Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq’s weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here,” one senior agency official said yesterday.
[…]
In a signal of administration concern over the controversy, two senior Pentagon officials yesterday held a news conference to challenge allegations that they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant intelligence for political reasons. “I know of no pressure,” said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for policy. “I know of nobody who pressured anybody.”
Feith said a special Pentagon office to analyze intelligence in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not necessarily focus on Iraq but came up with “some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
Officials in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill, however, have described the office as an alternative source of intelligence analysis that helped the administration make its case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat.
[…]
Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
“They were the browbeaters,” said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. “In interagency meetings,” he said, “Wolfowitz treated the analysts’ work with contempt.”
[…]
A senior defense official also defended Wolfowitz’s questioning: “Does he ask hard questions? Absolutely. I don’t think he was trying to get people to come up with answers that weren’t true. He’s looking for data and answers and he gets frustrated with a lack of answers and diligence and with things that can’t be defended.”
A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network.
On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. “I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda,” said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. Over the following year, “we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search.”
In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie’s book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said.
The DIA’s Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, “Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.” But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. “The message was, why can’t we prove this is right?” said the official.
I hope that members of the newly formed Iraq intelligence failure committee are informed of this Wolfowitz/Mylroie information. The 9/11 committee is charged with only dealing with events leading up to 9/11, so they won’t address this particular case of intellectual dysfunction. I would hope that the other would, however. This delusional thinking wasted huge amounts of time because one of the nation’s top foreign policy intellectuals turns out to be in thrall of a tin foil hat conspiracy theory. And, that thinking helped lead this country into an unnecessary war that has made this country more vulnerable to its enemies.
On TAPPED, Matt Yglesias notes Wolfowitz dancing on the head of a pin as he avoids answering questions about this very thing in the hearings yesterday.
Update: In an amazing moment of Hullabaloo synergy none other than Bob Kerrey seemed to be giving credence to Mylroie and Wolfowitz’s apparent beliefs that the ’93 WTC attacks were perpetrated by Iraq during Clarke’s testimony earlier. Clarke knocked it down very effectively, but I have to wonder just how many people in high places have drunk this noxious kool-aid, anyway?
I notice that Bob Kerrey is back on his hobby horse today insisting to Sandy Berger that Clinton was a sissy because he didn’t declare war on Afghanistan. It must be nice to live in bizarro-utopia where it was possible to persuade the American people and the entire world that the US should unilaterally invade countries based upon the bombing of embassies in africa or a rowboat attack on a warship. And he should have done these things during times of extreme domestic political crisis.
Perhaps Bob doesn’t realize that even the honorable and integrity-filled George W. Bush had had a little bit of difficulty persuading large chunks of the planet, including here at home, that it’s a good idea to unilaterally invade countries even after 9/11.
Let’s review what was really going on during the periods in question:
CNN: You believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in both attacks the 1993 and September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Why?
MYLROIE: You can demonstrate to the high legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, which is used for criminal conviction, that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, by showing that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bomb, was an Iraqi intelligence agent. I do that in “Study of Revenge.” That bomb, in 1993, aimed to topple the north tower onto the south tower. Eight years later, someone came back and finished the job. Since Iraq was behind the first attack, it is suggestive of the point that Iraq was behind the second attack.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is there any proof at all that Hussein is involved in the anthrax scares?
MYLROIE: There is no proof that Saddam is involved in the anthrax scares, but proof is different from evidence. Proof, according to the dictionary, is conclusive demonstration. Evidence is something that indicates, like your smile is evident of your affection for me. There is evidence that Iraq is behind the anthrax scares. First, it takes a highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the lethal form that was in the letter sent to Senator Daschle. Not many parties can do that. Second, there is an additive in that anthrax, bentonite, which is used to cause the anthrax to not stick together, and float in the air. Iraq is the only party known to have produced anthrax with bentonite.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Should the U.S.take action against Iraq?
