Friday, March 26, 2004

There is a key point in the Richard Clarke revelations specifically the demotion of Clarke to a deputy position after being a primary in the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations. This made the reporting process for Clark basically a dead end. He reported to Stephen Hadley instead of the principals. This structural mechanism insulated the principals with plausible deniability from any information which Clark's unit developed as Bush 2 had in reality come into office with the goal of going to Iraq from the very first day. They lacked a viable reason so they did everything possible to enable Bin Laden to take the bait and do the job even to the point of training his pilots and having the FBI room with some of the members of the cell beforehand. They had the air force stand down and virtually lit the way to the twin towers.

Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian 3/25 points out:

"One of the first official acts of the current Bush administration was to downgrade the office of national coordinator for counterterrorism on the National Security Council - a position held by Richard Clarke. Clarke had served in the Pentagon and State Department under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, and was the first person to hold the counterterrorism job created by President Clinton. Under Clinton, he was elevated to cabinet rank, which gave him a seat at the principals' meeting, the highest decision-making group for national security."

"By removing Clarke from the table, Bush put him in a box where he could speak only when spoken to. No longer would his memos go to the president; instead, they had to pass though a chain of command of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who bounced each of them back. " --Sidney Blumenthal

The book by Clarke is being spun by the "911 committee members" to be an indictment of the system rather than the Bushies who twisted and thoroughly abused it to their Machiavellian delight. Bush today laughed at not finding WMD in Iraq (at the National Press Club dinner)as if to say "You didn't really believe me when I said all those things last year did you? I just wanted to go to Iraq and subjugate the mideast and don't have the intellligence or diplomacy to do it morally or ethically."

After all we knew he was a Bush when he illegally took over the country on December 12, 2000. We knew he was a Bush when we didn't vote for him.