“Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath,” Frist said in a speech from the Senate floor, alleging that Clarke said in 2002 that the Bush administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida before the attacks.

Frist later retreated from directly accusing Clarke of perjury, telling reporters that he personally had no knowledge that there were any discrepancies between Clarke’s two appearances. But he said, “Until you have him under oath both times, you don’t know.”

Go to cspan.org and watch the video of Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission in its entirety.

I watched the entire testimony, live. I watched as he stated that neither his earlier allegations or the most recent in his book were untrue, but he plainly failed to explain the discrepancy between the two.

IMO, the taped phone interview in 2002, released by the reporter that taped it, shows enough contridictory evidence that Clark at this time is not a credible wittness.

Government ‘failed you,’ Clarke testifies
Ex-counterterror chief apologizes to victims

Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”

There have been discussions about the discrepancy between his testimony in 2002 and 9/11.  Both opposing sides could probably discuss this forever and never agree.

What strikes me the most was the comment from Mr. Clarke



Mr. Clarke was the only person that I know of in the adminstration that apologized to the victims families.

Of course the Republicans counter this with "he was grandstanding".

Our President who ran on the "compassionate conservative platform" has never mentioned anything close to an apology.

Mr. Clarke has show more feelings toward the 9/11 victims families than anyone from the Bush Adminstration.

And for this he gets attacked by the hypocrites in the Bush camp. Shame on them,everyone.

He may even have been right for 8.5 years but if he couldn't get anyone to listen to him, whose fault is it? He never was able to provide convincing evidence. Heck, if the evidence had been convincing the buyers in Clinton's administration would have bought it! Right?

You know, when someone screams "liar" continually without demonstrable evidence over and over, they might be considered to be "over the top".  I just hope that we're dealing with megalomania, not just cynical greed and a political agenda.  Time and the facts may, or may not, tell.

Noone, I believe, is saying 911 could have been prevented, even Clarke, but in all fairness, can anyone really say there isnt some truth to the accusations that this admin may have dropped the ball, ignored the obvious? Sheesh, I think someone like Grisham wrote a novel based on major terrorist attacks on WTC a few years before. Is our government that blind?
( I dont even want to get into the incompetance of response on 911)

The White House reportedly also backpedaled yesterday on whether President Bush pressed counterterror czar Richard Clarke the day after the attacks to find evidence that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved.

Clarke said the meeting occurred in the White House Situation Room and presidential aides said earlier this week the meeting never happened. But CBS News reported last night that White House aides now concede the meeting "probably" occurred.

One issue was her May 16, 2002, statement at the White House when she said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use . . . a hijacked airplane as a missile." Intelligence reports had detailed such plans as much as five years before 9/11.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11 panel, said that during a closed door session Rice revised that statement.

"She corrected [herself] in our private interview by saying, 'I could not anticipate that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,' but acknowledging that the intelligence community could anticipate it," Ben-Veniste said.

"No reports of the use of airplanes as weapons were briefed or presented to Dr. Rice prior to May 2002," said her spokesman Sean McCormack.

You know, when someone screams "liar" continually without demonstrable evidence over and over, they might be considered to be "over the top". I just hope that we're dealing with megalomania, not just cynical greed and a political agenda.

Based on the testimony coming out of the September 11 hearings, it appears that during the Clinton years efforts were made to prevent terrorists attacks from succeeding. But, clearly, there was no strategy for defeating terrorism...

A strategy for defeating terrorism is now in place. It shifts from treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem to regarding terrorists as enemy combatants fighting an unlawful war...

No doubt, it's not a perfect plan. And if Richard Clarke or anyone else has better ideas, by all means let's hear them and discuss them with open minds. But it is counterproductive — and just plain wrong — to let partisanship and politicking interfere with what should be our main task: defeating the terrorists, the ideologies and the movements waging war against all those they have demonized as infidels.

I was going to respond directly and then found an article that comes close to summing up my view on this issue. It it Terror.....Television

Keep in mind that al Qaeda wasn't formed until five years later. Remember that the key conspirator, Ramzi Yousef, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and a second conspirator, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Iraq and was harbored by Saddam — a longtime host of terrorists of many stripes — and where he reportedly cooperated with Saddam's intelligence.