MYLROIE: Yes. It is necessary for the United States to take action against Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War never ended. We continue it in the form of an economic siege whose origins lie in the Gulf War. And also, we bomb Iraq on a regular basis, and Saddam continues his part of the war in the form of terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used at some point, for example, in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us. He wants to do to the U.S. what we’ve done to Iraq. One way he can do that is terrorism, particularly biological terrorism.
CHAT PARTICPANT: What is the connection between bin Ladden and Saddam?
MYLROIE: Bin Laden and Hussein work together. The contact between the two was made in the 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan. Iraq intelligence also had a major presence in Sudan then. There were other widely reported contacts between bin Laden and Iraq intelligence, such as in December, 1998 when Farook Hajazi traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Hajazi is a senior intelligence officer. Bin Laden provides the ideology, he recruits the foot soldiers, and he provides a smokescreen. Iraqi intelligence provides the direction and training for the terrorism.
CNN: You hold the Clinton administration responsible for Hussein’s involvement in all of these attacks. Why?
MYLROIE: Iraq is a difficult problem, and has been since the Gulf War. Many mistakes have been made, because it’s inevitable that in human endeavor there are mistakes. Under the Clinton administration, specifically in February 1993 with the first attack on the Trade Center, Clinton dealt with the issue dishonestly. New York FBI believed in 1993 that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. That was accepted by the White House, that New York FBI might well be right. In June, 1993, Clinton attacked Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He said that that was punishment for Saddam’s attempt to kill George Bush when Bush visited Kuwait in April, but Clinton also believed that it would deter Saddam from all future attacks of terrorism, and that it would address the WTC bombing, too, so that Saddam would not think to carry out further attacks against the U.S.
And then the Clinton administration put out a false and fraudulent explanation for terrorism, saying that terrorism was no longer state-sponsored, but carried out by individuals. That false and fraudulent explanation was accepted and allowed Saddam to continue to attack the U.S. The reason Clinton dealt with terrorism in that fashion was because he did not understand the kind of threat that Saddam could pose, and by taking care of the terrorism in New York in that fashion, he avoided riling American public opinion, which might have demanded then, back in 1993, that he do a great deal more.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Do you believe this will eventually escalate into a much broader conflict as other states are identified as helping terrorist organizations?
MYLROIE: I believe that it is necessary to shift the war to Iraq and to do so as soon as possible, because Iraq is a primary threat, the primary terrorist threat to the United States, and as the anthrax shows, that threat can become very, very great. It’s necessary to get rid of Saddam.
CNN: The George W. Bush administration publicly focuses on Osama bin Laden and remains internally at odds over whether to implicate Hussein and Iraq in the current war. Is that a mistake?
MYLROIE: Yes, it is a mistake to avoid implicating Iraq, or to be unable to reach a decision about that. If we do not say that we suspect Iraq in the anthrax attacks, then Saddam will have no reason not to escalate to the next step. The next step could be that anthrax used in another fashion which is more deadly, or it could be anthrax that is resistant to antibiotics. We won’t be able to treat it, as we can now.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Have you spoken with officials about this information?
MYLROIE: Yes I have spoken with officials, in particular in the Pentagon. The Pentagon shares this view.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: You mentioned the bentonite in the anthrax, and yet we hear that the CIA and FBI are looking at home sources of that anthrax? Why are they not also viewing that as from Iraq rather than a U.S. source?
MYLROIE: That is a good question. Bob Bartley in the Wall Street Journal takes on that question. While one might say it is not impossible that an individual who is very knowledgeable, with access to a good lab, could have produced that in the U.S., it is also extremely unlikely. Iraq is a much more likely candidate. Bartley compares it to the situation of the elephant in the room that some people just don’t want to see, including, apparently, the FBI and the CIA. But the American people can see the elephant in the room, and Iraq is a much more likely suspect than an individual in the U.S.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is it possible that perhaps Iraq is waiting for us to accuse them and then take anthrax to the next level?
