With all of the attempts to discredit Richard Clarke that have sprung up in recent days, some of which I find credible and reasonable, some much less so, I wonder why no one is focussing on the fact that Clarke was caught in and out and out lie on the very 60 Minutes program that launched his new political celebrity. From the transcript:
STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.
CLARKE: Yes. The president — we were in the situation room complex — the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said ‘Iraq did this.’
STAHL: Didn’t you tell him that you’d looked and there’d been no connection?
CLARKE: I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’ He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.
STAHL: In other words, you did go back and look.
CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.
STAHL: You did. And was it a serious look? Did you really … ?
CLARKE: It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer.’
STAHL: Come on!
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Wrong answer?
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Did the President see it?
CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the President saw it because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Leslie, I don’t think the people around the President show him memos like that. I don’t think he sees memos that he wouldn’t like the answer [to].
Three times Clarke asserts, on national television, that he submitted a report that was rejected for political reasons. His words are clear- “Wrong Answer. Do it again.”
Why then, when Lesley Stahl and CBS reproduce the document, a document that absolutely rejects Clarke’s assertion, do they not examine this lack of credibility, particularly when they have done their own investigation into the memo in question. Let’s check the transcript again:
STAHL: Now can I interrupt you for one second. We have done our own work on that ourselves and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarke that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.
HADLEY: Look, the — I — I stand on what I said. But the point I think we’re missing in this is of course the President wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.
STAHL (exp): {So he’s not denying the President asked for another review, nor is he denying that Clarke wrote a memo stating once again that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. In fact the White House showed us the memo dated September 18th. As Clarke said, it was bounced back. The notation reads, ‘Please update and resubmit,’ and it was written by Steven Hadley.}
HADLEY: I asked him to go back — not ‘wrong answer’ — I asked him to go back and check it again a week or two later to make sure there was no new emerging evidence that Iraq was involved.
A blatant lie from Clarke, and when you examine the timeframe, it is completely reasonable for both President Bush and Deputy Director Stephen Hadley to want to examine any possible Iraq connection. Why?
Such short memories we have. Anyone remember who was responsible for aiding Al Qaeda in the first WTC attack?
Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq.
Ooops. Tricky things, those facts. Two months later, 17 Iraqis were arrested for another act of attempted terrorism when they tried to assasinate the then President Bush.
A failure to attempt to identify any role played by Iraq in the 9/11 attacks by Bush and his administration would have been foolish and irresponsible. Once again, the fierce partisans, ideological blinders on and focused directly ahead at the 2004 elections, are attacking the administration for doing exactly the right thing- investigating all options.
Before you get confused and start to think that perhaps they were trying to rush to war with Iraq post 9/11, as the hucksters would like for you to believe, remember the timeframe. When this memo was written, 18 September 2001, the one in which Clarke has been caught in an out and out lie, it was already pretty well decided that Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were the target. We know that the choice of action was already decided from the numerous write-ups, most easily accessible of which is this excerpt from the Sept. 18th 2001 portion of the lengthy Washington Post Series titled 10 Days in September:
Tuesday, September 18
President Bush and Vice President Cheney marked the seventh day since the terrorist attacks with a moment of silence on the White House lawn, then met with the National Security Council. After the president began the meeting, CIA Director George J. Tenet told the group that the agency was sending an eight-man team to Afghanistan to work with the Northern Alliance. “We are launching our plan,” he said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reported that military planning was proceeding, now that Bush had signed off on an option that included cruise missiles, manned bombers and U.S. forces on the ground.
Keeping options open is important but not the primary focus, Bush told Rumsfeld. “The top priority is shaking [Osama] bin Laden’s tree.”
With preparations underway to go to war, Bush had begun to think of how he would explain — both to the country and the world — what he planned to do. He wanted to announce his plans before a joint session of Congress. But before he set a date for his appearance, he wanted to feel comfortable with the tone and the language of what he was going to say — no presidential speech in recent history would be more important to national morale or more scrutinized than this one.
Despite Clarke’s vile assertion that the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks was nothing more than the Bush Administration creating reasons to invade Iraq, history disproves this assertion and shows Clarke and those who peddle this crap for what they are. If you doubt me, go read the entire WaPo ten part series. Refresh your memory. Put yourself back in that time and place, and you won’t know whether to laugh or scream at Clarke’s ludicrious statement that the administration’s response to 9/11 was “akin to, what if Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor instead of going to war with Japan said, “Let’s invade Mexico.” It’s very analagous.”
It is not analogous at all. It is demonstrably and verifiably fales, an out and out lie, and shameless political posturing on the part of anyone who attempts to make such a claim. The order to check up on any Iraq connections was nothing more than, as Hadley noted, a routine follow-up to make sure that in the chaos that ensued in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy of 9/11, all the i’s were dotted and all the t’s crossed.