Ramzi Yousef was a Kuwaiti traveling on a Pakistani passport. However, Laurie Mylroie, who publishes the newsletter Iraq News, disagrees. She's the one who claimed Yousef was really an Iraqi agent for reasons too dubious for words.

The Bush leaguers were the Bush political operatives, who sent everyone out except Barney the dog to trash Clarke, even speculating that he might be a perjurer for simply having been a good soldier when he appeared before Congress back in 2002. He said nice things about Bush antiterrorism policy when he was in government. Big deal. The fact that he was not a whistle-blower then hardly destroys his credibility now.

As if, anybody that is not a whistleblower is a liar. That is completely disingenuous. After the trashing Clarke is taking, why would anybody EVER come out as a whistleblower - regardless of the administration or party - if this is what you get subjected to? I thought it would be a good thing to find what goes on inside the government. After Clarke is done repeating the same thing 6 other former administration officials have said, I would have hoped corrections could be made to make us safer. But no. We instead trash the messenger because we can't trash the message.

Linkto the Rams Yousef Iraq "link" someone asked for

How is it that Bush decided to take the longest vacation in presidential history (one month I believe)

The President goes on vacation for a month!. I know this has been IGNORED by partisans, but is not ignorable. Its a statement of disregard, or..?

How would anybody ever know? What s the point of trying to guess what he would have done? The possibilites of what could have happened, including converting to Hare Krishna and drinking draft beer out of Air Jordans, are endless. There is really no point, in my non-factual rebuttal, if tackling that question. I am not a mind-reader.

Let's stick to the topic. Even me - the AD whipping boy - knows enough to deal with the current topic:
Question for debate: What's going on here? Why has Richard Clarke's portrayal of the Bush administration's attitude toward terrorism, Al Qaeda, and Iraq changed since October 2002?
My answer is maybe it didn't because I don't know what he said behind closed doors a couple years ago. And even so, if his choice was to resign or toe the party line, what he said then would likely be different from what he says now because as an administration official, you can't say what you think. You say what the president wants you to say. Now, he's free to speak his own mind. It's a fairly simple premise.

Currently the most important point of this whole episode.... Its hurting Bush's credibility in various polls. IMO, the harder the administration hits Clarke, the more desperate they look.

It's presumptuous and self-aggrandizing of him! He is just imho a small life-time bureaucrat with a Saddam-like ego


You know, when someone screams "liar" continually without demonstrable evidence over and over, they might be considered to be "over the top

I asked for facts (and provided facts) and you provided opinion! You can't make a point by re-spewing the same screed over and over in a debate. Heck, why don't you stop trying to be a politician and try being a truth seeker?  We may not find it, but the search is worth the effort.

It is hard for me to understand where you are coming from when you keep giving all kinds of opinions,but the opposing can't make a point by re-spewing the same screed over and over.

It you are really trying to be a TRUTH SEEKER you sure could have fooled me.

Are the terms:
liar
over the top
self -aggrandizing
small life-time bureaucrat
Saddam -like ego

Are they opinions or facts

Or re-spewing the same screed over and over??????????????

Are you really seeking the truth?????????????

I admire how you can jump on an entire article and dismiss it based upon one word. Also any source that has a conservative editorial policy is by definition is apparently deemed either wrong or a liar before you've reviewed their case.  It's obvious to me that you're not terribly interested in coming to the truth via researching and debating that facts. 

Just one other question for everyone then I'm out of this debate!

Had Richard Clarke gotten the job as Deputy Director of Homeland Security would this book have been written to "tell the truth" as Clarke claims?

Clarke is a paid political operative. Paid in the sense that there is an incestuous relationship between him, Kerry and the partisan media. Couldn't be any more obvious. They are all joined at the hip in their desperate attempts to defeat GWB.
You'd have to be blind, naive or a fool not to see this. Clarke casts virtually no criticism on Clinton, who reigned for 8 terror-attack filled years. But GWB is pilloried because he didnt clean the mess up in 8 months.

History will show Clarke to be one of the biggest political whores of all time once this episode is completely written.

