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2004-03-30 - 4:28 p.m.

Robert Scheer: Bush Puts a 'Cancer on the Presidency'

In this article in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer quotes John Dean, the White House counsel of Watergate fame, saying that the deeds of this administration are far worse than Watergate, for which President Richard Nixon had to resign in disgrace or be impeached.

Some excerpts follow:

"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."

Dean knows what he's talking about. He was the one who dared tell Nixon in 1973 that the web of lies surrounding the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters had formed "a cancer on the presidency." When Dean went public about that conversation, the Nixon White House smeared him as a liar. Fortunately, the conversation had been taped, and Dean was vindicated.

The dark side of the current White House was on full display last week when top officials of the Bush administration took to the airwaves to destroy the credibility of a man who had honorably served presidents Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes.

The character assassination of Richard Clarke, the former White House anti-terrorism chief, was far more worrisome than Nixon's smears of Dean because it concerned not petty crime in pursuit of partisan political ambition but rather the attempt to deceive the nation and the world as to the causes of the 9/11 assault upon our national security — and to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.

...

This is an administration that has been dominated by the neoconservative ideologues who condemned the logical restraint of the first Bush administration on foreign policy as a betrayal of the national interest.

These neocons have made a horrible mess of things, but that gives them no pause. They went to war with a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and few connections to terrorism — but have coddled Pakistan, which sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda and which recently was revealed as the source of nuclear weapons technology for North Korea, Iran and Libya.

The president's team is wrong to believe its outrageous lies can continue to lull a gullible public. Nixon's lies won him a second election, but then he lost the country.

Bush smiles better than Nixon, but when the lies are exposed, the smile turns into a character-revealing smirk. That happened last week when the White House released photos of a skit, performed for the amusement of jaded media heavyweights, in which the president pretended to look under his desk for the missing weapons of mass destruction. This may have amused his cynical audience, but to the general public, the carefully lip-synced policy pronouncements of the man who cried wolf has morphed into a sick joke.

To read the whole article, go here.

2004-03-28 - 11:27 a.m.

Playing into al-Qaida's hands

Here's an excerpt from Richard Clarke's new blockbuster book, Against All Enemies, from this editorial in the San Jose Mercury News.

The excerpt focuses on the administration's actions after the terrorist attacks, and reflects Clarke's growing frustration with the way the Bush Administration is "playing into al-Qaida's hands."

Follow the link to read the whole long excerpt, but here are a few excerpts from it:

Beers called from the White House months later and asked if he could stop by my house for a drink and some advice. "Randy, since when have you started calling before you dropped by? See you in a few minutes." We had been giving each other advice and counsel for years, but I sensed that there was something wrong, maybe there was new information about another planned Al-Qaida attack. I sat on the stoop of my old Sears catalog house and thought back to the night 12 years earlier when I had been sitting there drinking Lagavulin and cursing the CIA for saying that Iraq would not invade Kuwait. Older now and off scotch, I opened a bottle of pinot noir... When Beers sat down next to me his first words were, "I think I have to quit... They still don't get it.

"Insteada goin' all out against Al-Qaida and eliminating our vulnerabilities at home, they wanna... invade Iraq again. We have a token U.S. military force in Afghanistan, the Taliban are regrouping, we haven't caught bin Laden, or his deputy, or the head of the Taliban. And they aren't going to send more troops to Afghanistan to catch them or to help the government in Kabul secure the country. No, they're holding back, waiting to invade Iraq. Do you know how much it will strengthen Al-Qaida and groups like that if we occupy Iraq? There's no threat to us now from Iraq, but 70 percent of the American people think Iraq attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. You wanna know why? Because that's what the administration wants them to think!"...

Randy continued. "Worse yet, they're using the war on terror politically. You know that document from Karl Rove's office that someone found in the park? Remember how it said the Republicans should run for election on the war issue? Well, they did. They are doing 'Wag the Dog'! They ran against Max Cleland, saying he wasn't patriotic because he didn't agree 100 percent with Bush on how to do homeland security. Max Cleland, who lost three of his four limbs for this country in Vietnam!" Beers had lost hearing in one ear in Vietnam, where he had served two tours as a Marine. "I can't work for these people, I'm sorry. I just can't."

