Category Archives: Terrorism

Dear Lulu: People Live Here

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The second day after 9/11, New Yorkers were officially summoned back to their lives. Commuters flowed into Manhattan by auto and train, through tunnels and over bridges. They piled back onto the city’s buses and subways. They maneuvered around the growing number of sidewalk shrines in the shadows of world-famous landmarks like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.

In short, we who live and work in New York City spent our days in a labyrinth of prime targets for terrorists. And we were not unmindful of this.

On 9/13 I remember riding the downtown local Seventh Avenue train toward my place of employment in Chelsea. Before the cataclysm this train went to the World Trade Center; people who lived on the West Side could ride it to their jobs in the Financial District. But on that day, we all knew, the train would stop short of its usual route, because part of the tunnel was collapsed under the smoldering ruins of the towers. And on that day I saw a Financial District sort of guy — good suit, gold watch, leather briefcase — riding that train. He was trembling. He shifted in his seat and muttered to himself. He was terrified. God only knows what that man had seen with his own eyes just two days before. Other commuters stood around him, clinging to poles and swaying with the subway car. They were silent and respectful, and they clustered around him like protective angels. But the fact is we were all flesh, and we were locked inside a metal and glass thing hurtling through miles of unguarded underground tunnels.

We all knew that. Yet we got on the subway, anyway. We had to get to work.

In those first few days, rumors flew about poison gas in the subways and mysterious packages left on buses. One such rumor caused a co-worker of mine to faint from fear. She laid on the office floor moaning, and her husband had to come in a car to take her home.

Military planes guarded the city, and every time one flew close to the high-rise office building I worked in (which had given us a clear view of the atrocity) we all dashed to the windows to see if it was one of Them. I suppose you could say we were a bit twitchy.

But the point is that life is what it is, and if you lived or worked in Manhattan, you had to overcome your nerves and get on with things. “Getting on with things” doesn’t mean forgetting. It means making peace, somehow, with your own vulnerabilities.

This past Monday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg talked about the alleged plot to “blow up” JFK airport:

“There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life,” he said.

That “What, me worry?” attitude pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s advice to New Yorkers on the terror plot. As far as he was concerned, the professionals were on it, so New Yorkers shouldn’t let it tax their brains.

“You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist,” he added.

The Usual Screechers, naturally, are outraged. Michelle Malkin says non-worriers are “ostriches.” “Add NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to the gathering of ostriches,” she sneers.

In other words, according to Lulu, if one is not living in a constant state of terror, one is an “ostrich.”

I’ve got news for you, toots: People can’t live that way. And some of us, you know, live here. And if we choose to stay here, we must expose our precious flesh to the dangers of subways and tunnels and bridges and high-rise office buildings and Muslim taxi drivers every single damn day.

But just because we are not in a constant state of mind-numbing, inchoate fear, does not mean we are not mindful of what can happen. A whole lot of of watched the worst that terrorism can do with our own eyes. We were not sitting safely in our living rooms watching a little picture on a television. We were there. We lived with it. And we lived with the shrines and the smell and the sorrow for weeks after.

Believe me, you don’t forget something like that.

We’re still living with the hole in the city. I walked by it just a couple of days ago. Nobody’s forgotten anything. People still cluster in front of St. Paul’s to read the sidewalk display about the recovery effort. There’s still a big flag hung on the front of the Stock Exchange, and another from the ceiling in Grand Central Station, where armed National Guard still stroll through the corridors.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, I’m very happy that law enforcement is watching our airports so vigilantly that even half-assed plots are nipped in the bud. I fly into and out of New York City airports from time to time.

However, I don’t see anything useful about fear-mongering. Fear does have its uses, of course. If you confront a snarling dog, for example, fear gives you that nice shot of adrenaline that might help you climb a tree to safety. But the reality of modern life is that most of the scary things we face are things we can’t run away from. If we’re going to live our lives as we choose to live them, fear is an obstacle that must be overcome. Stirring up more fear isn’t helping anyone.

Fear isn’t helping anyone but some politicians, I should say.

New Yorkers on the whole do not like it when some politician frightens us with a terrorism threat, and we find out later the threat was absurd (e.g., destroying the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch). We get annoyed when news stories hype a threat to the office buildings we work in, and then we find out the threat was based on three-year-old information. And we do not appreciate someone who lives somewhere else, who was hundreds or thousands of miles away from Manhattan on 9/11, screeching at us that we’re supposed to be afraid. And that if we’re not afraid, we must not understand the dangers we live in.

You want to step over here and say that, Michelle? Out loud? On a New York City sidewalk? You might not like the reaction you get. You should be afraid, actually.

Update: See also Liberal Values, Oliver Willis, Gawker.

Update 2: See Happy Furry Puppy Story Time.

Bushies Are Trying to Kill You

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What else can one conclude from this, except that the Bushies have a dastardly plan to kill us, especially the poorer among us? Arian Campo-Flores writes at Newsweek.com that the Bush Administration is “reforming” Medicaid in a way that will cause emergency rooms and even hospitals themselves to close.

