On Keith, Clinton and Courage

When Keith Olbermann gave his ball-busting critique of President Bush this Monday - I cheered and then I worried. I knew the reaction would be intense, unrelenting and hysterical - because he'd just done the one thing that hadn't yet been done in much of the various criticism Bush has received.

He correctly noted George W. Bush's repeated failures and Cowardice!

He'd shown something Bush and his cronies are incapable of - Courage.

Naturally the shrill counter-attack didn't come from George personally. It never does.

It wasn't George Bush himself who slandered John McCain claiming he'd been driven a bit batty after his time in the Hanoi Hilton, or that he'd had an illegitimate black child out of wedlock. It wasn't George Bush himself who claimed John Kerry wanted to throw "Spitballs" at our enemies, had lied about the circumstances of his Bronze Star and had betrayed our soldiers by accusing them of War Crimes (by telling the truth). It wasn't George Bush who accused Bill Clinton of being asleep at the switch before 9/11 - and it wasn't George Bush who sent fake Anthrax to Keith Olbermann's home and then laughed at him in print.

MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann flipped out when he opened his home mail yesterday. The acerbic host of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" was terrified when he opened a suspicious-looking letter with a California postmark and a batch of white powder poured out. A note inside warned Olbermann, who's a frequent critic of President Bush's policies, that it was payback for some of his on-air shtick.

[Let me re-emphasize that this letter went to Olbermann's Home - not the MSNBC Offices - which begs the question whether it was sent by someone who either knows Keith personally or was able to get his home address from other "journalists"?]

All these things were done by people even worse than Bush - the people that got him elected.

It seems amazing to me that these people would go to these lengths, but it shouldn't be. We should know by now exactly who we're dealing with. We should know by now that they'll stop at nothing, not the law - not the Constitution - not FISA - not even torture and Terrorism (which is exactly what they attempted with Olbermann) to get and keep what they want.

Which is nothing short of Absolute Power.

No, it wasn't Bush - it was Rupert Murdock's Fox News Network that attempted to sandbag President Clinton last Friday, provoking his highly animated response.

WALLACE: Can I ask you about the Clinton Global Initiative?

CLINTON: You can.

WALLACE: I always intended to sir.

CLINTON: No you intended to move your bones by doing this first. But I don't mind people asking me. I actually talked o the 9/11 commission for four hours and I told them the mistakes I thought I made. And I urged them to make those mistakes public because I thought none of us had been perfect. But instead of anybody talking about those things. I always get these clever little political...where they ask me one sided questions... It always comes from one source.

...

CLINTON: And you guys try to create the opposite impression when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke's findings and you know it's not true. It's just not true. And all this business about Somalia -- the same people who criticized me about Somalia were demanding I leave the next day. Same exact crowd..

WALLACE: one of the...

CLINTON: ...So if you're going to do this for gods sake follow the same standards for everybody.

Olbermann responded forcefully to the attacks on Clinton, by turning the tables onto Bush and exactly what he did and didn't do prior to 9/11. (Which was nothing!)

Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it... we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently redd the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since -- a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush -- you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles... wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition... Sir, of cowardice.

Then we have Condoleeza Rice arguing before - you guessed it - Rupert Merdock's New York Post Editorial Board that Bush Administration "did as much to stop Al-Qaeda before 9-11 as the Clinton Administration".

QUESTION: By now I assume you've seen Bill Clinton's performances. How do you respond to his specific accusation that the eight months before 9/11 the Bush Administration, in his words, didn't even try to go after al-Qaida?

SECRETARY RICE: I'd just say read the 9/11 report. We went through this. We went through this argument. The fact of the matter is I think the 9/11 Commission got it about right. Nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11. I would be the first to say that because, you know, we didn't fight the war on terror in the way that we're fighting it now. We just weren't organized as a country either domestically or as a leader internationally.

But what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton Administration did in the preceding years. In fact, it is not true that Richard Clarke was fired. Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened and he left when he did not become Deputy Director of Homeland Security some several months later. We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida. For instance, big pieces were missing, like an approach to Pakistan that might work, because without Pakistan you weren't going to get Afghanistan. And there were reasons that nobody could think of actually going in and taking out the Taliban, either the Clinton Administration or the Bush Administration, because it's true you couldn't get basing rights in Uzbekistan and that was the long pole in the tent.