MYLROIE: We are in a very, very difficult situation. If we say clearly that it is Iraq, and we’re going to get Saddam, then it is likely that he will do his best to bring his enemies down with him. It is true that we face the danger then of more deadly attacks, including anthrax attacks. If we do not say it is Saddam, we will also face the danger of more deadly attacks. This is a terrible situation. Yet I prefer to deal with the losses that will come by taking on Saddam than to be subject to the losses that will occur if we remain sitting ducks. It would seem that some ambiguity in the beginning is the best thing. If we shift the focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, we are indeed at war, and during war, extreme measures may have to be taken. For example, we might think to get children and all non-essential personnel out of U.S. cities while this war goes on, which we will carry out very quickly, or to have people remaining in U.S. cities where they are a target, wearing masks pretty much all the time, in order to deal with this problem which we should address quickly rather than slowly.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is the reason behind the government not admitting to Iraq’s involvement over the oil situation?
MYLROIE: I don’t think that the oil situation is a factor. I think that at least two things are at work. First, there is a great confusion because for eight years Clinton treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue, with the emphasis on arresting individuals and bringing them to justice, trying and convicting them. That had the effect of obscuring the role of states in terrorism, particularly Iraq. But in addition, those who went along with his view of terrorism are now personally invested in it, and they are reluctant to give up that view. That would include George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who still heads the CIA, and I believe, the intelligence coming from the CIA is skewed. It may also be that there is an influence of former President Bush and Bush’s top advisors from the 1991 Gulf War on President Bush. Some of those people, including former President Bush, Brent Scocroft, his national security advisor, Colin Powell, have not acknowledged that it was an error to end the war in 1991 with Saddam in power, and that may color their judgment now.
This is what Clarke is talking about when he relates Wolfowitz’s seemingly bizarre contention that the terrorism priority was “Iraqi terrorism against the United States.” And it explains why these fruitcakes were able to convince lil’ Junior that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. We should all feel much safer knowing that this total nutcase is one of the Right’s leading intellectuals, influencing the highest reaches of the Bush administration.
Say, has anybody talked to Laurie lately about Saddam’s anthrax stocks that were all set to be released in balsa wood drone planes over Baltimore and Cleveland? What ever happened with that?
Update:Josh says that the usual suspects are parroting the same lies even today…
I am reminded why I came to loathe Bob Kerrey. He’s one of those self-serving “bi-partisan” iconoclasts who refuses to deal in the real world. His questioning of Cohen is typical.
The idea that Clinton, in the fall of 2000, could have invaded Afghanistan without the support of congress, any of our allies or the American people is so ludicrous I can’t believe he’s even making the argument. Apparently, Bob thinks that it is perfectly permissable, indeed it is required, that a president make military decisions in a complete political vacuum.
Clearly, the Clinton administration could only prepare a response to the Cole bombing, (which nobody in the entire world saw as such an imminent threat that it required all out war) that they had every reason to believe would likely be carried out by the next administration, be it Gore or Bush. That’s the way our bi-partisan foreign policy used to work and it is the way it should work. If Bob Kerrey or anybody else thinks that a lame duck president should go it alone and invade a country without any political support at home or abroad just one month before the presidential elections he has a hole in his head.
As Cohen pointed out, the Republican congress was a bunch of rabid dogs who had no qualms about accusing Clinton of everything from rape to treason. Invading Afghanistan against the wishes of the military and the rest of the world, ignoring all of the political considerations would have been insane. Kerrey is, as he’s always been at least half the time, a useless grandstanding tool for the GOP on this stuff. You can certainly criticize Clinton for a lot of things in this matter, but this isn’t one of them.
I don’t even think Bush could could have invaded Afghanistan before 9/11. Up to now, I was just wishing he would have, you know, acted like he gave a shit and did what he could to thwart what everybody seemed to know was a big plot, likely on American soil. It had worked with the millenium bombing and there is ample evidence that we might have “connected the dots” if a little more attention had been paid. I didn’t realize that we are now saying that Clinton or Bush should have willy nilly invaded Afghanistan without any support of anybody, including the military.
