Hawkish Clarke Turned Against Bush Failures

With 30 years experience in the US national security establishment, including high-level positions in the Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton administrations before he served in the second Bush White House, Clarke is no anti-war dissenter. He is a ruthless advocate of military and covert action in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism. This makes his testimony against the Bush administration all the more damaging.

In both his 9/11 commission testimony and his March 28 television interview, Clarke highlighted the difference between the approach of the Clinton administration to an upsurge of terrorist threats and that of the Bush administration under similar circumstances.

In the period leading up to the millenium celebrations in December 1999, US intelligence agencies reported a dramatic spike in intercepts of threatening communications involving Al Qaeda. At Clinton’s behest, his national security adviser, Samuel Berger, convened daily meetings of the highest-level security officials, including the heads of the CIA and FBI, to monitor efforts to forestall an attack. This continuous pressure, according to Clarke, led to the disruption of a planned New Year’s Eve attack on Los Angeles Airport when an Al Qaeda operative assigned to that attack was arrested attempting to cross the US-Canada border near Vancouver, British Columbia.

If an effort of similar intensity had been mounted during the summer of 2001, when intelligence intercepts about terrorist threats from Al Qaeda again began to spike, Clarke insisted, the September 11 attacks might have been disrupted or prevented.

"I do think what Clarke has done is really unprecedented in our history: somebody who served as a national security adviser to the president stepping down and, while that president is still in office, blasting him," he said. "That just hasn't been done before" . . . .

Above links from cursor.org, another fine news summary.

THOSE WHO TOLD

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers three decades ago, cited these people as part of what he sees as a new trend of those who criticize governments still in power:

-- Scott Ritter, the former lead inspector for the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) Concealment and Investigations team in Iraq.

-- Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, whose January book about his tenure inside the Bush administration was based, in part, on classified documents.

-- Rand Beers, who quit as President Bush's antiterrorism adviser to become John Kerry's foreign policy adviser.

-- Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who investigated whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger and later publicly accused the White House of manipulating his findings.

-- John Brady Kiesling, a career U.S. diplomat who resigned to protest the Bush administration's policies on Iraq.

-- Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst on the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

-- Robin Cook, a former British foreign minister who quit and wrote a book saying the threat of Iraq was overblown.

-- Katharine Gun, a British government linguist who was charged under the British Official Secrets Act for leaking an e-mail purportedly from U.S. intelligence services asking for help spying on U.N. ambassadors.

-- Anthony Zinni, retired Marine general and former U.S. commander for the Middle East who has criticized the handling of postwar Iraq.

-- Clare Short, a former international development secretary who resigned from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in protest after the invasion and later said she had seen transcripts of bugging of Kofi Annan's office.

-- Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel formerly assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans who wrote an article critical of the war on the online site Salon.com -- entitled "The New Pentagon Papers."

el - I would add Greg Thielmann. State Department intelligence analyst reponsible for weapons of mass destruction. Thielmann resigned and appeared on PBS Frontline to denounce Bush, Powell and other administration officials lies and exagerations about Iraq weapons of mass destruction.