[quote]hedo wrote:
If you believe Clinton about Clarke this is what Richard Clarke actually said. Draw your own conclusions.
Transcript: Clarke Praises Bush Team in '02
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
[/quote]
Hilarious! Why did Clarke spin this yarn?
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.
KING: We’re going to get to that in a minute. But who told you to do that briefing?
CLARKE: The national security adviser, the press secretary, the communication’s director, they all talked to me, asked me to do the briefing and were telling me to spin it in a very positive way.
KING: What do you make of Condoleezza Rice’s actions through this? Her statements about you, the issuing today of an e-mail you sent her four days before 9/11, which seems to back up what she thinks. What’s your overview of that?
CLARKE: They’re scrambling very hard at the White House. They’ve got a lot of people – the vice president, the chief of staff, the national security director, the press secretary, the communication’s director. They have five or six people running around doing talk shows and trying to refute me and trying to besmirch me. Larry, I said in the preface of this book, I knew before I wrote this book that the White House will let loose the dogs to attack me. That’s what they’re doing. That’s what they did to Paul O’Neill when he told the truth and I come back to this point that all of this is to get us, rather than being on this show talking about the failures of the Bush administration, instead talking about the flack that they’re throwing up every day.
KING: Was 9/11 preventable?
CLARKE: Well, we’ll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
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."
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/24/lkl.00.html
Nice try Hedo.
Clinton said incredibly true things so of course the right must try to besmirch him. This smackdown only reminded us of one thing…our president and his supporters are timid little cowards.
Your response…post the transcript of the efforts of your admins efforts to hide their non-efforts by begging Clarke to just please say something nice about us.
Yes draw your own conclusion…
Bush did nothing. Of course!