Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dana’s Little Secret

Gosh, listening to Dana Rohrabacher tonight on Hardball castigating Clarke and the Clinton administration for letting al Qaeda get away with murder for eight years, you’d almost think he hadn’t been up to his ears in the Taliban for years:

Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a “dual tract” policy with the Taliban.

A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, “If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy.”

Nowadays, Rohrabacher and his numerous aides are quick to provide copies of the congressman’s pre-Sept. 11 rants against the Taliban. They will tell you that he labeled them “a pack of dogs killing anyone” and “the most anti-Western, anti-female, anti-human rights regime in the world.” They will also show you records of the congressman berating Clinton administration foreign-policy advisors for misreading Taliban intentions and for trying to negotiate peace in Afghanistan with the militant Islamic group’s Mullah Mohammed Omar, a bin Laden associate.

What they won’t mention is that Rohrabacher also once lobbied shamelessly for the Taliban. A November/December 1996 article in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported, “The potential rise of power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher” because the congressman believes the “Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S.” Later in the article, Rohrabacher claimed that:

•Taliban leaders are “not terrorists or revolutionaries.”

•Media reports documenting the Taliban’s harsh, radical beliefs were “nonsense.”

•The Taliban would develop a “disciplined, moral society” that did not harbor terrorists.

•The Taliban posed no threat to the U.S.

Although he continues to describe himself as an expert on Afghan history and politics, Rohrabacher was obviously dead wrong on all counts.

Evidence of Rohrabacher’s attempts to conduct his own foreign policy became public on April 10, 2001, not in the U.S., but in the Middle East. On that day, ignoring his own lack of official authority, Rohrabacher opened negotiations with the Taliban at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, ostensibly for a “Free Markets and Democracy” conference. There, Rohrabacher secretly met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, an advisor to Mullah Omar. Diplomatic sources claim Muttawakil sought the congressman’s assistance in increasing U.S. aid—already more than $100 million annually—to Afghanistan and indicated that the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, wanted by the Clinton administration for the fatal bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. For his part, Rohrabacher handed Muttawakil his unsolicited plans for war-torn Afghanistan. “We examined a peace plan,” he laconically told reporters in Qatar.

To this day, the congressman has refused to divulge the contents of his plan. However, several diplomatic sources say it’s likely he asked the extremists to let former Afghan King Zahir Shah return as the figurehead of a new coalition government. In numerous speeches before and after Sept. 11, Rohrabacher has claimed the move would help stabilize Afghanistan for an important purpose: the construction of an oil pipeline there. In return, the plan would reportedly have allowed the Taliban to maintain power until “free” elections could be called.

[…]

After Taliban-related terrorists attacked the U.S. last September, Rohrabacher associates worked hard to downplay the Qatar meeting. Republican strategist Grover Norquist told a reporter that the congressman had accidentally encountered the Taliban official in a hotel hallway.

Read The Rest

I think it might also be a good idea to drop old Tweety a line and let him know that people are aware of Rohrabacher’s little sideline and that it might not be a good idea to present him as a Richard Clarke character assassin without also revealing his own sordid invlovement with the Taliban.

Pass It On

From future radio star Julia on The American Street

You folks may have heard that there is a new Liberal radio network going on the air tomorrow at noon with (I love this) The O’Franken Factor.

Here’s how you listen.

New York WLIB – 1190 AM

Los Angeles KBLA – 1580 AM

Chicago WNTD – 950 AM

Portland, OR KPOJ – 620 AM

Inland Empire, CA KCAA – 1050 AM

XM Satellite – Radio Channel 167

San Francisco Coming Soon

You can also get the feed at their website.

FYI: I spent some time yesterday talking to Janeane Garofalo and her cohost, Sam Seder during a runthrough of their show, the Majority Report, and I hear (to my utter amazement) that I’m going to be back at some point when they go on the air.

