{"id":788,"date":"2004-03-20T04:15:22","date_gmt":"2004-03-20T09:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/03\/no_one_could_have_ever_imagine\/"},"modified":"2004-03-20T04:15:22","modified_gmt":"2004-03-20T09:15:22","slug":"no_one_could_have_ever_imagine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/03\/no_one_could_have_ever_imagine\/","title":{"rendered":"No One Could Have Ever Imagined"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drip, drip, drip<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation \ufffd and how the new administration was slow to act.
\nThey said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice’s deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.
\nOne official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.
\n. . .
\n“It was very explicit,” Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. “Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in.” Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president’s cyberterrorism adviser.
\n. . .
\n“Until 9\/11, counterterrorism was a very secondary issue at the Bush White House,” said a senior Clinton official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Remember those first months? The White House was focused on tax cuts, not terrorism. We saw the budgets for counterterrorism programs being cut.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not to say that the administration wasn’t plotting any strategy during its first nine months. It was apparently busy tuning up the neocon’s long-standing plans . . . for Iraq<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A former White House anti-terrorism advisor says the Bush administration considered bombing Iraq in retaliation after Sept. 11, 2001 even though it was clear al Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
\nRichard Clarke, who headed a cybersecurity board that gleaned intelligence from the Internet, told CBS “60 Minutes” in an interview to be aired on Sunday he was surprised administration officials turned immediately toward Iraq instead of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
\n“They were talking about Iraq on 9\/11. They were talking about it on 9\/12,” Clarke says.
\n. . .
\n“Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq. … We all said, ‘but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan,” recounts Clarke, “and Rumsfeld said, ‘There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.”‘
\n. . .
\n“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection” between Iraq and al Qaeda, Clarke tells “60 Minutes.”
\n“But the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, ‘We’ve looked at this issue for years. For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection,”‘ says Clarke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There you have it. In Bush’s “war on terror” whether or not something is a judged to be a “good target” has nothing to do with the direct threat it poses to America. What makes a “good” target then? Beats me. An easy target? A target which provides a great platform for the display of American military might? A target which furnishes photo ops for the administration taking the fight to the “terrorists”?
\nThat’s something it would be good for Americans to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drip, drip, drip: Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation \ufffd and how the new administration […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}