They didn’t say “Wrong Answer,” as if they didn’t like what they heard. They asked him to update the memo and resubmit it. Responsible government , or, in other words, your job, Mr. Clarke.
In closing, CBS has a videotape of a man lying three times, the memo to prove he was lying (I wish I had a screenshot- if you do, please email it to me), his boss explaining how it was a lie, and the mainstream media misses it all in their rush to attack the Bush administration through their new proxy weapon.
That liberal media, Mr. Alterman.
*** Update ***
Randy Barnett addresses this myth about pursuing Iraq and fills in more blanks, but fails to note the blatant lie by Clarke:
Myth: After the 9/11 attacks, the President ignored the evidence and tried to pin responsibility for 9/11 on Iraq.
The Facts: The President sought to determine who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks. Given Iraq’s past support of terror, including an attempt by Iraqi intelligence to kill a former President, it would have been irresponsible not to ask if Iraq had any involvement in the attack.
When the President and his senior advisers met at Camp David on September 15-16, 2001, to plan a response to September 11, the DCI told the President that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attack. The President then advised his NSC Principals on September 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda, and that the initial US response to 9/11 would be to target al-Qa’ida and Taliban in Afghanistan.
Dick Clarke did prepare a memo for the President regarding links between Iraq and 9/11. He sent this memo to Dr. Rice on September 18, after the President, based on the advice of his DCI that that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attack, had decided that Iraq would not be a target in our military response for 9/11. Because the President had already made this decision, Steve Hadley returned the memo to Dick Clarke on September 25 asking Clarke to “please update and resubmit,” to add any new information that might have appeared. Clarke indicated there was none. So when Clarke sent the memo forward again on September 25, Dr. Rice returned it, not because she did not want the President to read the answer set out in the memo, but because the President had already been provided the answer and had already acted based on it.
*** Update ***
One quick note. This was not a mischaracterization of what happened by Clarke, this was a lie. I find it truly amusing that the same people who claim this is just a ‘paraphrasing’ or ‘characterization’ of events are generally the same people who took this statement:
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Publicly and magically turned it into this statement:
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Niger.”
and then shrieked for 8 months that it was a LIE, when the original statement was and still is 100% completely accurate and the second statement was never uttered.
And this wasn’t a geography problem, either…
Shark
No no no no no no no!
Only Bush and those evil Republicans lie.
Remember that. In the eyes of the media, Republicans are guilty until proven innocent.
And liars like Clarke get free passes because they’re useful to the cause…
DANEgerus
Actually it’s “Dick” as in flaccid… Dick.
And as CBS is part of the corporate umbrella publishing “Dicks” dribble… it’s not bias… it’s collaboration and the show was an infomercial.
HH
He said he had to treat Condi Rice as though she were a child who didn’t have much, or any, knowledge of bin Laden and al Qaeda. An Oct. 4, 2000 interview of Rice on the David Newman show on WJR-AM in Detroit says otherwise. Clarke needs to use his testimony tomorrow to apologize for his character assassination and distortions of history for a quick buck for himself and Viacom.
Avedon
Funny, I instantly heard that as a paraphrase, it didn’t even occur to me that he literally meant they had said, “Wrong answer.”
But “wrong answer” is certainly what is implied.
A “lie” would be – oh, say, claiming that the administration never said there were WMD in Iraq, or never suggested a connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
JorgXMcKie
I hate to tell you this, Shark, but Republicans are guilty even when proven innocent.
Me
Avedon,
And how when we attacked Afghanistan one month later does this prove what Clark says? It refutes it convincingly. The administration agreed that Al Qaeda, hidden behind the Taliban in Afghanistan, was behind the attack, and acted accordingly.
HH
Of course if only it were as simple as corporate synergy but we all remember the infomercial for a certain Viacom book written by a certain junior senator which aired on CBS competitor ABC.
HH
Calling Clarke’s interpretation (there goes that word again about his book) a “paraphrase” is like saying I received an invitation to go to lunch with a woman on business and told a friend that she wanted to have sex with me.
John Dunshee
I see. So anything anybody says, no matter what is actually said, the real meaning can only be what is “implied.” How convenient.
So when Clinton (and Clarke) refused to take bin Laden seriously, this “implied” great concern, and when Bush attacked Afghanistan, that “implied” that he had prepared to attack Iraq.
This is the same crap. You can change the meaning of just about any statement by saying that it was “code” or it “implied” something or another.