Bloggers you will definitely be hearing from on the Majority Report: Atrios, Kos and the editor of Liberal Oasis.

Word is that all three of them give really good radio.

Click through for the schedule.

Monday-Friday

Morning Sedition: 6:00-9:00am

This is a fast paced morning show that will entertain and engage audiences with wit and political satire. It will feature the latest news, offering up to-the-minute interviews with newsmakers, analysis and strong opinions.

Co-Host: Marc Maron

Co-host: Sue Ellicott

Co-host: Mark Riley

Unfiltered: 9:00am- 12:00pm

Air America’s midmorning program is a showcase for conversation about the political and culture state of the union. Unfiltered introduces listeners to fresh new voices not available in mainstream media.

Co-host: Lizz Winstead

Co-host: Chuck D

Co-host: Rachel Maddow

The O’ Franken Factor: 12:00-3:00pm

After debunking right-wing propaganda in his bestselling books Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken is taking the fight to America’s airwaves–and he’s doing it drug-free. With his co-host, veteran radio personality Katherine Lanpher, Franken will deliver three hours a day of fearlessly irreverent commentary, comedy, and interviews. Franken and Lanpher have a mean streak a smile wide. The O’Franken Factor will energize fans, infuriate liars, and deliver the truth–in what Al Franken likes to call the Zero Spin Zone.

Host: Al Franken

Co-host: Katherine Lanpher

Producer: Billy Kimball

The Randi Rhodes Show: 3:00-7:00pm

Randi Rhodes has spent the last 20 years burning up the airwaves in southern Florida with her pointed and provocative brand of talk radio. Combining live interview, call-in and commentary, Randi engages her audience with a passionate presentation.

Host: Randi Rhodes

So What Else is News?: 7:00-8:00pm

Based in Los Angeles, this is a one-hour program showcasing the intersection of politics, media and popular culture. This program will feature analysis and reports from the presidential campaign, as well as a daily reporters’ roundtable on how the news of the day is affected and reflected by the media. Marty will also cover the spinning of the news with a regular segment called “The Corrections.” This is also the place to hear the political voice of Hollywood, with celebrity guest interviews from the entertainment industries.

Host: Marty Kaplan

The Majority Report: 8:00pm-11:00pm

This program will introduce new, younger voices and opinions, with live guests from the world of politics, the arts and entertainment.

Host: Janeane Garofalo

Co-host: Sam Seder

Saturday and Sunday

Air America Radio’s weekend line-up will offer more original programming, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papatanio’s “Champions of Justice,” a program that brings a fresh and entertaining perspective to talk radio from the top legal and social issues focused minds in the country. Additional programming will include Best-of Air America Radio and Best-of-O’Franken Factor as well as other original programming to be announced soon.

Nice Try

So Wolfie said just now that Krugman was wrong when he called him “willing to be used” in his column today in which he quoted Wolf as saying on the air:

“…wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they’re also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well.”

I warned you

Wolfie claims that he was talking about these comments by Jim Wilkinson a few days before and showed footage of him saying:

…Let me also point something. If you look in this book you find interesting things such as reported in the “Washington Post” this morning. He’s talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of “X-Files” stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings.

C’mon, Wolf. You can do better than this. Wilkinson was talking shit allright (not that you mentioned it at the time, of course) but he didn’t say a thing about his “personal life” or any “weird aspects in his life.”

We all know what trash you were peddling, you cheap trollop. You are just lucky that you were talking to John King instead of one of the Botox Barbies or we would have undoubtedly been treated to a gossipy GOP spoon fed bitch fest, which was obviously premature. You’re supposed to wait until Drudge or The Sun runs it so you can call it “out there” and claim you had no choice. You know that.

