Montreal man linked to Clark controversy - Presidential candidate claims pressure

The Star ^ | 9/18/03

[areafiftyone]

WASHINGTON—A Montreal man has emerged as the key figure in a controversy that has dogged Democratic presidential aspirant Wesley Clark during the summer months.

Questions have swirled since June when the former NATO commander alleged on national television that he was pressured to link the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in a mystery phone call he received.

Clark first implied the call, not long after the attacks, might have come from White House, then later said it came from a Middle Eastern think tank in Canada. He has never identified the caller.

As Clark kicked off his campaign yesterday in Little Rock, Ark., Thomas Hecht, founder of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, told the Star he placed the call to Clark and drew his attention to a potential link between Saddam and the Al Qaeda suicide hijackers.

But Hecht said he did not pressure the former army general, who became a CNN commentator after retiring from the military, to make the link and said the matter was raised in a phone call inviting Clark to come to Montreal for a speech.

Clark's original claim and its subsequent variations had drawn much press and Internet attention in the United States as it became increasingly clear he was set to become the 10th candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Clark told the widely watched NBC show Meet the Press June 15 that the pressure to make the link "came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over.

"I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, `You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

Clark, in the interview, said he asked for evidence of the link and received none and still hasn't seen any evidence.

As he prepared for his presidential bid, Clark backed away from his comment, denying he was drawing a link to the White House, telling Fox News in July: "I personally got a call from a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information. He called me on 9/11."

Later in July, in another television interview, he said: The call came from "a man from a Middle East think tank in Canada, the man who's the brother of a very close friend of mine in Belgium. He's very well connected to Israeli intelligence and he follows Middle Eastern events very closely."

Hecht said his sister, who lives in Brussels, knows Clark socially.

One columnist, George Will of the Washington Post, took Clark to task because, he said, there was no Middle East think tank in Canada.

The Begin-Sadat Centre has its headquarters in Israel and its only office elsewhere is the one Hecht established in Montreal. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney is on its board, but strictly in a ceremonial role, Hecht said.

Hecht said he called Clark either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13 — not the morning of the attacks, as the former general said — but he merely passed on information he had received from Israel which drew a purported link.

Hecht said Clark called him in Montreal Sept. 7 this year to clarify the conversation the two men had, perhaps in anticipation of the question being raised again as part of his campaign.

"I told him the Begin-Sadat Centre is a center for strategic studies in Israel and has made various studies on the Iraqi threat to the state of Israel and therefore we have carried out analyses of what connection there could be between Saddam Hussein and other militant Islamic groups," Hecht said.

"I don't know why I would be confused with the White House. I don't even have white paint on my house," he added. "I saw those comments he made and I just chuckled."

The Clark campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

[Grampa Dave]

Lying Weasel Clark Warning!

[T'wit]

Hecht?! BigM, help me out here. Tommy was buying what Bud Henderson was selling, right? And when the RCMP tried to trace the contaminated blood back to its source in Arkansas, the door was slammed in their face.

Here's what it looks like to me. This phone call from Hecht to Clark was not out of the blue; Hecht and Clark knew each other and may very well have been old friends. How could that be? What do they have in common? Bill Clinton. Looks to me as if Hecht was close to the Clinton crew going back to the days when contaminated blood plasma moved from Cummins Prison Farm, Grady, Arkansas, to Canada. That would complete the connection the RCMP was looking for.

Might be worth talking to the Mounties. Tommy may have just shot himself in the foot.

[dwd1]

Nice smear campaign material...

[cyncooper]

But this can't be!!! Peach has assured all of us that Clark has claimed specifically that he received a call from the White House on 9/11.

Everybody with cognitive ability realizes that Clark was purveying the lie that the WH called him and "pressured him" to link Saddam to 9/11.

He has now been exposed as the liar he is.

Period.

Your willingness to accept his pathetic clintonesque spin on the matter as a reasonable explanation of his Meet the Press statement speaks volumes about you.

[cyncooper]

Clark clearly meant to convey the idea that the WH contacted him. He accomplished that goal because EVERYBODY thought that's what he meant, and it is only now that his "explanation" is being spun out that people like you can twist sentence structure in order to point and say "Aha!!! He did not SAY the WH called him" technically.

The fact remains that he was spreading the notion that that is what happened and enemies of President Bush used that false story in their diatribes against the administration.

[cyncooper]

Peach, I think you are onto something with your theory that Clinton called Clark.

Very interesting idea.

[VOA]

bump

[Peach]

Glad you think so, too. It's such an enormous lie that Clark told that my theory at least makes a little sense of his insensible explanations.

[arasina]

I do not see a conspiracy everywhere, hermes509. However, I did see (and hear) the original interview by Russert with Clark. I know what I heard him say. While you may be correct in stating that he did not specifically say "I got a call on 9/11/01 from the White House asking me to connect the attack to Saddam Hussein," he did give that distinct impression. Perhaps someone should ask Tim Russert what he thought Clark was saying.