Just like when Americans say that the Iraq War was not worth it, they are implying that the lives of foreigners are essentially worthless. That the people who were suffering in torture chambers and rape rooms were not our problem. It “implies” an isolationist attitude that regards foreigners like the Iraqis or the Cambodians as little better than animals, not worth our while.
motleycrewcut
I tend to agree that Clarke’s comments were over the top, and truth be told this could actually end up hurting Kerry, not Bush. However, I do think there is legit criticism of Bush and his response to the attack on 9/11, mainly that he did not finish the job in Afghanistan before going after Saddam.
Oh, I just heard Sean Hannity play a tape of Condi Rice talking about AlQaeda in the fall of 2003. I guess Clarke’s credibility takes another dive. The more Clarke plays the lap dog, the more he hurts any legit cause he champions.
Bart Hall
“akin to, what if Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor instead of going to war with Japan said, “Let’s invade Mexico.”
Even this doesn’t cut it. Most people have forgot (if they ever knew) that the first nation the US invaded after Pearl Harbor was MOROCCO.
Oh, yes, and BTW we had to fight the French navy in order to break down the door.
We went into Morocco for the same reason we went into Iraq — because it was an essential piece of real estate to control for what we wanted to do later.
Morocco–>Tunisia–> Sicily–>Italy … which tied up a bunch of German troops and permitted Normandy.
History will ultimately record the sequence in this war, but /we/ have to wait while it unfolds.
Robin Roberts
Exactly, Bart, Clarke can’t even get his historical analogies straight.
burnplant
Ha, the “unemployed gym teacher” scoops you guys again.
Now the lies you believe are stumbling over other lies…
From Bob Woodward’s White House sanctioned “Bush at War” book:
Until September 11, however, Bush had not put that thinking [that Clinton’s response to al Qaeda emboldened bin Laden] into practice, nor had he pressed the issue of bin Laden. Though Rice and others were developing a plan to eliminate al Qaeda, no formal recommendations had ever been presented to the president.
“I know there was a plan in the works. . . . I don’t know how mature the plan was,” Bush recalled. . . .He acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point [before that date], but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem.”
SamAm
Clarke should have been smart enough to know that you have to cross reference every single syllable when going up againt the Wurlitzer.
I doubt that the only feedback Clarke got on the report was those few words.
He should have mentioned them, but I’d guess that others (or Hadley in person) talked to him about going back. So the forcefulness of “wrong answer” might lie in a different conversation. Or perhaps it’s not.
Clarke should have said so, but even if it’s not the case, he’s guilty of only exaggeration, which I guess this week is for the right some cardinal sin for a WH employee to commit. Bring me the man indeed…
Bottom line: It’s pretty clear looking at the policy interests of key WH players, interest in Iraq was not as glancing as “please update and resubmit.”
JB
Bottom line: It’s pretty clear looking at the policy interests of key WH players, interest in Iraq was not as glancing as “please update and resubmit.””
Bottom line: it’s pretty clear you have no relevant point with regard to the specific issue here.
There’s a pretty clear difference between insinuating someone wants you to conjure up evidence vs. update you on it.
Bottom line: we attacked Afghanistan and not Iraq the month after 9-11.
Bottom line: “interest in Iraq” had not been “glancing” by the previous WH either.
Bottom line: this is self-serving BS by Clarke.
sofla
It isn’t clear that Clarke was intending to convey a verbatim account of the memo’s returned comments.
In fact, it appears he was instead characterizing what it said. Did it say do it over? No, and yes. Not literally, but constructively, of course it did.
Was he lying that he was ordered to do it again? That’s a stretch, since he was clearly required to perform the exact process he’s just done with the addition of updated alleged information from Chalabi’s bogus, uncorroborated, unvetted, yet stovepiped sources.
In the same way, Clarke summarizes the meaning of the request to go over land already plowed five times as ‘wrong answer.’
Note, I use quotations, as I am quoting the article. But did the transcription accurately convey what Clarke was doing? Did he intend to literally quote the words, or is that the editor’s invention?
His ‘do it over’ line makes it clear he is discussing the meaning of what was said, not quoting it exactly.
I would reconsider if these lines are in his books in quotation marks, but for now, it doesn’t appear he lied, but rather translated the message it conveyed.
anon
Wow, that was a long post turning nothing more than a paraphrase and translation into a mountain.
I am going to a real hot-air balloon festival this weekend, but somehow I feel it will now be anti-climactic.
P.S. Congrats on your citing by instahack.
Michael
“In fact, it appears he was instead characterizing what it said.”
Oh come on, don’t you realise how ridiculous that sounds?
“sent back saying wrong answer” is a characterization??
even if anyone really believed that, its a completely FALSE (and deliberately false) characterization!
Jeff B.