The rule, scheduled to take effect on Sept. 1, deals with the arcane world of Medicaid financing. Two provisions in particular dismay many in the health-care field. One limits states’ ability to tap certain funding sources to meet their Medicaid obligations. The other stipulates that Medicaid reimbursements cannot exceed the cost of treating the Medicaid patient. While that provision may sound reasonable, says Larry Gage of the National Association of Public Hospitals, it doesn’t account for the harsh reality confronting medical facilities that treat large numbers of the uninsured. Since these facilities don’t get reimbursed for that treatment, they rely in part on higher-than-cost Medicaid reimbursements. As a result of the new administration rule, many hospitals may need to make drastic cuts in personnel, beds and more.

Nearly a year ago the Institute of Medicine issued three reports (key findings here) saying the nation’s emergency rooms are inadequate and getting worse. Among other things, it found:

  • Demand for emergency care has been growing fast—emergency department (ED) visits grew by 26 percent between 1993 and 2003.
  • But over the same period, the number of EDs declined by 425, and the number of hospital beds declined by 198,000.
  • ED crowding is a hospital-wide problem—patients back up in the ED because they can not get admitted to inpatient beds.
  • As a result, patients are often “boarded”—held in the ED until an inpatient bed becomes available—for 48 hours or more.
  • Also, ambulances are frequently diverted from overcrowded EDs to other hospitals that may be farther away and may not have the optimal services.
  • In 2003, ambulances were diverted 501,000 times—an average of once every minute.

    • After these reports came out, David Brown wrote in the Washington Post:

    The number of deaths caused by a delay in treatment or lack of expertise is especially uncertain, though it may not be small. San Diego established a trauma system in 1984 after autopsies of accident victims who died after reaching the ER suggested that 22 percent of the deaths were preventable, said Eastman, one of the Institute of Medicine committee members.

    This is related to the ongoing controversy over disaster response (quoting the key findings from the National Institute of Medicine linked above):

    The emergency care system is ill-prepared to handle a major disaster. [Drawn from all three reports]

  • With many EDs at or over capacity, there is little surge capacity for a major event, whether it takes the form of a natural disaster, disease outbreak, or terrorist attack.
  • EMS received only 4 percent of Department of Homeland Security first responder funding in 2002 and 2003.
  • Emergency Medical Technicians in non-fire based services have received an average of less than one hour of training in disaster response.
  • Both hospital and EMS personnel lack personal protective equipment needed to effectively respond to chemical, biological, or nuclear threats.

    • That going on six years after 9/11 there has been no coherent effort to prepare the nation for biochemical or nuclear attacks goes way beyond the parameters of incompetence, IMO. The ridiculous Department of Homeland Security tosses money at pork projects and “contractors” (with ties to Republicans in Washington, one suspects) who don’t deliver. Yet to fund tax cuts for the rich and Bush’s pointless Iraq War — which is supposed to be about keeping America safer somehow — Bush’s government lets our ability to respond to disasters go to rot.

    On 9/11 New York City actually had surplus medical emergency response. That day the city’s wealth of world-class medical personnel and state-of-the-art facilities mustered a triage army around the Financial District. (I understand this was done on the initiative of New York City’s medical community; Rudy Giuliani didn’t have to ask.) But the nature of the disaster was such that people either got out, or they didn’t. The crack medical teams had little else to do but wipe bloody noses and wash dust out of eyes.

    But poor New Orleans after Katrina was a different story. Kerry Sanders reported for NBC News on September 2, 2005, that the sick, injured and dead alike were being stacked up at the New Orleans airport:

    The stench of death reeks inside portions of the airport here. Other parts of the airport just smell as any hospital would if there was no way to clean up. It is human misery as people are lying in pain, ailing and wailing.

    The pained screams from patients is like fingers on a chalkboard because there is nothing you can do to reach out and help these people. They have limited medical supplies. They do have aircraft coming in. The C-17s, Storm-30s are moving people out of here as fast as they can. …

    … A reporter is supposed to remain detached and just report what’s going on. But, when there is a man lying on the ground, and he’s yelling out to anyone walking by, “Help me! I need some water! Help me!” and there is no one to help this man.

    The moral is, if you’re ever a victim of a natural disaster or terrorist attack, be sure you’re someplace with really expensive real estate. Increasingly, America’s alleged “best health care in the world” is reserved for the well-to-do. Last year Jane Bryant Quinn wrote,

    America’s health-care “system” looks more like a lottery every year. The winners: the healthy and well insured, with good corporate coverage or Medicare. When they’re ill, they get—as the cliche goes—”the best health care in the world.” The losers: those who rely on shrinking public insurance, such as Medicaid (nearly 45 million of us), or go uninsured (46 million and rising).