Update: Yglesias has more on Kerrey’s backing of Chalabi and the INC (along with — surprise — our good friend Joe Loserman.)
He also appeared on Matthews making the same self-serving tough guy points. However, Trent Lott came on soon after and had the predictable effect of making Kerrey look moderate, sane and reasonable by comparison. Context is everything, I guess.
For those who are curious about the juicy details of Clarke’s book, Tim at the road to surfdom is excerpting and commenting on it. Here’s just one little tasty bit:
On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. “How’s it going over here?” I asked.
“It’s fine, Major Fenzel whispered, “but I can’t hear the crisis conference because Mrs Cheney keeps turning down the volume so she can hear CNN…and the Vice President keeps hanging up the line to you.” Mrs Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker.
Try to imagine if Hillary….
These excerpts are in addition to his interesting posts from yesterday on The Age Of Sacred Terror, one of the authors of which, Daniel Benjamin, appeared on CNN yesterday backing Clarke up all the way.
BLITZER: Clarke is the latest former Bush administration official to question the handling of the war on terror. The former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said the Bush White House was looking to out of Saddam Hussein from the very start of the administration.
And the former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has questioned the intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war against Saddam Hussein.
So is Richard Clarke a courageous whistle-blower or an angry ex- employee with an axe to grind? Joining us is another former national security council staffer, Dan Benjamin, was director of counterterrorism in the Clinton administration. He’s the co-author of the book “The Age of Sacred Terror.” You worked for Richard Clarke the Clinton White House.
DAN BENJAMIN, DIRECTOR, COUNTERTERRORISM IN CLINTON ADMINISTRATION: That’s correct. For the last two years of the ’90s.
BLITZER: So what do you make of his allegations?
BENJAMIN: His allegations track with what the discontent he was expressing for quite awhile after the new team came into office in January of 2001.
And I have to say that his critique of the emphases in the war on terror also tracks with what a lot of us in the counterterrorism community have been saying. It very much stands up to what we have said in our book, “The Age of Sacred Terror.”
BLITZER: But the White House is coming back and saying, you know what? You had eight years in the Clinton administration to get rid of Osama bin Laden, to destroy the al Qaeda. You had repeated terror threats, the first World Trade Center, the Cole, the twin embassy bombings. You didn’t do it over eight years.
BENJAMIN: Well there’s no question it was a tragedy that we couldn’t get him in those first eight years. But what is also the case is that we were working flat-out to get him. We found out how hard it is to get him. We’ve been working flat-out since 9/11 and have still not been able to find and to capture, kill bin Laden.
I think Dick’s argument here is that we could have done better and might have had more successes and possibly even more prevention had we been working flat-out after the new team came in in January 2001.
BLITZER: Which raises this question, he was a career federal civil servant, highly respected going back to earlier Republican administrations as well. Were you surprised when he was held over into the Bush administration?
BENJAMIN: Not very. Dick is first of all deeply patriotic, he is eager to work for the government. I think that his whole life was invested in this kind of work. And I think he found it deeply rewarding to be so close to these issues, to really work on national security.
This has been his entire life. So I wasn’t very surprised. And I must say he’s also been very, very highly valued in Washington. He’s known as an insider’s insider who knows where all the levers and pullies are in government.
BLITZER: At the same time he was demoted at the beginning. During the Clinton administration, he had a cabinet-level jobs as counterterrorism czar. And he was demoted to a certain degree in the Bush administration.
BENJAMIN: During the Clinton administration, at end, he had a place at table as someone who was going to speak specifically for counterterrorism issues. And he was made national coordinator for counterterrorism.
He was stripped of that rank when the new team came in because frankly they didn’t think that terrorism was such a big issue that any one person should be at the table to speak for it.
And historically, that has meant that terrorism has not been taken as seriously in the discussions of national security policy.
