Larry King Live: Richard Clarke - Darkforum.com - Dark Stories, Dark Art, Poetry, Photography, Debates and Discussions

SirVLCIV · **Larry King Live: Richard Clarke -** 03-25-04

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/24/lkl.00.html

Highlights, courtesy of me.

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RICHARD CLARKE, FMR. WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue.

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KING: Let's touch a lot of bases here. You spoke in August and praised the administration, you highlighted positive aspects that they had done, minimized negative aspects and then the book seems to counteract that. Why?

CLARKE: Well, Larry, what you're referring to is something the White House is trying out today as part of its continuing program to undermine my credibility. And, you know, for the Bush White House to be attempting to undermine my credibility is really sort of ironic and sort of the pot calling the kettle black. They're the ones who have the credibility problem, Larry. You know, they're trying to divert attention from the issues that I am raising and that other people are raising in the 9/11 Commission process.

The issue is -- could the Bush administration have done more prior to 9/11? The second issue is, what did it do after 9/11? Did it fight the war on terror well or did it not? Did it divert attention and actually hurt the war on terror by fighting an unnecessary costly diversionary war in Iraq? That's what we should be talking about and the White House, obviously, doesn't want to talk about that.

KING: But the question, Dick, was why did you praise them two years ago?

CLARKE: I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president -- here's what happened.

"TIME" magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on "TIME" and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive?

Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that. This is part of their whole attempt to get Larry King to ask Dick Clarke this kind of question. So we're not talking about the major issue.

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Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two -- if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two. Would that have stopped...

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CLARKE: Some people in the FBI knew. And if Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings, the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser, when she had information that there was a threat against the United States, that kind of information was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001, if she had been doing her job.

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CLARKE: I'd say, let's get back to the main issue. Before you went to the break, Larry, you had the president saying that George Tenet was briefing him regularly on the threat. He was. George Tenet told me that, and I saw the briefings. The president was being told on a regular basis that an al Qaeda threat was coming, an al Qaeda attack was coming.

Now, what does the president say in his own words to Bob Woodward in "Bush at War?" He says, Bush acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. "I was not on point," the president said. "I didn't feel a sense of urgency."

Well, how can you not feel a sense of urgency when George Tenet is telling you in daily briefings, day after day, that a major al Qaeda attack is coming? That's my point. That's one of my points. The other point is, which I'd like to get to, that by fighting the war in Iraq, the president has actually diminished our ability to fight the war on terrorism.

KING: What do you mean by that? Why does Iraq diminish the war on terrorism?

CLARKE: In three ways. Number one, it diverts us from reducing the vulnerabilities here at home, like protecting the rails from attacks like the one on Madrid. We're spending $180 billion in Iraq. We should be spending that money reducing our vulnerabilities to terrorism here at home, much more than we are. The railroads, the chemical plants, they are all still unprotected.

The second way it reduces the war on terrorism is by inflaming the Islamic world and helping, as Rumsfeld said in his internal memo, helping create more terrorists more rapidly than we can capture or kill them, because of the hatred in the Islamic world generated against the United States by our needless invasion of Iraq.

And the third way, of course, was it actually took troops and intelligence assets away from the hunt for bin Laden. We'll probably catch bin Laden here shortly, but it's two years too late. In those two years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, a multi-headed organization, so that by the time we catch him now, it won't matter very much, because all of these al Qaeda-like organizations have grown up around the world, like the group that attacked in Madrid.

The point is, the war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. And by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism. That's what I say in the book.

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KING: Did these problems start with Clinton?

CLARKE: Absolutely. And you know, people who haven't read the book seem to think that I only criticize the Bush administration. I criticize the Clinton administration, too. And I did so today in my testimony before the 9/11 commission. The news media did not cover that in the evening news, but I did criticize the Bush administration and the Clinton administration, I think, equally.

You know, the Clinton administration failed to bomb the camps that were in Afghanistan that we knew were there. They bombed them once, Clinton bombed them once, the public reaction was negative to that. Remember, wag the dog, everyone said Clinton is just bombing Afghanistan to divert attention from the Monica business. And so he didn't bomb them again.

And that was during a time when they were turning out thousands of terrorists, trained terrorists. It was an assembly line, those camp in Afghanistan were an assembly line, a conveyer belt that were sending terrorists out on a regular basis all over the world.

I thought they should have been blown up. I recommended it. And it didn't happen. I criticize the Clinton administration for that. I think there's a lot of blame to go around, and, as I said several times, I think I deserve some of that blame. I am willing to take that blame; I wish the president were willing to take some, too.

KING: President Clinton on this program said he was in Australia on 9/11, and he said as soon as he heard of the incident he said, bin Laden. Does that surprise you?

CLARKE: Well, no, Bill Clinton was obsessed with getting bin Laden. Bill Clinton ordered bin Laden assassinated. He ordered not only bin Laden assassinated but all of his lieutenants. The CIA failed him. The CIA couldn't do it, and now the CIA is trying to say, well, the orders were ambiguous. Let me tell you, Larry, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and myself both talked to George Tenet and talked to his chief lieutenants and said, are you very clear what this order is? This is an order to kill bin Laden. They said, yes, they were very clear.

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KING: Is somebody lying?

CLARKE: No, you know, people in this town are too smart to lie, especially under oath.

KING: So what do you call it?

