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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…

Clarke’s LiePost + Comments (39)