Less Than Lies, More Than Truth

Matthew Yglesias has a very interesting new article over on American Prospect regarding the Bush administration’s sophisticated dissembling techniques. I am struck by this particular passage, however, and I have to say that it kind of freaks me out:

A new paper by Steven Kull, Clay Ramsey, and Evan Lewis shows a similar dynamic at work in foreign policy. The authors examined the pervasiveness of three pieces of misinformation in the American public: that the United States has discovered WMD in Iraq, that evidence has been found showing that the Iraqi regime worked closely with al-Qaeda, and that world opinion favored America’s decision to go to war. Support for the war was found to be highly correlated with the possession of false beliefs on these three matters — 86 percent of those who believed all three supported the war, as did 78 percent of those who believed two, and 53 percent of those who believed just one. Among people who knew the truth on all three scores, just 23 percent supported the war. One key finding was that misinformation about the state of world opinion was the single strongest predictor of support for the war. In light of the fact that as late as February 2003 polls showed strong support for the proposition that war should be undertaken only with U.N. approval, it is tempting to speculate that the administration’s campaign to portray U.N. opposition as solely a matter of French intransigence rather than as reflecting almost universal hostility to the undertaking was a crucial factor in building public support for the invasion.

I’m not sure the country can survive if this persists. This is post-modernism in the most obvious sense and the great irony is that it’s being perpetrated by people who call themselves “conservatives.”

Joint Chiefs

Alberto Gonzales has made the grand accomodation of allowing all ten members of the 9/11 commission interview President bush and Vice-President Cheney — jointly.

I think that’s probably a good idea. It’s pretty obvious that the president is clueless so he needs to have Unka Dick there to translate when he makes statements that sound like the babbling of a 6th grader. (“You can’t see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us.”)

Even the Republicans on the commission might get scared if he “visited” with them all by himself.

I Won’t Be Ignoooored, Condi

Oh, I see.

Richard Clarke was a crazed martinet who made the Bush administration hate him because of his obsessive monomania so they just did everything they could to get away from the freak. (Clinton was such a slippery phony that he was able to fool Clarke into thinking he gave a shit. The minx.)

I don’t like obsessive people either. They really get on your nerves what with pushing their agenda all the time and acting like their shit is more important than your shit. Then they get all pissed off when they get ignored and they go out a write books making themselves look better. If I were George W. Bush I would especially hate it if some wierdo did it

after 30 years of service in 4 different administrations…

and the worst terrorist attack in history…

which he predicted …

and I blew him off…

and continued to blow him off…

to further pursue an agenda he knew was even more destructive…

Get off my back, dude.

This psycho-bureaucrat theory seems to be that Clarke rubbed people the wrong way and was therefore responsible for the fact that nobody listened to him. Perhaps he should have donned a cowboy hat and called Stephen Hadley “four eyes” in NSC meetings so that the Bush people would have been more comfortable with him.

Seriously, this is really more character assassination and it’s disturbing to see wise and intelligent people discussing this in these terms. Nobody really knows what makes Richard Clarke tick and nobody knows whether he was so obsessive that he reached some sort of emotional breaking point in which he couldn’t take it any longer and so he decided to go public. Maybe he’s a real prick and nobody could stand him. So what? The “bureaucratic turf” he was so unpleasantly pushing was counter-terrorism and he wasn’t alone in pushing it. Surely the “grown-ups” like Cheney and Rummy have encountered unpleasant personalities during their vaunted careers. In this day and age, if you think your point man in charge of counter-terrorism is a nutty Ahab you fire him, you don’t ignore him.

And this guy had survived bureaucratic turf wars for 30 years, reportedly always being something less than Miss Manners and nothing before had made him so repulsive that he had to take the most serious step of resignation and going public. Something happened, here. The Bush people want to say it was greed or partisanship and now others are saying that he was too emotional to be believable and basically he took this step out of a fit of pique.