Government ‘failed you,’ Clarke testifies
Ex-counterterror chief apologizes to victims
Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”

[No government can guarantee absolute protection or security from a catastrophic event such as 9/11 occurring period.  What a government can do is give reassurance to its people that they are making every reasonable effort humanly possible to prevent another such attack from occurring again.

Check out some links below regarding government apologies and historical apologies...you will find some interesting articles and also learn that almost all  governments refrain from apologies as it means they have done something wrong, are accepting responsibility, and therefore may be liable for compensating those they wronged.  Talk about bringing a government down financially!

Well, it is interesting, now Condi is changing her story from the "conversation never occured" to "well it was a perfectly logical question"- man- I am loving the way they are self destructing over this one!

Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she had misspoken; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies, and Clarke, had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles.

“Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath,” Frist said in a speech from the Senate floor, alleging that Clarke said in 2002 that the Bush administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida before the attacks.
Frist later retreated from directly accusing Clarke of perjury, telling reporters that he personally had no knowledge that there were any discrepancies between Clarke’s two appearances. But he said, “Until you have him under oath both times, you don’t know.”

RUSH: Cybersecurity? Meaning Internet security?
CHENEY: Yeah, worried about attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology systems we have these days and that an adversary would use or try --

RUSH: Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there.

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

RUSH: He was demoted.

"I would not use the word `out of the loop,' " Ms. Rice told reporters in response to a question about whether she considered it a problem that the administration's counterterrorism chief was not deeply involved "in a lot of what was going on," as Mr. Cheney said on Monday in an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program.

What this is about isn't Condi Rice or Richard Clarke or even George W. Bush. It's about what happened -- finding out what happened. One side wants to find out; the other doesn't. This whole story turns on that simple fact. Why else try to destroy Clark unless what he has to say is profoundly damaging? Liars are usually easily discredited; it's the truth-tellers who need to be destroyed.

I agree that no government can absolutely guarantee the safety of each and every one of it's citizens.

However, as far as the apology goes, I think it has been long overdue by someone inside the government. As to financial considerations, if you recall, we have already offered the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, a financial settlement, to compensate for their losses.

So, with the financial side out of the way, what is the big deal over saying "We are sorry. Please forgive us. We will do everything we can to try and make sure this doesn't happen again."

Seems like such a simple gesture. But one that would certainly go a long way.

Clarke claims, for example, that in early 2001, when he told President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about al-Qaida, her "facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before."

Unfortunately, his timing is way off and the opponents of Bush are making hay of his statements as 'factual" which means the Bush supporters are saying "lies" and neither one is right.

Actually, the White House had the manuscript 6 months ago. They were the ones responsible for the timing as it is they who recently released it.

Whats the problem with his writing a book and launching it now? Surely if he wants his book to have a maximum impact then now is the time to launch it!

The suggestion seems to be that Clarke's arguments are invalid because he wrote a book about them and therefore stands to make some money out of this issue...

What his book has done has been to derail the entire 9/11 process from finding out what went wrong in the system to instead a political fight between who can screw it up less.

Clarke claims, for example, that in early 2001, when he told President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about al-Qaida, her "facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before."

RICE: Osama bin Laden, do two things, the first is you really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA in foreign intelligence and the FBI in domestic intelligence. There needs to be better cooperation because we don't want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory.

QUESTION: Were all of those issues part of alleged plan that was late December (of 2000) and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

QUESTION: So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.

ANGLE: What was the problem? Why was it so difficult for the Clinton administration to make decisions on those issues?

CLARKE: Because they were tough issues. You know, take, for example, aiding the Northern Alliance. Um, people in the Northern Alliance had a, sort of bad track record. There were questions about the government, there were questions about drug-running, there was questions about whether or not in fact they would use the additional aid to go after Al Qaeda or not. Uh, and how would you stage a major new push in Uzbekistan or somebody else or Pakistan to cooperate?

One of the big problems was that Pakistan at the time was aiding the other side, was aiding the Taliban. And so, this would put, if we started aiding the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, this would have put us directly in opposition to the Pakistani government. These are not easy decisions.

ANGLE: And none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was ...

CLARKE: No, that's not true. In the spring, the Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away from the Taliban. So that's really how it started.

CLARKE: No, it came up in April and it was approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.

QUESTION: Well can you clarify something? I've been told that he gave that direction at the end of May. Is that not correct?

