Proof that Richard Clarke is right (via Eschaton) ... This is from a CNN Transcript of April 30, 2001 (emphasis added).

WOODRUFF: We will have more of the day's political news coming up. But now a look at some other top stories.

The Navy is ready for more demonstrations on the Puerto Rican island, Vieques. After a break on Sunday, Navy warships are firing at the island's practice range again. Over the weekend, roughly 70 demonstrators were arrested and charged with trespassing. They included a U.S. congressman, Democrat Luis Gutierrez of Illinois.

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there's no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and "personalizing terrorism."

still, Secretary of State Colin Powell says efforts to fight global terrorism will remain consistent.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POWELL: The results are clear: state sponsors of terrorism are increasingly isolated; terrorist groups on under growing pressure. Terrorists are being brought to justice, we will not let up. But we must also be aware of the nature of the threat before us. Terrorism is a persistent disease.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WOODRUFF: The secretary of state did go on to say that South Asia, particularly Afghanistan, continues to be the focal point for terrorism that is directed against the United States.

Aren't you glad the Bush Administration didn't make the mistake of focusing so much attention on Osama bin Laden in 2001 ... until September 11?

PIERRE, S.D. Republicans have accused Democratic U.S. House candidate Stephanie Herseth of maintaining a secret Web page to receive campaign donations raised from ads on liberal groups' Internet sites.

But a Herseth campaign official scoffed at the charge, saying the Web page is not secret and can be found easily with a standard search of the Internet.

Herseth faces Republican Larry Diedrich in a June 1 special election to fill the vacancy left when Bill Janklow resigned as South Dakota's lone member of the U.S. House.

Jason Glodt, executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, said the Herseth campaign arranged the special Internet donation site to prevent most South Dakotans from knowing about Herseth's relationship with such liberal groups.

The Herseth Web page takes campaign donations from people directed there from Internet sites called "blogs," which are online bulletin boards that feature journals, opinionated articles and messages.

There's a reason she's got that secret site. She doesn't want to advertise the fact she's doing this," Glodt said Thursday.

I think the real point is you judge a person by the friends they keep, and look where she's focusing her fund-raising efforts," Glodt said. "Anybody can look at these blogs and the content, and realize the values they are promoting are completely contradictory to the South Dakota values she purports to represent." [Chet Brokaw, Associated Press, March 25, 2004]

Here's an insider tip: if you want to find the secret site, google for "Herseth." The Herseth for Congress site is the first hit. Obviously, this site is a super-secret nefarious liberal plot designed to keep secrets from the people of South Dakota, who apparently don't have access to Google.

Remember, you read it on The Mahablog. 

According to Herseth's furtive, clandestine and utterly secret web page, these are the covert liberal sites the people of South Dakota must not find out about:

• Calpundit
• Daily Kos
• Democratic Underground
• EdCone.com
• Eschaton
• The Hamster
• Instapundit
• pandagon.net
• Political Wire
• Seeing the Forest
• Talk Left
• Talking Points Memo
• Yellow Dog Blog

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you ...

Condi's Bad Week

A New Folk Hero

Trial by Fire

As a very little boy, I thought the opening words to the recitation required at school every morning were "I led the pigeons to the flag." Seemed odd, but I figured the teacher knew best.

It is still incredible to the moms that their Secretary of Defense continued to sit in his private dining room at the Pentagon while their husbands were being incinerated in the towers of the World Trade Center. They know this from an account posted on Sept. 11 on the Web site of Christopher Cox, a Republican Congressman from Orange County who is chairman of the House Policy Committee.

Ironically," Mr. Cox wrote, "just moments before the Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker, Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why … Congress has got to give the President the tools he needs to move forward with a defense of America against ballistic missiles."

At that point, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Secret Service, the F.A.A., NORAD (our North American air-defense system), American Airlines and United Airlines, among others, knew that at least three planes had been violently hijacked, their transponders turned off, and that thousands of American citizens had been annihilated in the World Trade Center by Middle Eastern terrorists, some of whom had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet the nation’s defense chief didn’t think it significant enough to interrupt his political pitch to a key Republican in Congress to reactivate the Star Wars initiative of the Bush I years.

Suskind's new book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, The Price of Loyalty, is one long lament on the same theme: the administration's complete disregard for evidence. O'Neill becomes so desperate for an honest broker that he pleads with, of all people, Vice President Cheney: "[We] need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process. We need firewalls. The political people are there for presentation and execution, not for creation." By the time he left, O'Neill actually pined for the less political days of the Nixon White House: "The biggest difference between then and now is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl, Dick, Karen, and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."

P.S. Speaking of crediblity, the staff statement does a very nice job of filleting that of Mansoor Ijaz, a former Democratic Party donor and Al Gore schmoozer turned Fox News foreign policy consultant. Lately, Ijaz has been jazzing up the true believers with tall tales of an alleged 1996 offer from the government of Sudan to "render" (kidnap) Bin Ladin and turn him over the United States.

The staff statement disposes of that canard quite tersely:

Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim. (emphasis added.)

I'm not able to watch Richard Clarke's testimony today, but I understand his opening statement was awesome. C-SPAN will have a video up that I can watch later, I hope.

 

Looking at the numbers alone (and the numbers fluctuate greatly by source, but I’m going with the primary organizers, United for Peace and Justice, the attendance was only one-third of that garnered just a year ago. We were gathering to protest the Iraq war on its first anniversary, at a time of disgust and dismay, but the last year has desensitized us—or me, at least—to the injustices of this war.

