One of my readers postulated that Richard Clarke, of recent media darlingship, is beyond reproach as far as his credibility, even going as far as saying he had truckloads of it.
Well, he has truckloads of something.
Of course, the liberals are immediately defending his credibility on terrorism. He was a great man with an impeccable record and on and on. Since he is a Bush critic, his credibility is not to be questioned. Any attempt to do so is just perpetuating a vast right wing conspiracy to destroy a great man.
Ever notice how any attempt to criticize anyone on the left is met with the whole character assassination cries, vrwc cries, and yelping and kvetching about how it’s politics as usual?
Richard Clarke is a pathological liar. Yes, libs, he is. How do I know? Because if you put Richard Clarke in a debate with no one else other than Richard Clarke, you would watch a knock down drag out fight from two completely different angles. Don’t believe me?
Clarke’s first claim was that the Bush administration did not pay any attention to the gathering storm of terrorism. Of course, everyone believes it because, hey, it’s Richard Clarke, and he’s of impeccable credibility.
He’s also full of shit.
In an August 2002 interview, Clark said the following with regards to the Bush Administrations preparation to find and destroy Al Qaeda:
“First week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources — for example, for covert action, — five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.”
They what? They decided to increase CIA resources? To go after whom? Not Iraq, Al Qaeda. I thought they were ignoring Al Qaeda. Wonder when he was lying; then or this morning?
We continue.
“They changed the strategy from one of rollback of Al-Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al-Qaeda.”
They did what? They changed the strategy of the Clinton Administration, which was one of “rolling back” Al Qaeda to one of active pursuit? Compare that to his claim that no one cared about Al Qaeda and everyone wanted to go after Iraq. He has also said that the Clinton administration had a plan to deal with Al Qaeda and it was ignored by the incoming administration. Well guess what, Dick, it was. It was ignored because in the 8 years of the Clinton administration, we had an attack against us in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, and we had just gotten over an attack on the World Trade Center. It was ignored because instead of talking about it, as Madeline Albright claimed the Clinton administration was doing all that time, they wanted to (hold your breath) do something about it.
It was changed because after 8 years of terrorist attacks on American interests, something more than discussion needed to happen.
We continue.
Clarke claims that in a meeting with President Bush and his high level advisors, that Condi Rice acted as if she had never heard the name of Al Qaeda before.
Condi Rice, however, not only heard about Al Qaeda, but made this somewhat prophetic statement in October of 2000:
Osama bin Laden, do two things, the first is you really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA in foreign intelligence and the FBI in domestic intelligence. There needs to be better cooperation because we don’t want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory.
Sounds to me as if she knew about Al Qaeda long before Richard Clarke broke the news that they existed. And another interesting point is the part where she mentions split personalities. Richard Clarke and Madeline Albright also mentioned this problem agencies had sharing information. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why?
Because Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton, and Janet Reno didn’t want that to happen. Like many administrations before them, they were blinded by the fear that an intelligence agency and a law enforcement agency sharing information would lead to all out chaos and a destruction of rights as we know them. Of course, for Albright to act surprised by this is somewhat amusing, considering her and Reno were against making any changes. Their administration even slashed the intelligence budget numerous times, and even passed legislation barring the CIA from putting “shady characters” on their payroll.
Of course, this severely damages our ability to collect intelligence on terrorist groups when we have to inflitrate Al Qaeda from outside with some blonde-haired blue-eyed Iowa boy rather than someone already within we could just pay off to get the info we need.
We could also discuss Clarke’s amazingly idiotic statement that the US was obsessed with Iraq. There are two angles you could take here, both of which prove Clarke is not the genius the left have made him out to be:
1. Where were we immediately after 9/11? I’ll make it multiple choice:
A: Iraq
B: Afghanistan
If you answered B, you are correct, and you’ve also just come a long way toward realizing the argument that we wanted to get Iraq no matter what is ludicrous.
2. But let’s say the Administration did think it was Iraq, and wanted that whole situation straightened out. What was wrong with that line of thought?
Taken those four points just on their merit alone, is it so impossible to call a conclusion that Iraq was involved credible? Looking back we know it wasn’t, but looking back we also know that Clarke is a flip-flopping disgruntled ex employee of the government.
Is that really the best the left can do at this point?
They tried the same thing with Paul O’Neill, who before his critical book came out was a poor steward of the economy, and a terrible economic influence. He writes a critical book, does a 60 Minutes segment, and suddenly everyone wants his opinion. He goes from hack to hero overnight.
It’s the same deal with Richard Clarke. He’s connected to Rand Beers, who works for the Kerry Campaign. His book was supposed to come out in April, but was released this week (a complete coincidence that it coincided with his 9/11 committee testimony, I’m sure,) and he got two segments on 60 Minutes who didn’t bother to mention they had a financial interest in the book (namely that Viacom published the book and owns CBS). They’ve only ever made that omission one other time: Paul O’Neill’s book; another Bush critic.
Impossible to believe, right?
Richard Clarke’s “truckload of credibility” is quite the joke. His past statements are a complete 180 from his current statements, but of course I don’t expect anyone to criticize him, since he is, after all a Bush critic, which means he gets a pass and two segments on 60 Minutes.
If this is a truckload of credibility, I have a truckload of manure I’d like to pull up next to it. If I had my choice of which I would be standing in? It would be in the manure. It probably smells better.