Beers resigned....

...

The problem was that many of the important issues, like terrorism, like Iraq, were laced with important subtlety and nuance. These issues needed analysis and Bush and his inner circle had no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already knew the answers, it was received wisdom....

...

Although Bush had heard about Al-Qaida in intelligence reports before the attack he had spent little time learning about the sources and nature of the movement. His immediate instinct after the attacks was, naturally, to hit back. His framework, however, was summed up by his famous line "you are either with us or against us" and his early focus on dealing with Iraq as a way of demonstrating America's power. I doubt that anyone ever had the chance to make the case to him that attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement. Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of advisers who alone are the people whose views he respects and trusts.

...

Such efforts may or may not have succeeded, but one thing we know they would not have done is inflame Islamic opinion and further radicalize Muslim youth into heightened hatred of America in the way that invading Iraq has done.

...

Nothing America could have done would have provided Al-Qaida and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting, "Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq."

This is just a taste of the article, which is just a taste of the book. Go here to read the whole excerpt, and better yet, buy the book. Mine is on its way.

2004-03-26 - 10:07 p.m.

Insiders offer unflattering accounts of Bush's decision-making style

Back in 2000, it was easy to see that George W. Bush was probably the most unqualified candidate for President we've ever had in this country. If it wasn't for his name, he'd have never come close to even being considered.

After several failed oil ventures, where he'd been bailed out by his father's rich friends, he finally sold some insider stock and got in on a syndicate to buy the Texas Rangers.

I'm sure he'd have been a much happier man just to remain as the greeter for the Texas Rangers baseball team, attending all the games, and the country would have been a lot happier too.

I've always wondered how people could vote for such a man to be their president. I guess a lot of people just got bored with peace and prosperity under Clinton, and thought it didn't really make any difference who was the President. He seemed a nice enough man.

We've had to learn a hard lesson about that, now that our country is in danger of going bankrupt after squandering the surplus on those who needed it least, and has already become the most hated nation in the world after being the most admired.

Plus, we're in danger of being driven out of Iraq, in a war we should never have been in, and only are in because of the deceit and arrogance of our leaders, a war that is a diversion from the "war on terrorism" and has stretched our resources very thin and allowed al Qaida to survive and grow more dangerous. And most of the hard-won social gains of the past half century have been nearly lost in the process.

If we survive this administration's incompetence, we'll have a very difficult time just getting back to where we were before in terms of quality of life.

Here's an article by Ron Hutcheson of the Knight Ridder Newspapers which explores the management style of this president, which may have led to the trouble this country is in.

Some excerpts follow:

WASHINGTON - Accounts from insiders in the Bush White House describe a tightly controlled, top-down organization that pushes a predetermined agenda, shuns dissenting views and discourages open debate.

Tell-all books from former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as well as accounts from other administration insiders, shed light on President Bush's decision-making style. Critics say the flip side of the legendary discipline at the Bush White House is a near-complete disregard for alternative opinions that sometimes leads to trouble.

In Clarke's view, Bush's reliance on a small circle of aides blinded the president to threats from al-Qaida terrorists and the negative consequences of invading Iraq. O'Neill said the tightly held decision-making process foreclosed any meaningful discussion about the impact of the bigger federal deficits that resulted from Bush's tax cuts.

Their complaints about the lack of robust internal debate echo the conclusions of some presidential scholars who study White House decision-making.

"George Bush tends to make decisions on the basis of hunch and intuition, and then pulls together groups that confirm his decisions," said Paul C. Light, the director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center. "The only people who are invited to be on the team are people who agree with him."

...

White House officials bristle at suggestions that Bush has locked himself in an echo chamber with like-minded advisers. They attack Clarke and O'Neill as men with oversized egos and distorted views of how the White House works. The White House didn't respond to two requests for comment about this article.

...

DiIulio, who left academia to head the president's office of faith-based initiatives, complained in his parting shot that the Bush White House paid far more attention to politics and message management than policy.

