I don’t make a habit of linking heavily to Salon pieces in my blog, since I figure most of you are also Salon regulars — but I do want to make sure you have a look at Joe Conason’s interview with Richard Clarke, our cover story for today. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is in the eye of the storm right now for his revelations about the Bush administration’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Here’s a taste of the interview.
Clarke on the Bush administration’s mob ethos:
“The Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset.”
Clarke’s response to Dick Cheney’s charge that the Clinton administration had “no great success in dealing with terrorists”:
“It’s possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn’t know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn’t notice.”
Read the rest. Clarke has good, strong answers to every one of the personal attacks the Bush team has thrown his way.
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