So I would make the divide September 11, 2001 when the attack on this country mobilized us to fight the war on terror in a very different way. But the notion that somehow for eight months the Bush Administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false. And you know, I think that the 9/11 Commission understood that.

QUESTION: So you're saying Bill Clinton is a liar?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I'm just saying that, look, there was a lot of passion in that interview and I'm not going to - I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 Commission report on the efforts of the Bush Administration in the eight months, things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians, but essentially continuing the strategy that had been left to us by the Clinton Administration, including with the same counterterrorism czar who was Richard Clarke. But I think this is not a very fruitful discussion because we've been through it; the 9/11 Commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said.

To be fair: Getting a foothold in Pakistan was indeed a great help, but the Armed Predator Drone project had been started under President Clinton, it simply wasn't completed until after he was out of office. The project had begun because Bin Laden's hiding place in Afghanistan was out of the reach of Helicopters, which restricted the ability of a Special Forces attack. Cruise missles launched against him had to travel for two hours over Pakistan airspace, giving him ample warning and time to escape. The Predator Drone however had already sighted Bin Laden at least twice during the Clinton Administration, but was unarmed at the time.

In contrast Condoleeza Rice did not even have a meeting to discuss use of the Armed version of the Predator until September 4th 2001 [Although Richard Clarke had begged for the urgent need for such a meeting on January 25th) This means that the Armed Predator did not even fly from the time Clinton left Office until after September 11th.

In his book Clarke accurate describes some genuine failures of the Clinton Administration - not having an Armed Predator ready, missing Bin Laden on August 20, 1998 with the Cruise Missle attack and yes, also missing him with other missle attacks that were called off by CIA. But this is how Clarke describes that fateful meeting - one month after the August 6th PDB "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" and establishes exactly what the Bush Administration did about Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.

In preparation for [the Sept 4th] meeting I urged Condi Rice to see the issue cleanly, the Administration could decide that al Qaeda was just a nuisance, a cost of doing business for a superpower (as Reagan and the first President Bush had apparently decided about Hezbollah and Libya when those groups had killed hundreds of Americans), and act accordingly, as it had been doing. Or it could decide that the al Qaeda terrorist group and its affiliates posed an existential threat to the Ameican way of life, in which case we should do everthing that might be required to eliminate that threat. There was no in-between. I concluded by noting that before choosing from these alternative, it would be well for Rice to put herself in her own shoes when in the very near future al Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans. "What will you wish then that you had already done?"

The Principals meeting, when it finally took place, was largely a noneevent. Tenet and I spoke passionately about the urgency and seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. No one disagreed.

Powell laid out an aggressive strategy for putting pressure on Pakistan to side with us against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Money might be needed, he noted, but there ws no plan to find the funds.

Rumsfeld, who looked distracted througout the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq, and whatever we did on this al Qaeda business, we had to deal with the other sources of terrorism.

Tenet agreed to a series of things that CIA could do to be more aggressive, but the details would be worked offline: what would be the new authorities given CIA, how much money would be spent, where would the money come from. I doubted that process would be fruitful anytime soon. CIA had said it could not find a single dollar in any other program to transfer to the anti-al Qaeda effort. It demanded additional funds from Congress.

The only heated disagreement came over whether to fly the armed Predator over Afghanistan to attack al Qaeda. Neither CIA nor the Defense Department would agree to run that program. Rice ended the discussion without a solution. She asked that I finalize the broad policy document, a National Security Presidential Directive, on al Qaeda and send it to her for Presidential signature.

Just over a week after this meeting, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were in flames. This fact is what the right can't stand to admit. This is what their so afraid of. This is why they attack Clinton, they attack Clarke, and they attack Olbermann -- all of whom have done nothing but show exactly what they're made of in the face of the snears, jeers, and mysterious white powder appearing in thier Personal Mail [not from al Qaeda, but from Domestic Terrorists who Support Bush]. All of whom have done what America needed them to do - none of them may have completely suceeded in their tasks, not even Olbermann - yet - but all have tried. All have shown exactly what Bush's minions - Murdock, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, The Swiftboaters, The Republican Congress - have all failed to show.

Courage.

Vyan