You assume I thought you to be among the deep thinkers at DU when that is not the case at all. I don't waste my time worrying about what DUers will think about what we post here. Perhaps you'll not be able to find, as you said, what you need here, if that need is to confirm your extreme parsing of words issued by one General Wesley Clark. FreeRepublic is, as founder Jim Robinson has stated many times, a conservative forum. Every single one of your posts to-date has been to a thread involving Wesley Clark. If you're truly a conservative individual, why do you choose to sign up only to defend a man who is not?

[BigM]

Oh, the connection is there. Hecht was Cummins only customer by the spring of 1983. $4 million annually was earned from prisoners blood, only $500,000 was claimed as income by the prison.. Where did the rest go? Clinton put Leonard Dunn in there to ensure the blood payola kept coming. Hecht would have been quite welcome at the Governors house in Little Rock.

a bump and a drip!

[AHerald]

So did you. Thanks. This was a good thread. Haven't mixed it up like this in some time. Stirs the blood a bit.

[billhilly]

Me too. #;^D. Make mine medium rare.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

GEN. CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, "You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein." I said, "But--I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?" And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had--Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.

Clark's Clinton-esque parsing of the language didn't escape me. The entire paragraph is dripping with plausible deniability.

"It came from the White House. It came from people around the White House".

I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word it is. Actually, in this case, it really does. And I suppose it was an accident that the Supreme One followed up this statement with a story about a phone call he received on 9/11 demanding he make a case against Saddam Hussein. Notice he didn't take the time to say where the phone call came from -- he does mention the Canadian think tank, but he never says the call came from them. That's by design. It's much easier to infer that the call came from the administration than the think-tank, due to his careful (albiet, clumsy) wording of the statement.

And please, spare me this nonsense about the intelligence of swing-voters. October Suprises were invented for swing voters. Clark made his comments with precisely those people in mind.

The man's a 4-Star Clinton.

[billhilly]

"And please, spare me this nonsense about the intelligence of swing-voters. October Suprises were invented for swing voters. Clark made his comments with precisely those people in mind."

"The man's a 4-Star Clinton."

I like your style and agree with the premise.

[T'wit]

Good call, BigM, and thank you!

>> CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House."

It WAS the White House in his mind, betcha... Doubtless he still associates his friend Clinton with the White House, and Hecht with Clinton... or the "people around" Clinton.

Who do you suppose brokered a deal between an Arkansas prison and a Montreal blood broker? Well, who knew both parties? That be ol' Bubba Slick himself.

[GOPJ]

bump

[Great Dane]

Thanks for the link Dio.... Clark is buddies with a guy who pushed tainted blood..........hmmm!

That should surprise no one, the man is pathetic.

[Peach]

Another day, another lie for Weasley Clark, aka Flipper:

Clark Never Called Karl..
Weekly Standard ^ | Matthew Continetti


Clark Never Called Karl Wesley Clark says he would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his phone calls. White House phone logs suggest otherwise. by Matthew Continetti 09/22/2003 1:45:00 PM

WHEN WILL Wesley Clark stop telling tall tales? In the current issue of Newsweek, Howard Fineman reports Clark told Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and University of Denver president Mark Holtzman that "I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls."

Unfortunately for Clark, the White House has logged every incoming phone call since the beginning of the Bush administration in January 2001. At the request of THE DAILY STANDARD, White House staffers went through the logs to check whether Clark had ever called White House political adviser Karl Rove. The general hadn't. What's more, Rove says he doesn't remember ever talking to Clark, either.

This isn't the general's first whopper. Last June, the latest Democratic candidate for president implied that he "got a call" on 9/11 from "people around the White House" asking the general to publicly link Saddam Hussein to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Last August, Clark told a Phoenix radio station that "The White House actually back in February apparently tired to get me knocked off CNN and they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war."

Like his other two statements, Clark's latest tale bears little resemblance to reality. While it turns out Clark did receive a call "on either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13," the call wasn't from the White House. It was from Israeli-Canadian Middle East expert Thomas Hecht, who told the Toronto Star that he called to invite Clark to give a speech in Canada. As for Clark's accusation that the White House tried to have him fired from CNN--well, the general admits he has no proof. "I've only heard rumors about it," he said.

Skeptics of Clark's candidacy argue that the general's political inexperience makes him an unknown in the primary race. Was Clark's latest slip simply proof of his political naivete? Did he not recognize that his words would be taken seriously? And what does it say about Clark that he would have declared himself a Republican if only he had a chance to chat with Karl Rove? Clark may yet make a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. But if he keeps spinning yarns, he'll end up as the H. Ross Perot of the Democratic party.

Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard