JUDGE WHETHER GOOD ENOUGH HIT EURASIA.

After a solid week of build-up in the lefty blogs and several days of promotion during CBS's basketball coverage, the 60 Minutes interview with former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke finally aired last night. Some highlights and comments:

Mr. CLARKE: Well, Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And--and we all said, 'But no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And 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 do with it.'

STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.

Mr. CLARKE: Oh, initially, I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in--inn Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.

STAHL: Now, what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?

Mr. CLARKE: Well, what I said was, you know, invading Iraq, or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else--you know, it's akin to what did Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Instead of going to war with Japan, he said, 'Let's invade Mexico.' You know, it's very analogous.

STAHL: Yeah, but didn't they think that there was a connection.

Mr. CLARKE: No, I--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.'

This is the most damning piece of the interview, in my opinion, and good on CBS for not burying it. It's not "news," per se -- in fact, CBS itself reported as far back as September, 2002, that Rumsfeld issued a memo hours after the attacks asking aides to "Judge whether [info is] good enough hit S.H. at the same time." What this interview does do, though, is bring the Rumsfeld reality into stark relief at a time when people are more willing to accept it.

Mr. CLARKE: It was a serious look. We--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.

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: 'Wrong answer'?

Mr. CLARKE: Do it again.

STAHL: Did the president see it?

Mr. 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, Lesley, 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.

The fact that the White House's response to this charge is basically to claim that "wrong answer" wasn't what they said -- much like their "imminent threat" claims -- this is going to hurt, too. They've got nowhere to go here.

Mr. CLARKE: I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in--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 new issues that--the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.

This is something commentators have begun to harp on lately and I think it's the absolute lynchpin of the attack on Bush's defense strategy. Not only do they not know what they're doing when it comes to international terrorism, they patently refuse to contemplate in any terms other than those handed down by the University of Chicago in the 1970's. The budget for fiscal 2005 proposed by the Bush Administration includes over $10,000,000,000 for a missile defense system that doesn't work and probably never will and $46,000,000 for port security. ABC News smuggled nuclear material through the Port of New York two years ago. Are we really worried about people who destroyed the World Trade Center with box-cutters lobbing missiles at us from 8,000 miles away?

STAHL: You think he risked people's lives?

Mr. CLARKE: I think the way he has responded to al-Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe, absolutely.

STAHL: Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11? Showed strength, got us through it. You don't give him credit for that?

Mr. CLARKE: He gave a really good speech the week after 9/11.

STAHL: You don't give him credit for anything? Nothing?

Mr. CLARKE: I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism.

Yeah, "getting us through it" was really the important thing. Because the world was going to end if George Bush didn't tell us to keep shopping.

STAHL: (Voiceover) [White House security official Hadley] also says Clarke was wrong when he said the president pressured him to find a link between Iraq and 9/11.

Mr. HADLEY: We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.

STAHL: Now, can I interrupt you for one second? We have done our own work on that ourselves, and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarke that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.

Mr. HADLEY: Look, the--I--I stand on what I said.

Ouch.

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2004:03:22:09:38