    To slip from the winners’ circle into the losers’ ranks is a cultural, emotional and financial shock. You discover a world of patchy, minimal health care that feels almost Third World. The uninsured get less primary or preventive care, find it hard to see cardiologists, surgeons and other specialists (waiting times can run up to a year), receive treatment in emergencies, but are more apt to die from chronic or other illnesses than people who pay. That’s your lot if you lose your corporate job and can’t afford a health policy of your own.

    But now, in true Bush style, the Bush Administration is going to take a grim situation and make it worse. Let’s go back to Arian Campo-Flores at Newsweek.com:

    The administration calculates that the rule change will reduce federal Medicaid expenditures by about $3.8 billion over five years. But Gage and others estimate the impact on hospitals will be much larger. At Grady, where 42 percent of revenue comes from Medicaid, Kellerman estimates that the hit could total $200 million over five years. “Grady is already struggling,” he says. “This would put it out of business.” Were Grady to close, the consequences would be far-reaching: the hospital is the only Level I trauma center (the highest designation) in a 120-mile radius of Atlanta, and one quarter of Georgia’s physicians are trained there.

    Let’s see; the Bushies have run the National Guard into the ground and now they’re fixin’ to close hospitals. This at the very time that disaster and terrorist attack response is supposed to be a critical priority. Does it get dumber, or what?

    See also: The Mahablog, “Je m’amuse” (June 15, 2006).

    Only Muslims Commit Terrorism

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    If you define terrorism as an act committed by Muslims, then only Muslims can commit terrorism, right? Thus, when a bomb is planted outside an abortion clinic by the Fetus People, it’s not terrorism. It’s free speech. Perfectly logical.

    Read Zuzu for more.

    Update: Thanks much to alert maha reader MapRef41N93W, who sent a link to this story from today’s Birmingham (AL) News that’s not about terrorists:

    Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free Militia.

    Six alleged members of the Free Militia also were arrested by federal authorities and are being held without bond.

    Investigators said the DeKalb County-based group had not made any specific threats or devised any plots, but was targeted for swift dismantling because of its heavy firepower. The militia, which called itself the Naval Militia at one point, had enough armament to outfit a small army. …

    … The massive operation forced the closing of Collinsville High School on U.S. 11 because of traffic concerns. In Trussville, authorities rented a U-Haul truck to cart away the load of explosives and weapons from a house.

    Agents encountered booby traps at one site. They found trip wires and two hand grenades rigged as booby traps at the Collinsville camper home of 46-year-old Raymond Dillard, who holds titles of both militia major and fugitive from justice on an unrelated federal case in Mobile.

    “We were prepared,” Cavanaugh said. “We suspect booby traps with these types of groups.”

    Arrested and detained in federal custody were Dillard, also known as Jeff Osborne, 46, of Collinsville; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41, of Collinsville; Bonnell Hughes, 57, of Crossville; Randall Garrett Cole, 22, of Gadsden; James Ray McElroy, 20, of Collinsville; and Michael Wayne Bobo, 30, of Trussville.

    None of these people are named Mohammed or al-Something; therefore, they are not terrorists.

    Authorities wouldn’t pinpoint a leader, but said Dillard called himself the major. In addition to the booby traps, authorities recovered a long gun and a pistol from his home.

    Recovered from Cunningham’s Collinsville home were stolen commercial fireworks, improvised hand grenades, fuse assemblies and a half-dozen guns. At Hughes’ Crossville home, agents found 100 improvised hand grenades, 70 improvised hand grenades fired from the 37 mm rocket launch, a submachine gun and two silencers.

    An SKS rifle was found at McElroy’s home.

    In Jefferson County, authorities said they had to rent a truck to handle the bomb-making material from Bobo’s home, as well as 2,500 rounds of ammunition and 12 guns.

    The 30-year-old Bobo still lives with his parents and works for their pest-control company. Why am I not surprised?

    But it’s a real relief to find out these guys aren’t Muslims, huh? Otherwise they might be dangerous or something.

    Unspeakable Truth

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    David Bell, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, has an op ed in today’s yesterday’s Los Angeles Times called “Was 9/11 really that bad?” In spite of the flame-baiting headline, which I doubt Professor Bell wrote, it makes a sensible point.

    Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

    Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

    Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the “Islamo-fascist” enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler’s implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War). …

    … as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

    This is pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. There aren’t enough jihadists in the world to destroy the United States. There aren’t enough of them to invade us, seize Washington, and occupy our territory. There just aren’t. That ought to be obvious. Even if they could pull off another 9/11, that wouldn’t destroy us, either.

    Professor Bell began his op ed this way:

    IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against
    terrorism.

    Yes, if the jihadists could pull off a 9/11 attack every six hours for four years, that would constitute an existential threat. But, obviously, they can’t come anywhere close to that.

    At this point I want to remind readers that I was, in fact, in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and am an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers. Anyone who comments that I am in denial about what happened on 9/11 will be well and thoroughly ridiculed.