But, that means there must be an epidemic of bureaucratic mental illness in the government because that’s the only way to explain these other wacked out personalities like Rand Beers and Donald Kerrick and Roger Cressey and Paul O’Neill and John Brady Kiesling and Joseph Wilson and John H. Brown and Don North and Anthony Zinni and Karen Kwiatkowski and and Ray McGovern and Ray Mcmichael all of whom who have spoken out and/or resigned because of the administration’s handling of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. Apparently, the place is just crawling with assholes who don’t know that you can get more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

I don’t doubt that he was extremely unpleasant at times when he was trying to get people to pay attention to him and they ignored him. And I hope that I, too, would have gotten a little testy about that if I KNEW THAT TERRORISTS WERE GOING TO KILL AMERICANS AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND HIS STAFF REFUSED TO EVEN CALL A FUCKING CABINET MEETING ABOUT IT!

I realize that George W. Bush operates in a very formal way and his staff may not have appreciated being badgered. But, it was terrorism we are talking about here, not faith based initiatives or steel tarrifs. Lives were at stake and I think it is expected that the president of the United States’ staff can rise above such parochial concerns to evaluate the facts at hand.

But, that would require that they be open to facts that don’t fit their circa 1992 fossilized PNAC assessment of threats. They were not. And even worse, the facts clearly show that even after 9/11 they refused to adjust their thinking. This was about the national security of the United States and it really doesn’t merit consideration that his “likeability” was relevant in light of the terrible consequences we suffered on September 11th.

And I think that the reason they “refuse to just tell the truth” as in :

In retrospect, of course we wish we had paid more attention to terrorism. Everybody in the U.S. government does. After all, 3000 people died. It was a terrible misjudgment and a wakeup call for all of us. (I’m sure they could figure out a better way to say it, but you get the idea.)

Yes, we did focus on Iraq, and for good reasons. (Proceed to give reasons, which hopefully they can do by now without a second thought.)

is because there is no reason to believe that those statements are any more true than the lies they did choose to tell. Saying those particular things isn’t about “the truth” it’s about damage control. You could make a case that it might be a better strategy, but it certainly wouldn’t be more honest.

Tide Fool

Maureen Dowd quotes Junior saying:

I made the choice to defend the security of the country. You can’t see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us. But the lesson of September 11th is, is when the president sees a threat we must deal with it before it comes to fruition, through death, on our own soils, for example.

Setting aside the supreme irony of his comments about hoping the threat goes away and dealing with it before it comes to fruition (not to mention the atrocious grammar) what is this thing about the oceans protecting us?

My entire childhood, indeed my entire life, was spent under the cloud of a possible nuclear attack. I lived in Kansas for a time as a child during the 60’s where my father worked on the missile silos. We did duck and cover drills twice a day. I had nightmares for years about being incinerated like the Japanese at Hiroshima from the instructional movies they showed in my elementary school.

We lived for more than 40 years in this country under the threat of TOTAL ANNIHILATION. It was a real possibility that the entire world would end in a nuclear holocaust. We even came damned close to finding out in October of 1962.

So spare me this melodrama about our shores being penetrated for the very first time as if we were a bunch of naive virgins until terrorists slammed into the WTC. We’ve lived with far worse threats than this to our “homeland.” 9/11 did not change anything in that regard.

First Impressions

I was going to write a sort of impressionistic review of Clarke’s book today while I stew a bit in the information contained therein.

I find that Tristero already did it and did it much more clearly and evocatively than I could.

In His Own Words

Tim: We’ll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: “On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. ‘Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,’ the government’s top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness — and anxiety — against imminent terrorist attack.”

Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?

Clarke: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it

was, George Tenet called me and said, “I don’t think we’re getting the message through. These people aren’t acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances.” And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser’s office. And I’ve used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet’s warnings as “He had his hair on fire.” He was about as excited as I’d ever seen him. And he said, “Something is going to happen.”

Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.

Shameless

Frankly, a lot of us didn’t take terrorism seriously enough before 9/11, so I’m not sure there’s any great shame in all this. Still, the Bush White House should quit smearing Clarke and own up to the truth: terrorism wasn’t a top priority during their first few months in office. 9/11 was a wakeup call for them, just as it was for the rest of the country.