CLARKE: No, it was March.

From an interview on WJR in Detroit, October 4th 2000, 11 months BEFORE the 9/11 attacks:


This blows the both the assertion that

a. Condi Rice didn't know who Al Qaeda was
and
b. that the Bush team was not concerned over terrorism.

And I'd assert that the American public is finally PAYING ATTENTION to the 9/11 Commission because of the book, so it couldn't have come at a more opportune time... for the commission, which needs to wrap it up in the next couple of months. And the commission isn't getting screwed up because of politics; they seem to be the least partial group I've seen in Washington!

The question, Moif, goes to motivation. If Richard Clarke truly wanted to make things better from the standpoint of the war on terror, the very last thing he would have done was to release his book in the middle of a Presidential campaign. He's been a government bureaucrat for 30 years, he knows the deal and how it works. What his book has done has been to derail the entire 9/11 process from finding out what went wrong in the system to instead a political fight between who can screw it up less.

However, as far as the apology goes, I think it has been long overdue by someone inside the government. As to financial considerations, if you recall, we have already offered the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, a financial settlement, to compensate for their losses.

If you read some of those links in my previous post to government apologies and historical apologies....you will find that apologies from ANY government do not come easily.

So, with the financial side out of the way, what is the big deal over saying "We are sorry. Please forgive us. We will do everything we can to try and make sure this doesn't happen again." NiteGuy

We will do everything we can to try and make sure this doesn't happen again." NiteGuy

Mr. Chairman, I am no newcomer to the horrors of terrorism. In 1983, I was working for Secretary of Defense Weinberger when 243 Marines and Navy Corpsmen were killed in Beirut, Lebanon.
Later, in 1985, four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro carrying more than 400 passengers and crew. They shot 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer in his wheelchair, and threw him overboard, wheelchair and all.
I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 when the first bombing of the World Trade Center took place.
In 1996, I was out of government when the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia was bombed.
Khobar and all the other terrorist attacks over the years were very much part of my consciousness as I prepared to serve as President Bush’s principal foreign policy advisor and as Chief Executive Officer of the Department of State.
I was well aware of the fact that I was being sworn in just three months after USS COLE was struck in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, taking the lives of 17 sailors and wounding 30 others.
I was well aware – very well aware -- that our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had been blown up in 1998, injuring some 4,000 people and killing 220, 12 of them Americans – the highest number of casualties in the State Department’s history.
As the new Chief Executive Officer of the Department of State, I was acutely aware that I would be responsible to Presidetn Bush for the safety of the men and women serving at our posts overseas, as well as for the safety and welfare of private American citizens travelling and living abroad.
The 1999 Crowe Commission Report on embassy security became our blueprint for
upgrading the security of all our facilities. Admiral Crowe had done an extensive review and made some scathing criticisms of how lax our country was in protecting our personnel serving abroad from terrorist attacks. One of my first actions was to ask retired Major General Charles Williams of the Army Corps of Engineers to come into the Department and head our building operation. We wanted him to move aggressively to protect our people and our installations, including those that belonged to the United States Agency for International Development. And
he did.
At the beginning of the Bush Administration, we were building one new, secure Embassy a year. Today we are building 10 new embassy compounds a year with a hard eye toward security. Many of the compounds have separate facilities for USAID. Additionally, with implementation of standard embassy designs, we have been able to reduce overall embassies program costs by 20% and are now delivering secure new embassy compounds in 24 months as
opposed to 3/1/2 to 4 years.
As the principal foreign policy advisor to the President, I was well aware, as was the President and all the members of the new team, that Communism and Facism, our old foes of the past century had been replaced by a new kind of enemy -- terrorism. We were all well aware that no nation is immune to terrorism. We were well aware that this adversary is not necessarily a state and that often it has no clear return address. We knew that this monster is hydra-headed, and many-tentacled. We knew that its evil leaders and followers espouse many false causes, but have one common purpose – to murder innocent people.
Mr. Chairman, President Bush and all of us on his team knew that terrorism would be a major concern for us, as it had been for the past several administrations.

Let me return to our diplomatic activities. From early 2001 onward, we pressed the Taliban directly and sought the assistance of Pakistan and other neighboring states to put additional pressure on the Taliban to expel bin Laden and to shut down al Qaida.