    Naturally a number of rightie bloggers already are hyperventilating over Professor Bell’s op ed, and their reactions prove once again that righties have the reading comprehension skills of gnats. And you absolutely can not challenge a rightie’s overblown senses of righteousness and victimhood without getting snarked.

    The point that Professor Bell only mentions, but which is critical, is that our overreaction is hurting us more than it’s hurting them. Several antiterrorism experts interviewed by James Fallows for this September 2006 Atlantic Monthly article made the same point most urgently. I blogged about this article here, here, and here, and probably elsewhere. Here’s an excerpt:

    No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.

    But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.

    “Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

    “I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

    “It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

    This is the point that righties are, universally, too stupid or too scared to get. The pathetic little weenies hide behind their keyboards and do everything they can to jettison the Bill of Rights and the balance of powers because they are afraid and they think a big almighty dictatorial President can save them.

    Whoever the next President is, let me say now that it is not enough for this individual to want to end the war in Iraq. I want this individual to lead the American people away from the fear and hysteria the Bushies have cultivated to their advantage. The American people need to understand that, although terrorists can take lives and knock down buildings, the only thing the nation has to fear is, well, fear itself.

    Update: See The Anonymous Liberal.

    Dinesh D’Souza Jumps the Shark

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    I haven’t read Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Nor have I read any of D’Souza’s old books. D’Souza resides in Deep Wingnuttia, a place I do not go. But if Alan Wolfe’s review of Enemy is halfway accurate, D’Souza’s fellow wingnuts might be having second thoughts about him.

    D’Souza has told interviewers that his book is about the causes of 9/11. According to this interview, these causes can be traced back to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to prevent the Shah of Iran from being overthrown — a variation on the Right’s traditional “who lost China?” theme. The other cause is “values that are being globally pushed by the left.” These “values” are what persuaded Muslims that America is their enemy. Corporatism, economic globalism, U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel — D’Souza denies that any of these things triggered bin Laden’s fatwas against America. No, it was the Left’s values — “gambling, adultery, fornication, prostitution, undermining the family.”

    According to Alan Wolfe, D’Souza respects bin Laden as a righteous guy doing what had to be done:

    At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”

    There’s enough stuff in that paragraph alone to keep you gasping for a while. But let’s go on —

    D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be “highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.” Islamic punishment tends to be harsh — flogging adulterers and that sort of thing — but this, D’Souza says “with only a hint of irony,” simply puts Muslims “in the Old Testament tradition.” Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, “even better than polygamy.” And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while “pooh-poohed by Western commentators,” was “undoubtedly accurate.”

    D’Souza’s in mid-shark jump at this point. Wolfe continues (emphasis added),

    Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not … Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.

    The shark, it is jumped.

    I can’t help but think of what Richard Hofstadter wrote of McCarthyist Cold War redbaiting in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage/Random House, 1962), in particular pp. 41-42 (emphasis added):

    The inquisitors were trying to give satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, reformers, internationalists, intellectuals, and finally even against a Republican administration that failed to reverse liberal policies. What was involved, above all, was a set of political hostilities in which the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to socialism, and socialism to Communism. In this crusade Communism was not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power of International Communism where it really mattered — in the area of world politics.

    Alan Wolfe also brings Joe McCarthy to mind when he writes,

    “The Enemy at Home” is clearly designed to restore his reputation as the man who will say anything to call attention to his views; charging prominent senators and presidential candidates with treason can do that.

    That was McCarthy’s pattern, also. He began by charging foreign policy experts in the State Department with treason, and by the end of his volatile career he had charged General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason. He had no one left to charge but God.

    But I give D’Souza credit — he seems to be dragging the social pathology that is Wingnutism into the light, if not all the way into the petri dish. Many of us have noticed for a long time that there are frightening parallels between extreme Christian fundamentalism and extreme Muslim fundamentalism. Many of us have noticed that righties’ full-throated cries in support of freedom of speech only apply to Danish cartoonists, not to critics of the Iraq War or Christian fundies or anyone else the Right identifies as fellow tribesmen. It has been well noted that righties are, at heart, authoritarians who are terrified of freedom (per Eric Fromm).

    But while most righties lack the moral strength and courage to be honest with themselves about themselves — their literature promotes “freedom” and “liberty” as ideals even as they crusade to destroy freedom and liberty — D’Souza’s latest rantings might be seen as an attempt at honesty, transparency, even. Perhaps he has looked deep into himself — well, half an inch into himself, anyway — and realizes that freedom must be crushed if his vision of moral utopia will ever come to pass. At some level he may be dimly aware that achieving his moral vision requires surrendering to totalitarianism. And if that’s what it takes, he thinks, so be it.

    Alan Wolfe concludes,

    Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he [D’Souza] has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed.

    And that would be too bad, because we may never find a clearer revelation of the dark heart of wingnutism. We liberals should take D’Souza’s book firmly in hand and commence bashing the Right with it.

