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Summary: Poll: Clarke Testimony is Blow to Bush
Review: Blow For BushPublic confidence in the president's handling of homeland security has been damaged by the testimony of former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to the 9/11 panel this week, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll.
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Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: This has to be the best book ever written exposing Bush's most important failures driven by his idealogy.
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Summary: Revelations from a patriot and a brave man
Review: This book is an eye opener. Clarke is probably the nation's leading expert on fighting terrorism. The book is full of relevant, chilling detail about how America dropped the ball. Naturally the Bush people are attacking it, since they are up for re-election, but the book does Clinton no favors either. Clarke has written a masterpiece. It should be required reading for all college freshmen.
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Summary: A clear, concise and wholly believable indictment of Bush
Review: The book is a page turner that is stunning in the detail of just how horribly the Bush administration has handled intelligence information and advice before and after 9/11. Exceptional! I haven't enjoyed reading a kiss and tell book as much as this since reading the Pentagon Papers.
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Summary: Clarke Tells the Truth...and Gets Pummelled for It
Review: Did the Republican National Committee, Fox News or right-wing talk radio arrange this savaging of Richard Clarke on Amazon's web site? Richard Clarke is to be commended for exposing the mistakes and misdeeds of the Bush administration. America is less safe today than it was before September 11 because Bush and his team decided to divert resources from the war on terrorism to his war on Iraq. The administration and the right wing cannot win on the merits of the policy discussion, so of course you all can't wait to launch the ad hominem attacks on Clarke to divert attention from the real issues. Did any of you even read the book?
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Summary: Mr. Clarke's Revelations
Review: I took at wait and see attitude prior to reading this book. I am not a fan of Junior (Bush) and for the life of me how the Republicans could ordain a fool and idiot in lieu of the likes of Sen. McCain is beyond my comprehension, so we got what we were asking for. To simply discount 30 years of experience on this specific subject, especially since the WH is now back tracking on their previous attacks, in realistic in every sense. I have noted nothing in this perception of what Mr. Clarke experienced during his tenure in mostly Republican administrations that would suggest any partisanhip on his part. In fact, the turf wars he exposes are not new to anyone who has any understanding of human nature and in politics. I applaud Mr. Clarke for giving us HIS insight into the inner workings of past administrations. Remember, this is his writing of what he experienced. No one, not the FBI or CIA have come forward to question what he has written. Only the WH is guilty of slandering an American patriot for what he believes is the truth. As for one readers suggestion that Mr. Clarke is a traitor, remember that Mr. Armitage and Colin Powell were involved with the illegal Iran Contra affair, Mr Armitage slipping out of the perjury noose by the skin of his teeth.
www.flipthemoff.com
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Summary: Finally -The Truth
Review: I am glad someone had the nerve to stand up to the Right Wing Machine which now appears to be leaking oil, and will probably blow a gasket soon due to the intense pressure coming from all sides. It is our constitutional right to find out what happened prior to and right after September 11, 2001, since contrary to their beliefs, they happen to work for US. If the radical right wing can prove that they were utilizing every method available to deter and eliminate terrorism, then that is acceptable. So far, they have not, so Richard Clarke's book is the only testimony we have to base our beliefs of what happened behind closed doors at the White House during this historic time.