BLITZER: The other charge that they’re making against Richard Clarke is that his — one of his best friends, Rand Beers, worked for you on the Clinton administration on the National Security Council. He teach, of course, with him at Harvard, at the Kennedy School. And that Rand Beers is now one of the top national security advisers to John Kerry.
In other words, politics behind these allegations.
BENJAMIN: I don’t think it’s politics because I think Dick is doing so well in the private sector with his consulting and with his speaking that I don’t think he’s looking for a way to get back in.
And what’s more is everyone in Washington, everyone in the political world knows exactly what Dick’s strengths are and his failings.
I don’t think he needs to audition for a job. This is because he felt strongly about the issues.
BLITZER: Are you surprised the way the White House is now going after him?
BENJAMIN: I’m not surprised. These are very, very serious accusations. And in fact, they go to the president’s perceived strength in the election. Of course, they’re going to fight back hard.
BLITZER: One final question. One of the charges the vice president made and others in the White House is once he was demoted at the start of the administration, he didn’t attend a lot of the high- level meetings where the decision were made.
So as a result, he didn’t know what the president and vice president were really doing to fight Osama bin Laden.
BENJAMIN: Well that’s impossible. Dick was the pointman in charge of coordinating counterterrorism policy. If he didn’t know what the policy was, and he didn’t know what steps were being taken, then no one did. And there was no policy.
So it’s simply inconceivable. If there were principals’ levels meetings on terrorism, he had to be there.
One of Tim’s commenters mentions that my good friend Jim Wilkinson was all over FOXNews calling it “a book of lies.” He also appears on this Blitzer transcript rebutting Benjamin, in full character assassination mode, almost frothing at the mouth:
JAMES WILKINSON, DEP. NATL. SECURITY ADVISER: You know when I go try to buy this book tonight I’m going to look probably in the fantasy fiction section of my local bookstore. But there are so many inaccuracies in this book. For example, he says that he could never get a meeting. He asked for one meeting with the president of the United States. He asked for that during this time of research and he to briefed on cybersecurity. I brought an email I want to read to you. He claims he could never get a meeting yet, Wolf, I work for Condi Rice and we meet with her every single morning in the situation room. Anyone is welcome to come to those meetings and Dick Clarke refused to come to those meetings. He thought they were beneath him. Let me read you a note that was sent to him.
“Condi noted your absence this morning and asked me to remind you of the importance she attaches to the meeting and her expectation that all senior directors will be there.”
Why didn’t Dick Clarke go to these meetings? Let me remind you, it was Dick Clarke that was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the USS Cole happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the embassies in Africa happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the threat was building towards 9/11 and it was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country in June when the FBI said 16 of 19 hijackers were already here, Wolf. And on the day of 9/11, he was giving a speech on cybersecurity. This book is full of so many inaccuracies.
BLITZER: What about…
WILKINSON: Wolf, let me finish. The terrorists weren’t overseas, the terrorists were here in America. By June, the FBI says 16 of 19 terrorists in the 9/11 attacks were already here. I just don’t see what this focus on process and titles and meetings. 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.
BLITZER: What about the other charge that he makes is that the president and the vice president, the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of defense, they were all literally obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq after 9/11, even though the CIA and the FBI repeatedly told them Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or 9/11.
WILKINSON: Let me ask the question this way, let me go even further than you. Wouldn’t your viewers have found it strange if the president didn’t ask about Iraq? Wouldn’t they have found it strange if they didn’t order his counterterrorism team and his FBI director and his intelligence director to look in every corner of the globe for who might be involved? I just don’t see the point with all this Iraq business.
I was working at central command for the last year as you know from our time together. In the northern and southern no-fly zone, Iraq was shooting at our pilots hundreds of times a day. Iraq had dug in deep. Iraq was threatening its neighbors. I just don’t see the point of this Iraq connection. I think the American people would be comforted to know that this president wanted to know everything possible. I want to bring up another point, Wolf.
