
Oh please, haven't we had more than enough Clintonspeak, this past week?
You're right. I could go on all night poking fun at Clintoon. It's too easy.
The Republic is in good hands. Rest well my Freeper friends.
Who the heck are you?
You sound very gay.
Michael Savage had on a guy a while back who carried the 'football' for Clinton. He claimed that there was credible evidence for the location of bin ladin and we could have taken him out. Clinton couldn't be bothered because he was watching golf on tv.
So, Rove finally finished the time machine he's been working on. Now we can send a surgeon back to the 90's to give Clinton that backbone transplant and sign the finding to let the CIA get UBL.
That was, IIRC, Buzz Patterson.
One heck of a guy.
I admire him a great deal.
Clinton was derelict in his duties.
Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson's, "Dereliction of Duty" was used for scenes of Path to 9/11.
Everytime the Dems start talking about Clarke's book, and what he says happened, we need to keep referring back to his earlier remarks: (Thanks Howlin, for posting this on another Clintoon thread)
He resigned [his State Department position] in March 2003 and retired in April. He began work on John Kerry's Presidential campaign in May 2003 as National Security/Homeland Security Issue Coordinator.
Anyone to give him any type of credibility after that is a n idiot.
Clinton always has, and always will be, a lying sack of $*%#.
Sad that so many people still believe him.
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Bill Clinton is desperate to be remembered by history for something other than the Lewinsky affair, perjury, and impeachment. And he will be. It's becoming clear that the Clinton legacy will also include eight years of inaction, broken by rare instances of ineffectual action, towards the mounting threat posed by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists that culminated in 9/11.
That this prospect horrifies Clinton is evident from the rough transcript of the former president's interview with Chris Wallace. Clinton has no defense for his feckless response...How do we know this? Clinton said so, and you can listen to him say it here. Posted by Paul at 02:47 PM | Permalink UPDATE: Ace has other thoughts. Wow. Link to a transcript of his remarks -- and an actual audio recording -- here. The man simply lies. I guess the real lesson of the nineties is that we didn't impeach Clinton frequently enough. We strongly suspected he had any number of chances to kill bin Ladin before this. It turns out we were one-hundred percent right: "That video was great. Clinton is losing it, because he knows the game is up.
Goodbye, 'legacy.'" Finally, Jimmy Carter gets some competition for the worst ex-President ever... impressive work, Karl Rove. Getting Clinton to remind everyone of what a crappy job he did...
SENSITIVITY: "Bill Clinton has been injecting himself into the news a lot lately, and it inevitably gives his critics a new opportunity to go through the case against him. . . . He wants to be the mellow, above-the-fray ex-president, but he really can't control the presentation. And now that he's shown how raw and angry he is about the criticisms, it's not going to get any easier."
Count me as one of those bored with Clinton criticism -- but surprised that he's restarting it now. So is Tom Maguire, who wonders why Clinton is saying and doing things that ensure that the runup to the 2006 elections will be filled with unflattering looks at the Clinton Administration's antiterror policies.
Tom Harkin isn't helping the Democrats either. I blame Karl Rove's mind-control rays. Democrats: Protect yourselves before it's too late!
UPDATE: More thoughts here. And a related post, here. Those Rovian mind-control rays are powerful stuff!
What is the source of this interview?
April 05, 2004, 8:47 a.m.“Don’t Look at Me”
Dick Clarke’s reversed reality.In 1992, when Richard Clarke assumed the counterterrorism portfolio in the White House, terrorism was not a serious problem. Libya's downing of Pan Am 103 four years before had been the last major attack on a U.S. target. Yet when Clarke left his post in October 2001, terrorism had become the single-greatest threat to America. Clarke would have us believe this happened because of events beyond anyone's ability to control. He argues, moreover, that the Bush administration has adopted a fatally wrong approach to the war on terror by including states, particularly Iraq, in its response to the 9/11 attacks.
Clarke's tenure as America's top counterterrorism official is essentially contemporaneous with the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton took what had been considered a national-security issue, in which the U.S. focused on punishing and deterring terrorist states, and turned it into a law-enforcement issue, focused on arresting and convicting individual perpetrators. That was certainly an easier response, but it was completely ineffectual. In fact, it had created a very serious vulnerability long before September 11, 2001. Clarke's book, Against All Enemies is, essentially, an attempt to blame the Bush administration for 9/11, while exonerating Clinton (and therefore Clarke). The reality is quite the reverse.
CLARKE VS. ME
An audacious series of terrorist attacks began in the 1990's, starting with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center &emdash; one month into Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI was the lead investigative agency, and senior officials there, including director Jim Fox, believed Iraq was involved. As Fox wrote, "Although we are unable to say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators" (italics added).
Clarke vehemently rejects this view, calling it "the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory." While this theory is indeed the central thesis of my book, Study of Revenge, one wonders why Clarke would not attribute it to Fox and the other FBI agents who did the hard work to uncover the evidence of Iraq's role. Gil Childers, lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing trial, was considered by other U.S. officials the expert on that attack. Childers described Study of Revenge as "work the U.S. government should have done."
Clarke's office was obliged to review the book in the spring of 2001. He dismissed it then, as he does now. He systematically ignores or distorts the information suggesting an Iraqi link to the 1993 bombing, including the critical question of the identity of its mastermind, Ramzi Yousef; as well as the identity of Yousef's "uncle," Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks; along with the identities of other key terrorists in that remarkable "family."