On February 8, 2001, less than three weeks after this Administration came into office, we closed the Taliban office in New York, implementing the UN resolution passed the previous month.

In March, we repeated the warning to the Taliban that they would be held responsible for any al Qaida attack against US interests.

In April 2001, senior Department officials traveled to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the
Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan to lay out our key concerns, including about terrorism and Afghanistan. We asked these Central Asian nations to coordinate their efforts with the various Afghan players who were opposed to the Taliban. We also used what we called the “Bonn Group” of concerned countries to bring together Germany, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and the United States to build a common approach to Afghanistan. At the same time, we encouraged and
supported the “Rome Group” of expatriate Afghans to explore alternatives to the Taliban.

In May, Deputy Secretary Armitage met with Russian First Deputy Foreign Minister
Trubnikov to renew the work of the U.S.-Russia Working Group on Afghanistan. These discussions had previously been conducted at a lower level. We focused specifically on what we could do together about Afghanistan and the Taliban. This, incidentally, laid the groundwork for obtaining Russian cooperation on liberating Afghanistan immediately after 9/11.

In mid-June 2001, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Sattar traveled to Washington and heard in no uncertain terms from me, Dr. Rice and others, that Pakistan needed to work with us to convince the Taliban to take action on bin Laden and al Qaida. Later that month, we delivered a strong message in Islamabad to the Taliban envoy there that the Taliban would be held responsible for any bin Laden-led attack anywhere in the world. We also met with our Indian counterparts here in Washington to discuss how India could play a greater role in our global fight
against terror.

In early July, our Ambassador in Islamabad met with Taliban Deputy Foreign Minister Jalil to highlight yet again the severe consequences to the Taliban and Afghanistan if bin Laden attacked American interests. Two weeks later, our Assistant Secretary for South Asia, Christina Rocca, held a lengthy discussion with President Musharraf in Islamabad to emphasize that we wanted to re-engage with Pakistan but that the Taliban was the single biggest issue standing between us. During the same trip, she also urged the Taliban envoy to Islamabad to expel bin
Laden from Afghanistan.

On August 16, 2001 we met in Washington with Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Inam ul Haq. Our primary objective was to convey our sense of urgency regarding cooperation on Afghanistan and against the Taliban and al Qaida. We also held a working group that week which included Pakistani ISI intelligence officials and hammered home the same points.

On September 5, we met in Washington with the Director General of Pakistan’s ISI. We sent another tough message on Pakistan’s cooperation with us on the Taliban and al Qaida. We told him that Pakistan needed to take immediate, concrete, visible steps alongside the United States to choke off terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan.

On September 8 and 9, we continued to use every diplomatic channel to change the status quo in Afghanistan, including participating in a group under U.N. chairmanship in Geneva where we and Iran could discuss Afghanistan directly. On September 9, State Department officials were meeting with the Iranians when word came of the assassination of Northern Alliance leader
Ahmed Shah Masood.

During the period I just described, we also put into play, in addition to diplomacy and intelligence activities, some of the ideas Dick Clarke’s team had presented that had not been tried by the previous administration. These activities fit the long-term time frame of our strategy and were presented to us that way by Clarke and his team -- that is, as 3-5 year actions and not immediate actions. If these ideas made sense, we explored them and, if they looked workable, we adopted them. For example, we provided new counterterrorism aid to Uzbekistan because we
knew al Qaida was sponsoring a terrorist effort in that country led by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). We also accelerated the initiative to arm the Predator. In fact, we drove that fort forward so fast we probably broke some records in weapons development. But I will let Secretary Rumsfeld tell you all about Predator later this afternoon. Let me just say, though, that even with that remarkable acceleration, we calculated that armed Predator was not going to be
ready as a weapon to use against al Qaida leaders before the fall of 2001. The Predator was ready in the fall. And we used it, repeatedly and effectively.
Other ideas were under consideration but made no practical sense in isolation. As a
result, we deferred them until our broader strategy was more firm and we could see a place for them within it, or discard them. One such idea was to provide limited military aid to the Northern Alliance. It did not make sense to pursue the idea in late April outside of a broader strategy. That broader strategy would have to coordinate, or at least deconflict, such a move with efforts toward Iran and Russia at a minimum. So we deferred the matter until the broader
strategy was further developed. All of Mr. Clarke’s ideas were examined as our comprehensive strategy developed.
Let me now describe the basic elements upon which our broader strategy rested:

See full testimony of Colin Powell at:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hea...l_statement.pdf

Tenet told the commission, "Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced."

