Clinton lied about a blow job.
Meanwhile, Bush's lies have gotten 500 or 600 of our men and women killed. His lies have cost us $87 billion (for the first installment). And they have made us less secure, not more.
Oddball and I disagree a little bit.
To me, the most unforgiveable thing about the George W. Bush presidency is not the Sept. 11 massacre. The most unforgiveable part of his presidency was the way he preyed on the fear, confusion and anger that followed the Sept. 11 massacre to satisfy his fetish for attacking Iraq.
Statements like this:
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."
Bush will end up in hell for statements like that.
Because he knew -- or should have known -- that Qaeda had nothing to do with Saddam.
What follows is an excerpt from Clarke's 60 minutes interview. He is describing a meeting with all the big muckity mucks right after 9/11 (the whole interview is <a href='http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/60min_StahlClarke_transcript.html' target='_blank'>here)</a>.
<span style='font-family:Courier'>
STAHL: You relayed a conversation you had with Sec'y of Defense Rumsfeld.
CLARKE: Well Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq and we all said, 'No no, al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well there are lots of good targets in lots of places but Iraq had nothing to with it.'
STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.
CLARKE: Initially I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.
STAHL: Now what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?
CLARKE: What I said was, you know, invading Iraq or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else, it's akin to, what if Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor instead of going to war with Japan said, "Let's invade Mexico." It's very analagous.
STAHL: But didn't they think there was a connection?
CLARKE: I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection 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 for a connection and there's just no connection.
STAHL: And you told them that?
CLARKE: Absolutely.
STAHL: You personally ...
CLARK: I told them that, George Tenet told them that ...
STAHL: Who did you tell?
CLARKE: I told that to the group, to the SState, the SDef, the AG. They all knew it.
STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.
CLARKE: Yes. THe president -- we were in the situation room complex -- the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said 'Iraq did this.'
STAHL: Didn't you tell him that you'd looked and there'd been no connection?
CLARKE: I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.
STAHL: In other words, you did go back and look.
CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.
STAHL: You did. And was it a serious look? Did you really ... ?
CLARKE: It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'
STAHL: Come on!
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Wrong answer?
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Did the President see it?
CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the President saw it because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Leslie, I don't think the people around the President show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer [to].
STAHL (exposition): {Clarke was the President's top advisor on terrorism and yet it wasn't until after 9-11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to 9-11 this administration did not take the threat seriously.}
CLARKE: We had a terrorist organization that was going after us, al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda and it was pushed back, and back, and back for months.
STAHL: You're about to testify publicly before a committee that wants to know if the Bush administration dropped the ball. What are you going to tell the committee when they ask you that?
CLARKE: Well there's a lot of blame to go around and I probably deserve some blame too. But on January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condileezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a cabinet level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack and that urgent memo wasn't acted on.
STAHL: Do you blame her for not understanding the significance of terrorism?
CLARKE: I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on the Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back, they wanted to work on the same issues right away -- Iraq, Star Wars -- not the new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years
STAHL (exp): {Clarke finally got his meeting to brief about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request, but it wasn't with the president or the cabinet. It was with the number twos in each relevant department. For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.}
CLARKE: I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden. We have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz the Deputy Sec'y of Defense said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the Untied States in eight years,' and I turned to the Deputy Director of [the] CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' and he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
STAHL: In eight years.
CLARKE: In eight years.
STAHL: Now explain that.
STAHL (exp): {He explained that there was no Iraqi terrorism against the US after 1993 when Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate the first President Bush while he was visiting Kuwait.}
CLARKE: We responded to that by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis, saying if you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won't just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it'll be your whole government. It was a very chilling message. And apparently it work because there's absolutely no evidence of Iraqi terrorism since that day until we invaded them. Now there's Iraqi terrorism against the United States.
STAHL: Was there any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?
CLARKE: Were they cooperating? No.
STAHL: Was Iraq supporting al Qaeda?
CLARKE: No. There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda. Ever.
STAHL: You call certain people in the administration and they'll say that's still open ...
CLARKE: Yeah, well ...
STAHL ... that's an open issue.
CLARKE: Well they'll say that until Hell freezes over.
</span>
Another excerpt:
<span style='font-family:Courier'>VIDEOTAPE OF GW BUSH: You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.
STAHL: (exp): {Clarke contends that with statements like that, the President continually left an impression that Saddam had been involved in 9/11.}
[VIDEO WITH CLARKE]
CLARKE: The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it.
STAHL: But you're suggesting here that they knew better --
CLARKE: They did know better.
STAHL -- and it was deliberate.
CLARKE: They did know better. They did know better. We told them. The FBI told them. The CIA told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their deaths in Iraq thinking that they were avenging September 11 when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. I think for a Commander in Chief and a Vice President to allow that to happen is unconscionable.
STAHL (exp): {And he thinks the President to this day misinterprets the nature and the scope of the terrorist threat.}
CLARKE: He asked us after 9/11 to give him cards with pictures of the major al Qaeda leaders and tell us when they were arrested or killed so he could draw X's through their pictures, and you know, I write in the book, I have this image of George Bush sitting by a warm fireplace in the White House drawing X's through al Qaeda leaders and thinking that he's got most of them and therefore he's taken care of the problem, and while George Bush thinks he's crossing them out one by one there are all these new al Qaeda people who are being recruited who hate the United States in large measure because of what Bush has done.
STAHL (exp): {He says that the war in Iraq has not only inflamed anti-Americanism in the Arab world, it drained resources away from the fight in Afghanistan and the push to eliminate Osama bin Laden.}
</span>
What Bush did is unforgivable.