I found the most common sentiment, in fact, to be anti-Bush, rather than decidedly pro-peace: signs read “Bush Lies Who Dies,” “More Trees Less Bush,” etc, and there were the racy hats (“Lick Bush in ’04”) and chants (“Bush, pull out, just like your father should have”), and the clever graphics (a goofy Bush head on a bull’s body, defecating a globe).

When flags were waved on Saturday, however infrequently, they were often smeared with slogans or flown upside down, as in a distress signal. Some people carried flags with the field of stars replaced by a peace symbol or a skull and crossbones.

IF any flag dominated, it was the green, red, white and black banner of the embryonic Palestinian state. As demonstrators headed up Avenue of the Americas, prominent New Yorkers in the front rank, including City Councilmen Bill Perkins and Charles Barron, were framed against a backdrop of Palestinian flags - and those flags only.

Indeed, listening to the speeches at rallies held both before and after the march, one could be forgiven an occasional impression that the afternoon was more about embracing Palestinian nationalism than opposing United States actions in Iraq.

Some in the crowd acknowledged later that they were uneasy with speeches that, in their view, veered far from the day's main agenda: letting the White House know what they think of this war.

Even a few protest organizers from a coalition called United for Peace and Justice rolled their eyes over the America-bashing language from speakers aligned with a group known as Answer, short for Action Now to Stop War and End Racism. (During Answer's part of the program, someone taped to the speakers' platform a photo of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who peddled nuclear materials to North Korea and Libya, those noted democracies.)

The 9-11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch, two separate groups, are demanding the resignation of Philip Zelikow, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, after information surfaced over the weekend that he participated in Bush administration briefings prior to Sept. 11 on the threat al Qaeda posed to the country. ...

Critics have previously called for Zelikow to resign because they believed he had at least an appearance of a conflict of interest. He co-wrote a book in 1995 with Condoleezza Rice, who is now Bush's national security adviser. Additionally, only Zelikow and commission member Jamie Gorelick are permitted to read classified intelligence reports known as the presidential daily briefs in their entirety. [Chris Strohm, GovExec.com]

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things, that is he was given a new assignment at some point here. I don't recall the exact time frame.

Q Cyber security, meaning Internet security?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, worried about attacks on the computer systems and the sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try to the system against us.

Q Well, now that explains a lot, that answer right there explains -- (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he wasn't -- he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff. And I saw part of his interview last night, and he wasn't --

Q He was demoted.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was as though he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example, with the President of Pakistan, laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and the importance of going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al Qaeda. This was, say, within three weeks of our arrival here.

Marie Cocco: Bush's 9/11 Myths Enganger U.S.

Thomas Oliphant: The Army of the Ambivalent

E.J. Dionne: Why Scalia Should Duck Out

Richard Cohen: Bush v. Clarke

Kerry's Surprising Defenders

They say authors are like hookers and will go anywhere and do anything to sell their books. (Who me? Look right!) The latest to shake his booty is Richard Clarke, the "terrorism expert" [What does that mean?--ed. He reads more than one newspaper a day.]

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice body slams the Clinton spinners trying to escape the blame for 9/11 unpreparedness The Bush Administration has never yielded to the partisan temptation to place the responsibility for 9/11 on the backs of Bill Clinton and his team where it belongs,

but neither will the Bush Administration allow the election season to obscure the critical fact --Al Qaeda took root in Afghanistan and metastasized during the Clinton party. 

The 9/11 Commission has instead been driven from the start by meaner political calculations: To appease the demands of those (few) victims' families looking for someone to blame, and to provide a vehicle to embarrass the Bush Administration. That's the real reason Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell--two men who have acted in the past as statesmen--were hounded out as the original commission leaders on trivial conflict-of-interest grounds.

Yeah, why in the world did anyone object to good ol' Henry Kissinger?

WSJ complains that the commission's report will come out during the presidential campaign, but whose fault is that?  If the Bush Administration hadn't stonewalled so long, they report might have come out last year.

Here's another gem:

As for Iraq, he and other Bush critics want to claim that the U.S. invasion has only created more terrorists--as if there weren't any before March 2003.

Jeez, talk about a straw man. Nobody claimed there weren't any terrorists before March 2003. The charge is that there are more terrorists as a result of Bush's War. And there is evidence to back up this charge.

See, for example, "Why the Qaeda Threat Is Growing" by Tony Karon in Time, March 17.

Last week, CIA director George Tenet told the Senate that al-Qaeda has morphed into a loose and expanding association of regional terror cells linked less by chains of command and communication than by a common vision of jihad against the U.S. The growing embrace of the movement's goals and tactics by terror cells with no direct operational connection to bin Laden's network, said Tenet, means that "a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future, with or without al-Qaeda in the picture."

This is what Richard Clarke said on Sixty Minutes last night:

Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda ... we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda," adds Clarke. "And the result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened."

See also "The Secret War" from the March 21 Guardian.

My daddy used to tell me that quail hunting caused an increase in quail populations, because the birds would scatter and begin new flocks. (For the record, he scattered a lot more quail than he ever brought home; every bobwhite in Missouri should thank him.) Similarly, Bush's thrashing about in the Middle East has done more to scatter al Qaeda than kill it. Now where there was an organization there are countless deadly cells, mostl working independently of each other. And as the recent tragedy in Madirid revealed, these cells are capable of carrying out deadly, coordinated attacks.

But the Wall Street Journal pundits won't admit this is happening, because it doesn't fit their ideology. Some people never learn.

Update: See also Billmon, "Aftershock."

Iraq War Hindered Battle Against Terrorism

Al Qaeda's True Nature Eludes the West

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.

FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked. ["FBI Claims Bin Laden Inquiry Was Frustrated," November 7, 2001]