After intelligence agencies began seeing strong indications in June and July 2001 that a terrorist attack was likely, some CIA officials were frustrated when some policy-makers questioned the intelligence. But Tenet, who was briefing Bush daily, "told us that his sense was that officials at the White House had grasped the sense of urgency he was communicating to them," the report said.

Clarke is a paid political operative. Paid in the sense that there is an incestuous relationship between him, Kerry and the partisan media. Couldn't be any more obvious. They are all joined at the hip in their desperate attempts to defeat GWB.

You'd have to be blind, naive or a fool not to see this. Clarke casts virtually no criticism on Clinton, who reigned for 8 terror-attack filled years. But GWB is pilloried because he didnt clean the mess up in 8 months.

History will show Clarke to be one of the biggest political whores of all time once this episode is completely written.

George Tenet, the same day that Clarke testified, contradicted Clarke's "ignore" and "did nothing" statements:

...

These two statements by Clarke are really irking me.  I know that he can't believe them, since he would have been part of the team that "did nothing".

George Tenet had also been asked to stay on from Clinton to Bush.  He and I regularly commiserated that al-Qaida was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration.

Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the director of Central Intelligence stitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration.  We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al-Qaida.

I am equally troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation’s most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001.

Anyone who can find a single instance of Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, or George W Bush Bush uttering the words "al-Qaeda" or "bin Laden" in public between Bush's Inauguration and the September 11 attack...Wertz

So far, as Cube Jockey pointed out, the only real revelations to emerge regarding 9/11 have come from former members of the White House staff publishing what they knew - not from any Congressional testimony or closeted interviews conducted while not under oath. Wertz

During an interview with NBC television, Mr. Gonzales also noted that legally it is not necessary for Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath. He said White House officials are already required to tell the truth.

In the letter to the commission, the White House counsel noted that top presidential advisors never, as a rule, testify before commissions created by Congress. He said that is especially true in the national security area, where much of the advice provided is, and should remain, confidential.

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1105302/posts

On September 11, 2001, nearly three thousand Americans died. Had Clarke's strategy been put into effect (as it would have been were the legitimate president in office), it is probable that they would be alive today.

No wonder Richard Clarke is frustrated.

If Richard Clarke truly wanted to make things better from the standpoint of the war on terror, the very last thing he would have done was to release his book in the middle of a Presidential campaign.

Whether public or "closeted interviews" (testimony) of all current high level White House officials is under oath from the time they are sworn into office, and thus do not have to raise their hand to take the oath again before testimony.  Probably the reason, the only public testimony of witnesses to raise their hands in "swearing to tell the truth" (oath) were former Secretary of State, Albright and former staff member, Richard Clarke.  Now, I suppose if anyone wishes to raise their hand again to reaffirm they are under oath...no one is going to yell, "Stop!"

Reason why Condi Rice's private testimony leads to confusion...she legally doesn't have to swear in again to "tell the truth" as she is under oath to tell the truth period.

KEAN: Our staff statement does include a number of things that are unclassified. We've also had the opportunity to interview Director Tenet extensively in private on these subjects. And he said any time that we need any further questions on these subjects, he would be very happy to accommodate us.

I do urge my fellow commissioners to defer to the director's judgments on some of these very sensitive, very sensitive areas.

Director Tenet, Deputy Director McLaughlin, I would like to ask you to raise your right hands. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

TENET: I do.

MCLAUGHLIN: I do.

We welcome a senior member of the Cabinet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is accompanied by distinguished Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Thank you very much for coming.

Mr. Secretary and Mr. Deputy Secretary, we would like, if we could, to ask you to raise you right hand that we may put you under oath.

Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

POWELL: I do.

KEAN: Thank you very much.

We are pleased to welcome him (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) before us this afternoon. He's accompanied by his distinguished deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers.

Mr. Secretary, Mr.