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Summary: TO PSYCHO LIBS: THIS IS FRAUD, A COLLUDING FOR PERSONAL GAIN
Review: Myth: The Administration did not treat the intelligence chatter about an imminent attack during the spring and summer of 2001 with sufficient urgency; Principals did not "go to battle
stations." The Facts: • The President and senior Administration officials were
very concerned about the threat spike during the spring and summer of 2001. • The President and his NSC Principals received intelligence reports about the intelligence "chatter" during this period, but none of the intelligence was specific as to time, place, or manner, and was focused overseas. • The Government's interagency counterterrorism crisis management forum (the Counterterrorism Security Group, or "CSG"), chaired by Dick Clarke, met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period. The CSG was at "battle stations." If Dick Clarke or other members of this group needed anything, they had immediate and daily access to their superiors. Dick Clarke never suggested that the President or the Principals needed to intervene to take any immediate action on these threats. • Dick did not ask to brief the President on the al-Qaida threat during this period or at any other time. Instead, in the middle of the al-Qaida threat period, Clarke asked to brief the President, but on cybersecurity, not al-Qaida. He did so. • Formal, in-person meetings among Principals were not required; unlike President Clinton, President Bush met every morning with his Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet for an intelligence briefing. Secretary Card, Dr. Rice, and the Vice President sat in on the briefings. The threat posed by al-Qaida and the need for a response was discussed regularly at these high-level meetings, as well as in frequent, regular discussions between Dr. Rice and Tenet. Dr. Rice and Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld also have a 7:15 am phone call every morning and talk frequently during the day, and in this period they discussed actions to respond to the threat during these calls. • Although the threats were focused overseas, in July, Dr. Rice specifically directed Dick Clarke and his CSG to meet to consider possible threats to the homeland and to coordinate actions by domestic agencies, including the FAA, FBI, Secret Service, Customs, Coast Guard, and Immigration, to increase security and surveillance. During the Summer of 2001, FAA and FBI issued numerous terrorist threat warnings, including a warning about "the potential for a terrorist operation, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States." Security at federal buildings also were reviewed for vulnerabilities. Overseas, we also disrupted terrorist cells worldwide, significantly increased security at our embassies, and directed US Naval vessels to leave high-risk ports in the Middle East and heighten security at military facilities.
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Summary: ATTENTION LIBS: CLARKE IS USING YOUR STUPIDITY AGAINST YOU!!
Review: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fuming U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice accused former counter-terrorism aide Richard Clarke on Wednesday of shifting positions from backing President Bush's war on terrorism to now questioning it. Clarke has accused Bush of a fixation on Iraq but Rice said Clarke did not raise those concerns with her. She said after his resignation 13 months ago, she invited him to lunch three weeks before the start of the U.S.-led war against Iraq to thank him for his years of service. Clarke had "not a word about concerns that Iraq was going to somehow take us off the path of the war on terrorism. It would've been easy to do, kick the others out, close the door, say 'I just want you to know I think you're making a mistake.'
He didn't do it," she told reporters in her West Wing office.
Rice, in normal circumstances an even-keeled top White House aide, was unusually incensed during a half-hour briefing for reporters in her West Wing office, as she castigated her former employee. She also went on television to make her case. Her comments reflected ongoing White House frustration with Clarke, who has threatened the underpinning of Bush's re-election strategy as an activist in the war on terrorism. Clarke has dominated news cycles this week with a book, interviews and public testimony accusing Bush of failing to act on the threat of al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and for being fixated on Iraq. To underline her case that the Bush administration was acting on the threat, Rice read from a letter from Clarke on Sept. 15, 2001, in which Clarke detailed meetings from the previous June and July about preparations being taken to prepare for the possibility of a "spectacular al Qaeda terrorist attack." MEETING WITH OFFICIALS "We asked that they take special measures to increase security and surveillance," Clarke wrote of a July 5, 2001, meeting with FBI, Secret Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Customs, Coast Guard and Immigration officials. The White House has gone to great lengths to try to discredit Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism czar, by accusing him of being a disgruntled former employee who did not get a promotion and whose best friend is a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Rice said Clarke's criticism expressed in his book, in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview and testimony on Capitol Hill, were directly opposite to what he told reporters in an August 2002 briefing. Clarke said in testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration considered terrorism important but not urgent, while the previous Clinton administration, for which he also served, considered it a top priority. "There's two very different pictures here, and the fact of the matter is these stories can't be reconciled," Rice said. "Either we were ignoring the threat, or now it's changed that it was important but not urgent, or we were actually responding to the things that he actually suggested, which is what he said in the August 2002 interview." Rice described Clarke as a sometimes difficult employee who was "too busy" to come to some meetings she chaired until she finally demanded he appear.
"I know how to manage people, and I asked him to come once. We continued to have a problem, I asked him to come twice. We didn't have a problem after that," she said.
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Summary: American Hero!
Review: Richard Clarke bravely tells the unvarnished truth about thhis Administration's lack of focus on terror, knowing full well he would be the target of an all-out attack by the White House. Those here giving this book only a single star obviously 1) have not read it, and 2) are right-wing cronies. I am grateful for the quiet dignity with which he presents his case, and I hope he sells millions of copies.
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