    Getting Colder

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    Following up the last post — Just to show How Far the Righty Have Fallen — rightie bloggers are whoopin’ and high-fivin’ it up over the missile strike in Somalia. For example, Curt at Flopping Aces celebrates payback for the U.S. troops killed in the 1993 “Blackhawk Down” firefight in Mogadishu. “God knows we would never get it when Clinton was in office,” he says.

    I assume the Bush Administration plans a retaliation for the U.S.S. Cole bombing of 2000 sometime in 2013. I guess we’re taking the old saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” literally.

    The Pentagon says the recent attack was not about what happened in 1993. However, one of their justifications for blitzing the Islamists involved the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by al Qaeda in 1998. Suspected perpetrators of those acts of terrorism are being harbored by the ICU, the Pentagon said.

    In 1998 the Clinton Administration waited only 13 days after the embassy bombings, not 13 years, to launch cruise missiles that struck an al Qaeda training complex in Afghanistan and destroyed a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in the Sudan that allegedly produced nerve gas. You might remember that subsequent news stories said the facility in Sudan was a legitimate pharmaceutical plant and that the missile attack killed an innocent night watchman. Republicans verbally bludgeoned President Clinton about the dead night watchman and the “aspirin factory” for, well, a long time. I think they’re still at it.

    Still, you’d think that they would have approved striking and destroying an al Qaeda training facility in Afghanistan. Guess again; grief for that dear, innocent night watchman far overwhelmed any concern for national security. Ol’ blood ‘n’ guts himself, Christopher Hitchens, sniffed:

    Well then, what was the hurry? A hurry that was panicky enough for the president and his advisors to pick the wrong objective and then, stained with embarrassment and retraction, to refuse the open inquiry that could have settled the question in the first place? There is really only one possible answer to that question. Clinton needed to look “presidential” for a day. He may even have needed a vacation from his family vacation. In any event, he acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan, and killed wogs to save his own lousy Hyde (to say nothing of our new moral tutor, the ridiculous sermonizer Lieberman). No bipartisan contrition is likely to be offered to the starving Sudanese: unmentioned on the “prayer-breakfast” circuit.

    After 9/11, of course, the rightie tune was that Clinton should have acted quicker and bombed the Afghanistan facility while Osama bin Laden was still there. The attack missed him by hours.

    Regarding the pharma plant, though I understand the CIA and some former Clinton Administration officials still stand by the nerve gas claim, consensus leans on the aspirin factory side of the story. Even so, going by this Wikipedia article, the Clinton Administration was a lot more successful at capturing, prosecuting, and convicting the perpetrators of the embassy bombings than the Bush Administration has been concerning those responsible for 9/11.

    However, as this blogger points out, righties since then have become considerably more sanguine about the slaughter of civilians, including children, in the name of fighting terrorism. Yep, after the attacks on 9/11 the righties shed their tender sensibilities rather abruptly, and they flipflopped from complaining that Clinton had done too much to claiming he hadn’t done enough.

    The missile story also reminded me of this famous exchange between Senator Bob Kerrey and National Security Adviser Condi Rice from the 9/11 commission hearings:

    KERREY: You’ve used the phrase a number of times, and I’m hoping with my question to disabuse you of using it in the future.

    You said the president was tired of swatting flies.

    Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to al-Qaida prior to 9-11?

    RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was …

    KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted?

    RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on …

    KERREY: No, no …

    RICE: … when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah …

    KERREY: He hadn’t swatted …

    RICE: … or go after this guy …

    KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn’t …

    RICE: That was what was meant.

    KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn’t swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?

    RICE: We swatted at — I think he felt that what the agency was doing was going after individual terrorists here and there, and that’s what he meant by swatting flies. It was simply a figure of speech.

    KERREY: Well, I think it’s an unfortunate figure of speech because I think, especially after the attack on the Cole on the 12th of October, 2000, it would not have been swatting a fly. It would not have been — we did not need to wait to get a strategic plan.

    Dick Clarke had in his memo on the 20th of January overt military operations. He turned that memo around in 24 hours, Dr. Clarke. There were a lot of plans in place in the Clinton administration — military plans in the Clinton administration.

    In fact, since we’re in the mood to declassify stuff, there was — he included in his January 25th memo two appendices — Appendix A: Strategy for the elimination of the jihadist threat of al-Qaida; Appendix B: Political military plan for al-Qaida.

    So I just — why didn’t we respond to the Cole?

    RICE: Well, we …

    KERREY: Why didn’t we swat that fly?

    Ahh, those were the days. There’s more amusing nostalgia in the linked old post. Are the righties now reduced to cheering the swatting of flies? To be fair, Pajamas Media reports the U.S. has “boots on the ground” in Somalia, but so far I haven’t picked up this information in other news stories.