I brought with me a copy of the January issue of “Publisher’s Weekly.” It shows that this was supposed to come out April 27 of this year. Do you think it’s a coincidence, and you’ve been in this town a long, could it be a coincidence that this book is released the very week he’s giving his public testimony before the 9/11 commission. A commission we’ve spent hours with. We’ve given documents, 800 tapes, cooperating with fully and private, working on these sorts of issues. Is that a coincidence? I think the publisher and Dick Clarke have some answering to do. Why is he focused on book tours and these sorts of things. He should have been focused on terrorism like this president is.
Can you believe this shit? Clarke shouldn’t be “focused on book tours” because he should have been focused on terrorism like the president is now. OK. And, you’ve got to love, “I just don’t see the point of this Iraq connection.”
Wilkinson needs to lay off the coffee and krispy kreme’s. He’s bordering on incoherence.
Tim also mentions Kevin Drum’s opinion that the Bush administration is being foolish not to admit to what he thinks is a reasonable explanation as to why they didn’t care much about terrorism:
The answer seems pretty simple to me: most people before 9/11 thought of terrorism as simply one among many foreign policy problems. There wasn’t really any compelling reason to develop a crash program to deal with it.
I think that is missing the whole point of Clarke’s story, frankly. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the administration might not have known the scope of the terrorist threat before taking office. But, the minute they entered the White House, the entire national security establishment was warning them about it and they blew them off. That’s the entire thrust of what Clarke, Benjamin, Kerrick and others have all said which is that the Bush administration was distinctly uninterested in terrorism even though throughout the spring and summer of 2001 people were screaming that there was a huge amount of chatter and something really big was about to happen. They were focused on Iraq and missile defense and the rest of their fossilized agenda despite what all of the experts were telling them.
And besides, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise. I knew that al Qaeda was the likely culprit the minute I saw the WTC with a big hole in it and I’m no terrorism expert. The African embassy bombings were in 1998. The USS Cole was bombed in October of 2000 (which, considering the total lack of bipartisan patriotism on the part of Republicans, explains why Clinton didn’t move on al Qaeda then. The GOP thugs would have tried to impeach him again for wagging the dog on behalf of Gore in the presidential campaign. I’m sure that was another reason why they counterterrorism guys were were just a little bit surprised when the Bush people told them to take a hike.)
The issue of terrorism may not have been on a hot burner in most Americans’ minds, but after the millenium plot was foiled I think everybody certainly assumed that the government was very much aware of and working on the threat. The Clinton team was. The Bushies weren’t — and we paid, bigtime. That’s why Clarke came forward.
Update: Read this great post by Avedon on the subject. Fiesty and wise.
In an interview on PBS television Thursday, Wolfowitz said Zapatero’s withdrawal plan didn’t seem very Spanish.
“The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven’t run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don’t run in the face of these people.”
I’m beginning to think that the lead in the water in DC is a much bigger problem that we realize.
“To that end, according to a well-placed source close to Dean, Kerry and Dean have discussed Dean’s projected role in challenging Ralph Nader, whose fourth run for president has Democrats, Independents and even some Greens apoplectic. Dean has been careful to praise Nader’s accomplishments before urging people not to be seduced by a quixotic campaign. This is a tactical move to avoid driving people into Nader’s arms by being too combative. But should Nader manage to get on the ballot in some key states and threaten to throw them to Bush, expect the gloves to come off.”
One after another dismisses the national ID card debate as not at issue here. One after another suggests—and to a rather frightening degree, at times—that this case has nothing to do with innocent people, or ordinary people. This case has to do with “suspicious” people, and—as you were no doubt aware—suspicious people are not like you or me.