"In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," he wrote in a memo published by Esquire magazine. Under pressure from the White House, DiIulio later recanted his criticism.

...

Still, some Bush loyalists concede that there is some truth in saying White House decision-making is often a closed-loop process. One administration official, who insisted on anonymity to speak frankly, said he and other top Bush aides sometimes displayed a "holier than thou mentality" that shut out alternative views.

...

Clarke, who charges that Bush failed to grasp the seriousness of the terrorist threat before Sept. 11 and treated it as a low priority, said the president's results-oriented approach discouraged a full discussion of complex issues.

"Bush and his inner circle had no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already know the answers, it was received wisdom," he wrote in "Against All Enemies," his account of his service in the Clinton and Bush administrations.

"I doubt that anyone ever had the chance to make the case to him that attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic-terrorist movement," Clarke added. "Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of advisers who alone are the people whose views he respects and trusts."

O'Neill, who met weekly with Bush when he headed the Treasury Department, offered similar criticism in "The Price of Loyalty," his collaboration with journalist Ron Suskind. Speaking through Suskind, O'Neill concluded that Bush is "cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything."

O'Neill said Bush's Cabinet meetings were little more than scripted events to promote White House policy, with no real debate.

Go here to read the whole article.

2004-03-24 - 3:58 p.m.

Clarke's testimony at the 9/11 Commission hearings

I spent most of today listening to the 9/11 Commision hearings on NPR. For those of you who missed it, you missed the excellent public testimony of former Counter Terrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, whose just released book, Against All Enemies, has gotten great public attention (my copy is on its way).

After an emotional apology to the surviving families of those lost in the 9/11 attacks, Clarke stood his ground and issued a strong case against the Bush Administration, who neglected the terrorist threat in the months before 9/11.

When John F. Lehman, the former Secretary of the Navy, brought up Iraq, for the first time in 15 hours of Clarke's testimony, asking why he hadn't said that he felt the president was so wrong about Iraq before now (in his book).

Clarke calmly replied, "No one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. By invading Iraq, the president has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Silence followed, as this statement sunk in, underlying this idea which is finally gaining traction in the media.

Here's the transcript of the testimony from the New York times.

And here's Clarke's emotional opening statement on page 45:

I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurance. I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness. With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll be glad to take your questions.

Here's the New York Times story about today's testimony.

And here are some more excerpts:

"George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the Al Qaeda threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials," Mr. Clarke said, referring to the director of central intelligence, who testified earlier today. "But although I continue to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way," Mr. Clarke said of his time in the Bush administration.

Mr. Clarke has asserted, in his book and recent interviews, that President Bush underestimated the danger from Al Qaeda, was too slow to pursue it after 9/11 and was preoccupied with finding a link between the attacks and Iraq.

...

Mr. Clarke recalled that, in the early months of the Bush administration after he had raised alarms about the threat of terrorism, he and his counterterrorism security group were told to take up their concerns initially with a committee below cabinet level — not the cabinet-level gathering he had requested.

The relegation to a less influential group slowed the entire process "enormously, by months," Mr. Clarke said. And by the time he and his security group were finally ready for a cabinet-level or "principals meeting" in July, time was running out — although no one knew it then.

"The principals' calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them in August," Mr. Clarke recalled. "So we couldn't meet in August, and therefore the principals met in September."

Eventually, Mr. Clarke said, he grew too frustrated with his secondary status to continue.

"My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem," Mr. Clarke said. "And I thought, if the administration doesn't believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there's an urgent problem, and if it's unprepared to act as though there's an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job."

Mr. Clarke left the Bush administration in 2003.

And you can go here to read the transcript of tonight's Larry King interview with Richard Clarke.

And you can listen to an interview with Richard Clarke on Fresh Air Online here.

2004-03-21 - 12:43 p.m.

Don't Miss 60 Minutes Tonight

Tonight on 60 Minutes, former Bush Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke blows the whistle on the Bush Administration's distorted priorities on terrorism.

Here's an excerpt:

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

If you missed it, you'll probably be able to catch it here.

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