    In January 1998, the neocons at PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton advising him that “regime change” in Iraq should be the aim of U.S. policy in the Middle East. A look at PNAC’s archives for 1997-2000 reveals the pnac’ers were obsessed with Saddam Hussein. But they seem not to have noticed Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda at all, unless I’m missing something. Even memorandums written within days of the embassy bombings are about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. And these are the same geniuses pushing Bush into an escalation in Iraq now. If neocon policies don’t touch off a pancontinental war across the Middle East and much of Africa it will be a miracle.

    Litle Lulu Lala

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    The Right Blogosphere is about to blow a fuse over tonight’s Countdown on MSNBC. A guest of Olbermann’s made a connection between the more, um, rhetorically aggressive righties like Coulter and Malkin and Chad Conrad Castagana, alleged to have sent threatening emails and white powder to various leftie icons (like Olbermann). See David Neiwert for background.

    I’m sure someone will post a clip. Too juicy.

    Update:     See also these fine blogs — Michelle Malkin Is an Idiot; Sadly, No.

    NIEs, Nays, Neighs

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    If anyone ever writes an opera about the Bush Administration (hey, there’s one about Nixon!), I foresee a scene in which a pile of shit is hauled into the White House (Josh Bolten: Osservi, un altro mucchio di defecazione!). Then Karl Rove appears with a shovel, promising to find the pony (Non si preoccupi! Posso trovare il piccolo cavallo!).

    This scene might be written around a story by Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post:

    In announcing yesterday that he would release the key judgments of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate, President Bush said he agreed with the document’s conclusion “that because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent.”

    But the estimate itself posits no such cause and effect. Instead, while it notes that counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged and disrupted al-Qaeda’s leadership, it describes the spreading “global jihadist movement” as fueled largely by forces that al-Qaeda exploits but is not actively directing. They include Iraq, corrupt and unjust governments in Muslim-majority countries, and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims.”

    The overall estimate is bleak, with minor notes of optimism. It depicts a movement that is likely to grow more quickly than the West’s ability to counter it over the next five years, as the Iraq war continues to breed “deep resentment” throughout the Muslim world, shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and cultivating new supporters for their ideology.

    In describing Iraq as “the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists,” the document judges that real and perceived insurgent successes there will “inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere,” while losses would have the opposite effect.

    That last sentence amounts to a hoofprint, if not the pony itself. Today Bush apologists expand on the theme that insurgent losses would discourage jihadists to continue the struggle elsewhere, and from there reach the conclusion (as in this Chicago Tribune editorial) that “America’s intervention, in short, is a lot of Mideast thugs’ worst nightmare.”

    Damn, some people can find a pony anywhere.

    The actual declassified portion of the NIE offers a few sentences of hope that the spread of extremism can yet be stopped. Today some rightie bloggers have seized these sentences — in effect, cherry-picking what was already cherry picked by the White House — to suggest the NIE vindicates Bush policy in Iraq. It takes some mighty shoveling to reach that pony, folks.

    Joshua Holland comments:

    …here’s the money quote, and the argument we’ll hear from the right’s echo chamber from now until the election:

      In addition, it asserts that if jihadists are perceived to be defeated in Iraq, “fewer fighters would be inspired to carry on the fight.”

    Bingo! There’s your justification for an indefinite occupation of Iraq: we have to stay the course until we achieve a “victory” that will so demoralize the “global jihadist movement” that they’ll take their ball and go home.

    The fatal flaw in this argument is that America lumps every Islamic political movement that opposes the occupation together and calls them “jihadists.” There’s the rub, because “victory” would mean, of course, a political victory, and in order to actually achieve political stability in Iraq some of those we’ve defined as jihadists would have to be involved in the country’s governance.

    What the intelligence analysis is saying — and this is almost certainly true — is that if Iraq were to end up with a pro-U.S., largely secular unity government without any influence from Iran, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, the Badr Brigade or any of the dozen other Iraqi religious groups — Shiite and Sunni — that have opposed the U.S. presence — if all of those elements were effectively wiped out — it would be so demoralizing that Iraq would lose all of its potency as a recruiting tool.

    But that particular scenario is never, ever, going to happen — not in a million years. It’s a Catch-22: aside from the fact that a legitimate government has almost zero chance of emerging under U.S. military occupation, if it did it would certainly require that a large chunk of the Iraqi opposition come into the political fold.

    And as long as people like Sadr, who’s been called a radical militant and a criminal by the U.S. for three years, have a seat at the table when U.S. troops leave, they’ll make the claim that they defeated the Great Satan and they’ll be hailed as heroes across the Islamic world. Their resistance will be seen as a model for opposing superpower bullying and that’ll just create a thousand new recruiting posters for extremists everywhere.

    At last week’s Clinton Global Initiative conference, speaker after speaker said that military actions like the U.S. invasion of Iraq are spreading extremism. Keep this in mind while reading this part of the NIE:

    _The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution — an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world — is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.

    _Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism. This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support. In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.

    Exactly. But every time the Muslim mainstream hears about torture of Islamic prisoners or “coalition” bombs dropping on a Muslim wedding or Muslim families wiped out by Marines who are breaking down from stress, that Muslim mainstream gets a little smaller and weaker. And this is the point righties cannot get into their stupid heads.