How are we supposed to take the comments seriously of a man who uses the phrase “Instahack?” By using that locution you reveal yourself as someone who had already made their mind up about the issue before even reading Cole’s article, which IS pretty damning in many ways. And your further dismissal – without engaging in the points – makes it clear that you merely posted here as a psychological cleansing ritual, a way of being able to say “ah, I looked at that – it’s all BS!” without actually, you know, having to LOOK at the evidence.
Reponses like that create new Republican votes every day. But I hope it made you feel personally secure.
Bryan
Jeff B
pull the hook out of your mouth…you’ll see it’s not very sharp…a bit like you appear to be. Oh I was paraphrasing…. You can imply that I meant “You appear to be stupid.”
Wince and Nod
Without mind reading or a time machine, there is insufficient of evidence that Clarke lied. On the one hand Clarke claimed he was told “Wrong answer. Do it again.” On the other hand, Hadely says that he just wanted the report updated with new information and resubmitted, which is what was written on the document.
To me it looks like Clarke has the habit of trying to read between the lines to figure out what people want, and he thinks he is good at figuring out their motivations, which he then internalizes as the way things really happened. I’ve seen this pattern about 15 million times in blog comments alone. Ironically, I’m doing to Clarke what he did to the rest of the administration.
If I am correct, than Clarke isn’t a liar, but maybe he isn’t such a great judge of character. If I am incorrect, I think I’ve still provided a reasonable enough explanation that you can’t call Clarke a liar.
Passion, deep involvement and sloppy thinking are nearly always just as good an explanation as “that so and so lied”.
Yours,
Wince
Andrew Lazarus
Where do we fit into the chronology the established fact that on 9/17/01 Bush asked the military to draw up plans for the invasion of Iraq?
You know, “Please update and resubmit” is consistent with either Clarke’s explanation (where update is a euphemism for “correct according to the instructions”) and Hadley’s. But you guys assume that Bushies’ anti-Clarke attacks are always factual, even in the increasing number of instances where they conflict with each other AND EVEN WITH THEMSELVES.
I can’t wait for Congress to declassify Clarke’s testimony, giving him an opportunity to rehearse all of Bush’s mistakes again.
BushWhopper
How pathetic can you guys get? There is no way to tell whether Clark was speaking with quotation marks, so to speak (in other words, he didnt ‘say the memo said “quote, Wrong anwswer, Unquote”. It’s at least possible that he was using a figure of speech, and that it was his opinion that Bush and Co. by telling him to update the memo, didn’t get the answer they wanted. If this is the best you can do, Bush is toast!
Wince and Nod
It isn’t the best we can do. Kerry has been a great help to Bush supporters like myself.
Yours,
Wince
JoanneO
There is always going to be a negative reaction when you have critics (some Bush’s supporters) misconstruing a character rather than allowing the possibility of “the truth” coming out.
We all know there were no nucleur weapons in Iraq. We all know the CIA is corrupted. Clarke has errupted controversy that can only have a positive effect on the government.
Since this goverment is of the people,for the people, and by the people, the people should be able to attain information and become active participants rather than spectators.
By sending troops out to Iraq we are attempting to stir up fear and glorify the power of the country. Meanwhile, several die, mostly innocent people. The attacks on the Islamic world would only stem up more hatred and more terrorist groups are likely to follow. Clarke said it best in his conclusion “to address the continuing threat from radical Islamic terrorism, the US and its allies must become increasingly focused and effective in countering the ideology that motivates that terrorism”.
In order to come up with a solution, we need to examine the problem first, analyze it, break it down, instead of making it bigger.
JEB
The news media is ignoring the most important thing Condi Rice said about Dick Clarke. The following statement by Condi Rice shows that Dick Clarke should be apologizing to the 9/11 victims and the administration. Dick Clarke was the actual administration official tasked to make sure all US agencies dealt adequately with the intelligence spikes on pending attack. Dick Clarke is a liar and merely covering his own rear end. Where is the scrutiny of Dick Clarke over the revelation about his responsibility for failing to raise the URGENCY at all of these agencies?
Exerts From Condi Rice’s Prepared Statement:
For the essential crisis management task, we depended on the Counterterrorism Security Group chaired by Dick Clarke to be the interagency nerve center. The CSG consisted of senior counterterrorism experts from CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Defense Department (including the Joint Chiefs), the State Department, and the Secret Service. CSG members also had ready access to their Cabinet Secretaries and could raise any concerns they had at the highest levels.
On July 5, Chief of Staff Andy Card and I met with Dick Clarke, and I asked Dick to make sure that domestic agencies were aware of the heightened threat period and were taking appropriate steps to respond, even though we did not have specific threats to the homeland. Later that same day, Clarke convened a special meeting of his CSG, as well as representatives from the FAA, the INS, Customs, and the Coast Guard. At that meeting, these agencies were asked to take additional measures to increase security and surveillance.
From Condi Rice