Kevin Drum keeps taking that position and I don’t understand it. According to all the people who Kevin cites in his post as backing up Clarke, the Clinton administration took terrorism much more seriously. And you don’t have to rely on the “impressions” of civil servants because actual real world results show even to those of us not privy to the classified documents that the Clinton team had terrorism as a top priority. They did, after all, thwart the millenium plots.

Even according to Kevin himself in a previous post:

Clarke surely knows that it would have helped his credibility if he had treated the Clinton and Bush administrations more evenhandedly, but he obviously thought the differences between them ran too deep to do that. During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push.

The way he phrases that leads me to believe that he may not completely share Clarke’s view. Or perhaps he’s internalized the old political saw that says there’s not a dimes worth of difference between the parties or something. In any case, credibility is not determined by some phony “even handedness.” This man’s credibility rests on his history as a nonpartisan career civil servant and the facts and witnesses that back up his claims.

As kevin notes he does not say that Clinton was a one man terrorist wrecking crew. He and everybody else were slow off the mark as the terrorist threat emerged in the mid 90’s. But, it is indisputable that by January of 2001 the professional national security establishment KNEW that al Qaeda was a huge threat and within months they were warning of a major attack. Unlike Clinton two years before (and from whom they could have learned a thing or two) the Bush team chose to keep their fingers crossed rather than raise the issue to the top of their list of priorities.

Our bi-partisan tradition of foreign policy has meant that a new administration depends upon career civil servants like Clarke to keep national security running smoothly over changes of parties in the White House. They are non-partisan for that reason. He and others had made forward progress in getting the Clinton administration to make terrorism a priority and it was naturally expected that once it had hit the top of the threat food chain it would stay there until it was either defeated or proved to be mistaken. You just don’t drop national security threat assessments for partisan ideological reasons.

That is what happened. The Bush team ignored the warnings of the Clinton appointees and they also ignored the warnings of the permanent national security establishment, all of whom had experienced the rise of the terrorist threat during the preceding eight years and who were not kidding when they warned them about it.

Clarke admits that we will never know if we could have prevented 9/11, but it is clear that if the Clinton administration (and probably the Gore administration) had been in office during the summer of 2001, they would have treated the intelligence they received more seriously. It is shameful that the Bush administration failed to take the threat of terrorism at least as seriously as the previous administration did and it is even more shameful that they have resisted any attempts to change the way they do business, as amply illustrated by their misguided adventure in Iraq.

They are not responsible for 9/11, but they most certainly are responsible for the mistakes they made leading up to it. They should feel some shame for not having having taken the advice of those who warned them. That’s what that whole “grown-up” thing was supposed to be about.

Liberal Oasis has more on this topic

And for some serious “evenhanded” pooh-poohing about “futile recriminations” and 9/11’s inevitability, Gregg Easterbrook takes the cake:

It has taken two and a half years to get to the carnival of futile recriminations about September 11, 2001, but we’re now at that point, and it’s time for the futile recriminations to stop. No one, Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, knew September 11 was coming. Looking back, all that matters is what was said before September 11, not afterward, and, while many before that day offered generalized cautions about terrorism, no one made a firm warning about what actually happened. That’s because no one knew what was coming.

Easterbrooks’ straw man is very smug, but he’s wrong. Nobody says that there was perfect information that was ignored. But we know that there were dots that could have been connected as Colleen Rowley and other in the FBI prove. Clarke, the consummate bureaucrat, says that the way to get the behemoth federal government to move on an urgent issue is to shake the trees from the top down and flush the information to the top. The Bush team refused to do that. He believes that it may have been possible to put together some of the clues that we know existed and take some action. It is simply not true that nothing could have been done.

Perhaps this is one of those cases where believing that something could have been done and wasn’t is rejected because it’s too bad to be true.