Clarke maliciously misrepresents my argument on these points. After stating the obvious &emdash; that Yousef is indeed the terrorist the government says he is, Clarke writes: "That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad."
Yet that is not my position: "Ramzi Yousef was arrested and returned to the United States on February 7, 1995" (Study of Revenge, p. 212). This very serious dispute relates instead to Yousef's real identity. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has observed, "For Clarke to say something like that is like the 13th chime of the clock. Not only is it bizarre in and of itself, it calls into question...everything from the same source."
But while Clarke totally rejects the possibility that Iraq was behind the first attack on the Trade Center, he nevertheless entertains the possibility of a foreign dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing: "Ramzi Yousef and [Terry] Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days.... Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American?... We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States."
Clarke might have added that Nichols met his (underage) wife, Marife, on an Asian sex tour. He insisted on marrying her, although Marife did not want to marry him. She had a boyfriend, Jo-Jo, but her parents, believing they would gain a rich American son-in-law, pushed her into the marriage. After the wedding, Nichols remained only a week in Cebu, leaving Marife with some money to see her through her lengthy wait for her U.S. visa. She ran off with Jo-Jo, became pregnant, and sent Nichols a letter asking for a divorce. Yet he still insisted on marrying her &emdash; even though he scarcely knew her. FBI agents involved in the investigation speculated in their reports about whether this marriage might be a cover for conspiratorial activities. The regular ongoing phone calls to Cebu certainly underline that possibility.
DETAILS, DETAILS...
Intelligence analysts need to have a reasonably good memory, but Clarke's book is riddled with errors. Libya bombed Pan Am 103 in 1988, during the Reagan administration, not in 1989 under Bush 41, as Clarke claims; El Sayyid Nosair murdered Meir Kahane in 1990, not 1992; the Khobar bombing was after April 1996 (in June), not before. The 1982 U.S. intervention in Lebanon was not prompted by events related to Iran: Israel had invaded Lebanon to expel the PLO, and the U.S. then intervened to oversee the PLO's evacuation to Tunisia and otherwise to help establish a new government in Beirut.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has protested that Clarke quotes him speaking at a meeting he did not attend. Clarke claims that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz rejected his view that Osama bin Laden's threats should be taken with the same seriousness as those of Adolph Hitler. Wolfowitz, however, disputes that characterization, asserting that he himself agrees that Hitler is the prime example of why such figures cannot be ignored.
To bolster his claim after 9/11 that he had vigorously pursued the possibility of Iraq's involvement in the first attack on the Trade Center, Clarke wrote a memo stating that "[W]hen the bombing happened," he "focused on Iraq as the possible culprit because of Iraqi involvement in the attempted assassination of President Bush in Kuwait in the same month." But as Wolfowitz noted during the 9/11 Commission hearings, Iraq's attempted assassination of Bush was two months after the Trade Center bombing.
One person who worked with Clarke in government explains that he was never very good with facts. Facts slow you down and otherwise got in the way of his hard-charging style. Perhaps for that reason, Clarke was also prone to making things up.
Most egregiously, Clarke maintains that when Clinton hit Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June 1993, that attack ended Iraq's involvement in terrorism. But if the 1991 Gulf War did not do so, why should one cruise-missile strike achieve that goal?
Clinton was aware at the time of New York FBI's suspicions that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. Although Clinton said publicly that his strike on Iraqi intelligence headquarters was punishment for the attempted assassination of Bush, he also meant it to answer for the terrorism in New York, just in case New York FBI was correct. Clinton believed, as Clarke writes, that that strike would deter Saddam from all future acts of terrorism. By not telling the public that it seemed Saddam may have tried to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, Clinton avoided the risk (from his perspective) of a public demand that he take much more vigorous action.
That initial decision to deal surreptitiously with suspicions of Iraq's involvement in a major terrorist attack was reinforced by the ad hoc, all-purpose explanation for such assaults against the U.S. that emerged: Such activity was the work of loose networks, not supported by any state. This theory represented a 180-degree revision of the previous understanding of terrorism, and it provided a cover not only for U.S. inaction but also for terrorist activity on the part of hostile governments, particularly Iraq.
This was the flawed analysis that led ultimately to the attacks of 9/11. This, almost certainly, explains Clarke's over-the-top denunciations of those who have argued that Iraq was involved in the first attack on the Trade Center, as well as his repeated assertions that he searched for such evidence, but it was just not there. At stake is the question of who was responsible for our vulnerability on that terrible day. Clarke apparently believes that the best defense is a good offense.
Laurie Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign. She is author of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terrorism. She can be reached through www.benadorassociates.com.
Laurie Mylroie is hardly a "Clintonista" even if she was an Clinton "advisor" for a while. I'd say that by the beginning of Clinton's second term, she would have been a distinct thorn in his side.
Mylroie has a strong supporter in former CIA Director James Woolsey, and has assembled a very persuasive case linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq to the first World Trade Center bombing and by implication to 9-11 as well, even if indirectly.
She is - and has been - a vocal critic of the Cliton administration policy of walling off intelligence from criminal proscutions. read her "Study in Revenge" for a better understanding of who Laurie Mylroie is.
Clinton can go overseas, back stab Bush, trash America, undercut the military effort, probably encourage deaths, and dishes it out but can't take it.
Is she vulnerable to Arkancide??...
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