    I recommend reading the transcript or watching the video of this CGI session from last Thursday. Here’s just a bit, spoken by Queen Rania of Jordan:

    I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

    So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

    What the NIE says — the part Bush released, anyway — is that it’s still possible to turn this around. It’s still possible to grow moderation and marginalize extremism. It doesn’t say this will happen; it says it could be done.

    However, since the invasion nearly everything the Bush Administration has done in Iraq has had the effect of growing extremism and marginalizing moderates. The declassified portion of the NIE doesn’t specifically say this, which doesn’t mean the part still classified doesn’t. This is what it does say:

    Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.

    If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide. …

    … We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

    The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. …

    …We assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.

    Maha’s summary: Extremism is spreading. Bush’s Iraq policy is among the factors causing it to spread. But it might be possible to shrink extremism.

    Let’s guess what the still-classified part of the NIE says.

    A. We can shrink extremism by continuing to do the very things we’ve been doing that grew it; or,

    B. We can shrink extremism, but we’ll have to change our policies and focus to accomplish this.

    Righties will choose A; the rest of us will assume B is the logical answer.

    But notice that the bloggers who support torture and rendition and indiscriminate bombing and publication of anti-Muslim cartoons and whatnot are the same bloggers who today are celebrating the “Muslim mainstream” that’s going to end the jihad. Logic is not exactly their strong suit. They’re better at shoveling.

    Condiliar Strikes Back

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    Following up the last post, which describes how the Bush Administration failed to take action to prevent the 9/11 attack — Condi Rice gave the New York Post an exclusive interview rebutting Bill Clinton —

    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making “flatly false” claims that the Bush administration didn’t lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

    Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration “did not try” to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.

    “The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false – and I think the 9/11 commission understood that,” Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

    “What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,” Rice added.

    Rice lies.

    I combed through the article looking for all the ways the Bushies were at least as aggressive as what Clinton did. Here’s one:

    “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 [drone] that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important,” Rice added.

    In the last post I quoted a Newsweek article from 2002 (not free content) which said,

    Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

    Ah, but that’s old information. What did the 9/11 report actually say? I found comments on the drone beginning on page 210:

    The main debate during the summer of 2001 concentrated on the one new mechanism for a lethal attack on Bin Ladin–an armed version of the Predator drone.

    In the first months of the new administration, questions concerning the Predator became more and more a central focus of dispute. Clarke favored resuming Predator flights over Afghanistan as soon as weather permitted, hoping that they still might provide the elusive “actionable intelligence” to target Bin Ladin with cruise missiles. Learning that the Air Force was thinking of equipping Predators with warheads, Clarke became even more enthusiastic about redeployment.

    The CTC chief, Cofer Black, argued against deploying the Predator for reconnaissance purposes. He recalled that the Taliban had spotted a Predator in the fall of 2000 and scrambled their MiG fighters. Black wanted to wait until the armed version was ready.” I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN,” he wrote. Military officers in the Joint Staff shared this concern. There is some dispute as to whether or not the Deputies Committee endorsed resuming reconnaissance flights at its April 30, 2001, meeting. In any event, Rice and Hadley ultimately went along with the CIA and the Pentagon, holding off on reconnaissance flights until the armed Predator was ready.

    The CIA’s senior management saw problems with the armed Predator as well, problems that Clarke and even Black and Allen were inclined to minimize. One (which also applied to reconnaissance flights) was money. A Predator cost about $3 million. If the CIA flew Predators for its own reconnaissance or covert action purposes, it might be able to borrow them from the Air Force, but it was not clear that the Air Force would bear the cost if a vehicle went down. Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz took the position that the CIA should have to pay for it; the CIA disagreed.

    Second, Tenet in particular questioned whether he, as Director of Central Intelligence, should operate an armed Predator.” This was new ground,”he told us. Tenet ticked off key questions:What is the chain of command? Who takes the shot? Are America’s leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this, going outside of normal military command and control? Charlie Allen told us that when these questions were discussed at the CIA, he and the Agency’s executive director, A. B.”Buzzy” Krongard, had said that either one of them would be happy to pull the trigger, but Tenet was appalled, telling them that they had no authority to do it, nor did he.

    Third, the Hellfire warhead carried by the Predator needed work. It had been built to hit tanks, not people. It needed to be designed to explode in a different way, and even then had to be targeted with extreme precision. In the configuration planned by the Air Force through mid-2001,the Predator’s missile would not be able to hit a moving vehicle.

    White House officials had seen the Predator video of the “man in white.” On July 11, Hadley tried to hurry along preparation of the armed system. He directed McLaughlin, Wolfowitz, and Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Richard Myers to deploy Predators capable of being armed no later than September 1. He also directed that they have cost-sharing arrangements in place by August 1. Rice told us that this attempt by Hadley to dictate a solution had failed and that she eventually had to intervene herself.