[…]
We all seem to want to live in the world inhabited by most of the justices: where our names are private, and no one needs to incriminate themselves—unless some policeman decides they are suspicious. Then, there is a duty, a responsibility, a constitution-negating requirement that you come forward—to use Scalia’s formulation—and cooperate. This idea that the “suspicious people” (read: dark-skinned, poor, urban etc.) have some heightened duty to cooperate with the police is utterly backward, in light of the police’s historical treatment of them. It’s a shame Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t speak today. One can imagine that he has at least some idea of what it means to hold “suspicious” people to a different constitutional standard.
Read the whole thing. Somehow I’m getting the idea that the court is in the process of abandoning legal principle generally in favor of some sort of “common sense” view of the law that says the government can do what it wants because an innocent person has nothing to worry about.
…you really ought to read Peter Bergen’s article on Laurie Mylroie. Especially in light of Wolfowitz’s pre-9/11 remark (reported in Clarke’s book) that rather than go after al-Qaeda we should go after Saddam Hussein because he sponsored terrorism against the United States it appears more and more to be the case here that a big part of the problem is simply that Wolfowitz is a believer in her conspiracy theory. I’ve heard in a second-hand kind of way that this is the case, and Clarke’s stuff seems to lend that account even more plausibility than what Bergen gives us.
Actually, there’s quite a bit more evidence. In a post from last August, in which I wrote about this Wolfowitz/Mylroie connection I linked to Josh Marshall’s reporting on the backround controversy surrounding Sam Tannenhaus’ article on Wolfowitz in the August 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Josh said:
As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is “confident” that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had “entertained” the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz’s ideas about Oklahoma City to a “longtime friend” of the Deputy Secretary.)
The exact quotes remain on backround and have never been revealed. But, in an earlier story, Time magazine reported:
One reason so many hawks seemed ready to make the case for retaliating against Saddam as well as bin Laden may have been the influence of Laurie Mylroie, a conservative scholar who had convinced herself and a number of influential conservatives, although not the U.S. intelligence community, that Iraq had been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was very likely behind 9/11, too. But as eccentric as her argument was to the U.S. intelligence community, it was hailed by Wolfowitz, who wrote in a blurb to her book that it “argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence.” And invade-Iraq cheerleader Richard Perle, formerly head of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, wrote in his own blurb: “Laurie Myroie has amassed convincing evidence of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. If she is right, and there are simple ways to test her hypothesis, we would be justified in concluding that Saddam was probably involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks as well.”
Clarke said that after 9/11 Wolfowitz wondered why the government was spending so much time on one apparently irrelevant man. Two days after the attacks, Wolfowitz made his famous Al Haig style comment in which he said (and which was slapped down immediately by Colin Powell):
I think one has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that’s why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.
It is indisputable that Wolfowitz swallowed whole the ridiculous theory that terrorists are unable to function without state sponsorship, as his comments above illustrate. This theory was set forth again last July by Mylroie testimony before congress in which she said:
Prior to the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, it was assumed that major terrorist attacks against the U.S. were state-sponsored. But that bombing is said to mark the start of a new kind of terrorism that does not involve states.
That notion is dubious. Rather, the claim that a new, stateless terrorism emerged with the 1993 Trade Center bombing was a convenient explanation in that it required no military response. Once promulgated, it was hastily accepted–even before much progress had been made in the investigation of that attack itself.
There isn’t time to properly address that issue in this testimony. Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against America contains the fullest account of this author’s argument that there is no new source of major terrorist attacks on the U.S. They were state-sponsored–and remain so. That that is not understood is the result of a major intelligence and policy failure that occurred in the 1990s.
In the time allotted here, I want to address three major terrorist plots that have been attributed to so-called “loose networks,” including al Qaeda, and illustrate that there is significant evidence to suggest that Iraq was involved: the 1993 Trade Center bombing; the 1995 plot in the Philippines to bomb a dozen US airplanes; and the 9/11 attacks.
According to Tannenhaus, as of August 2003 Wolfowitz still agreed with her about the WTC bombings. Perhaps by then he had accepted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but his statements right after the attacks certainly comport with what Richard Clarke reports was his reaction to the information that Al Qaeda was to blame.