CLARKE: I call it creative memory sometimes. I call it interpretation and emphasis sometimes. I think the American people need to know the truth about what happened, so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again. And I think heaven for the family members of the victims who caused this commission to come into existence over the objections of the White House and who have now been able to get it extended over the objections of the White House.

Well, there ya have it folks, in his own words.

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

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KING: Dick, we look forward to having you on a lot in the upcoming months. One other thing, you served four presidents.

In the issue of security, who was the strongest president you served?

CLARKE: Well, I think George Bush the first was a national security expert. He had been CIA director, had been U.N. director. He was able to build a multi-nation coalition to fight Iraq the first time, which is what we should have been doing this time. If thought we had to go after Iraq, we should have done what George Bush the first did and build a real and not this thing we have now. KING: So you give him of the four the highest marks?

CLARKE: Oh, yes, I think absolutely. George Bush the first was a real national security professional, but I must admit, he did not retaliate for the deaths of Americans on Pam Am 103, and that kind of lack of retaliation, again, with Ronald Reagan in Beirut when the terrorists killed the marines there, that lack of retaliation by Reagan and Bush contributed to the attitude that bin Laden and others had that they could attack the United States and get away with it.

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

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KING: You were a proponent of a strong reaction to all kind of occurrences, right?

CLARKE: Well, I think if you let people get away with things like that -- then you pay a price in the future.

KING: You would favor what Israel did with Hamas?

CLARKE: That's a very tough question. I think if you're an Israeli, perhaps, you do favor it. If you're a bit more detached as we can be in the United States, you realize it's just part of a continuing cycle and that Hamas will now retaliate and kill more Israelis, perhaps they would have done that anyway. The Arab/Israeli process is a difficult issue that we should spend more time on. I wish the administration were trying to get the Arab states to generate a Palestinian interlocutor, so that we could have negotiations. Obviously, we can't negotiate with Arafat.

Lawson · 03-25-04

The words of one who has been caught lying.

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

Quote:

KING: But the question, Dick, was why did you praise them two years ago?

CLARKE: I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president -- here's what happened.

"TIME" magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on "TIME" and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive?

Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that. This is part of their whole attempt to get Larry King to ask Dick Clarke this kind of question. So we're not talking about the major issue.

Lawson · 03-25-04

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

Wow. "There was no plan." That clarifies everything. Thanks JLB!

dgg9 · 03-25-04

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He was able to build a multi-nation coalition to fight Iraq the first time, which is what we should have been doing this time.

Really? And the Coalition of the Willing wasn't a multi-nation coalition?

What should I think of someone who still retails the "unilateral" lie?

Still, something useful did come from all Clarke's dishonesty: now, finally, it puts to rest the Clinton lie that he (Clinton) had a detailed anti-terrorism plan in place, gave it to the Bush team and it was then ignored. So, if nothing else, Clinton shills will have to drop that particular slander.

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

Thank you for your dishonesty once more.

dgg9 · 03-25-04

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Originally Posted by SirVLCIV

Thank you for your dishonesty once more.

?

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

"Still, something useful did come from all Clarke's dishonesty: now, finally, it puts to rest the Clinton lie that he (Clinton) had a detailed anti-terrorism plan in place, gave it to the Bush team and it was then ignored. So, if nothing else, Clinton shills will have to drop that particular slander."

This statement is based on a tiny sample of Clarke's testimony, and disgards several other statements he made rebutting it.

Lawson · 03-25-04

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirVLCIV

"Still, something useful did come from all Clarke's dishonesty: now, finally, it puts to rest the Clinton lie that he (Clinton) had a detailed anti-terrorism plan in place, gave it to the Bush team and it was then ignored. So, if nothing else, Clinton shills will have to drop that particular slander."

This statement is based on a tiny sample of Clarke's testimony, and disgards several other statements he made rebutting it.

So, which one of his staements is a lie?

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

None. One can take any statement out of context and make it mean something else entirely.

Lawson · 03-25-04

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Originally Posted by SirVLCIV

None. One can take any statement out of context and make it mean something else entirely.

But we have posted his statements in context, and it shows he was either lying then, or is lying now.

Which is it?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In August 2002, then-White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told reporters that the Bush administration -- from day one -- told him to "vigorously pursue" the Clinton administration policy that allowed the United States to kill Osama bin Laden if the opportunity arose.

In addition, he said that in the spring of 2001 Bush committed to a "five-fold" increase in CIA resources dedicated to going after the al Qaeda leader.

"What we ended up with was a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda," Clarke told reporters in August 2002. "So the president recognizes very early on that you don't want to roll back al Qaeda over this long period of time, you want to eliminate al Qaeda on a much more accelerated timetable."

That sounds different than what he is saying now, doesn't it?

SirVLCIV · 03-25-04

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In August 2002, then-White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told reporters that the Bush administration -- from day one -- told him to "vigorously pursue" the Clinton administration policy that allowed the United States to kill Osama bin Laden if the opportunity arose.

Thank you for admitting that bit.

And I believe Clarke clarified everything rather well in the Larry King interview.

Lawson · 03-25-04

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirVLCIV

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In August 2002, then-White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told reporters that the Bush administration -- from day one -- told him to "vigorously pursue" the Clinton administration policy that allowed the United States to kill Osama bin Laden if the opportunity arose.

Thank you for admitting that bit.

And I believe Clarke clarified everything rather well in the Larry King interview.

Then explain this statment:

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Do both of these statements agree with one another?

If they don't, do you believe he's being inconsistent?