    On August 1, the Deputies Committee met again to discuss the armed Predator. They concluded that it was legal for the CIA to kill Bin Ladin or one of his deputies with the Predator. Such strikes would be acts of self-defense that would not violate the ban on assassinations in Executive Order 12333. The big issues–who would pay for what, who would authorize strikes, and who would pull the trigger–were left for the principals to settle. The Defense Department representatives did not take positions on these issues.

    The CIA’s McLaughlin had also been reticent. When Hadley circulated a memorandum attempting to prod the deputies to reach agreement, McLaughlin sent it back with a handwritten comment on the cost-sharing:”we question whether it is advisable to make such an investment before the decision is taken on flying an armed Predator.” For Clarke, this came close to being a final straw. He angrily asked Rice to call Tenet.” Either al Qida is a threat worth acting against or it is not,” Clarke wrote.” CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.”

    These debates, though, had little impact in advancing or delaying efforts to make the Predator ready for combat. Those were in the hands of military officers and engineers. General John Jumper had commanded U.S. air forces in Europe and seen Predators used for reconnaissance in the Balkans. He started the program to develop an armed version and, after returning in 2000 to head the Air Combat Command, took direct charge of it.

    There were numerous technical problems, especially with the Hellfire missiles. The Air Force tests conducted during the spring were inadequate, so missile testing needed to continue and modifications needed to be made during the summer. Even then, Jumper told us, problems with the equipment persisted. Nevertheless, the Air Force was moving at an extraordinary pace.” In the modern era, since the 1980s,”Jumper said to us,”I would be shocked if you found anything that went faster than this.”

    September 2001

    The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The “real question” before the principals, he wrote, was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

    So, in a nutshell, through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, while Condi and crew were spinning their wheels over an armed Predator, the Bushies never launched even an unarmed Predator. The DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

    This is Condi’s version of being “at least as aggressive” as the Clinton Administration? At least the Clinton White House made use of unarmed drones to spy on bin Laden. Condi is blowin’ smoke. The Drone exemplifies exactly the opposite of what Condi claims.

    There’s more on the dithering over the drones revealed in CBS and Fox News reports from 2003.

    Now, let’s go back to the New York Post story for Condi’s other criticism of the Clinton interview.

    She also said Clinton’s claims that Richard Clarke – the White House anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country’s “best guy” – had been demoted by Bush were bogus.

    “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,” she said.

    How can you tell when Condi Rice is lying? It’s when her lips are moving. As Fred Kaplan explained,

    Clarke wasn’t a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton’s NCC, he ran the “Principals Committee” meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

    Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals’ meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

    Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke’s book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

    The Post staff, in their official function as propagandists and mouthpieces for the VRWC, did not fact check Condi’s remarks. That this exclusive was given to the Post suggests to me that Condi didn’t want the piece fact checked; indeed, she didn’t want the general public looking at it real hard at all. By talking to the New York Post she catapulted the propaganda directly at the Right.

    But now I want to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report quote from above. This bit is on page 212:

    The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The “real question” before the principals, he wrote, was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”


    The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4.     Yeah, real aggressive, Condi. Took you more than seven months to hold a bleeping meeting.

    The Principals Committee of the National Security Council was established by Poppy Bush, a.k.a. “41.” Apparently this is a Big Deal committee. Richard Clarke sent a memo to Condi Rice on January 25, 2001, which said “We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network.”

    The “urgent” meeting was held, finally, on September 4. In Condi World, urgent and aggressive mean “dither for more than seven months.”

    Finally, let’s go back to the New York Post story one more time:

    The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

    “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.

    Would it surprise you if I told you Condi is lying? Let’s go back to this page.

    Washington, D.C., February 10, 2005 – The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice – the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration’s policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke’s memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke’s request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

    The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11, Rice stated in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed, “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”

    Two days after Rice’s March 22 op-ed, Clarke told the 9/11 Commission, “there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s a plan or a strategy or a series of options — but all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done. They were done after September 11th. They were all done. I didn’t really understand why they couldn’t have been done in February.”

    Also attached to the original Clarke memo are two Clinton-era documents relating to al-Qaeda. The first, “Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,” was released to the National Security Archive along with the Clarke memo. “Tab B, September 1998 Paper: Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida,” also known as the Delenda Plan, was attached to the original memo, but was not released to the Archive and remains under request with the National Security Council.

    It appears The NSC is still sitting on Tab B, “Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida.” Or else sometime on September 12, 2001, Condi ran it through a shredder.

    Update: More about the “comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda” that Condi doesn’t remember at ThinkProgress. Apparently the 9/11 Commission says she got it.

    As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years …[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]


    Update update:     From the Department o’ Stupid Sheep — Several rightie bloggers, including the Anchoress, complain that “the MSM’ didn’t fact check Clinton. Everything Condi says is, of course, automatically true. None of the sheep bothered to check what she told the New York Post against the 9/11 commission report.