If you believe Clark when his says “There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever.”
Would also believe a Clinton appointed Federal Judge that sets a legal precident that proves otherwise?

Or would you believe some one that is on the verge a whirlwind tour of the states selling his book.

BTW 60 Minutes showed there bias inner sole by not telling there viewers that CBS is owned by VIACOM who also owns the publishing company that did Clarks book.

This is a very short list but you know what they say– “seek and you shall find” but you have to seek first not just accept what some book flack is pushing.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/09/11/911.lawsuit.iraq

Clinton-appointed Manhattan federal judge Harold Baer ordered Hussein and his ousted regime to pay $104 million in damages to the families of George Eric Smith and Timothy Soulas, both killed in the Twin Towers along with 2,790 others. “I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, ‘by evidence satisfactory to the court’ that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda,” Baer ruled. An airtight case? No, but sufficient evidence tied Hussein to 9/11 and secured a May 7 federal judgment against him.
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Or would you believe these events all happening under the Clinton?Clark watch. Which at best shows there Law Enforcement strategy” to terrorism is just as incompetant as Bush’s.

*1993: Shot down US helicopters and killed US servicemen in Somalia
*1994: Plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila
*1995: Plotted to kill President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines
*1995: Plot to to bomb simultaneously, in midair, a dozen US trans-Pacific flights was discovered and thwarted at the last moment
*1998: Conducted the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed at least 301 individuals and injured more than 5,000 others
*1999: Attempt to carry out terrorist operations against US and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations was discovered just in time by Jordanian authorities
*1999: In another millenium plot, bomber was caught en route to Los Angeles International Airport
*2000: Bombed the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 US Navy members, and injuring another 39.
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Not enough how about these Iraq Terrorist links

On January 5, 2000, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir ? an Iraqi airport greeter reportedly dispatched from Baghdad’s embassy in Malaysia ? welcomed Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi to Kuala Lampur and escorted them to a local hotel where these September 11 hijackers met with 9/11 conspirators Ramzi bin al Shibh and Tawfiz al Atash. Five days later, according to Stephen Hayes, Shakir disappeared. He was arrested in Qatar on September 17, 2001, six days after al Midhar and al Hamzi slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 216 people. On his person and in his apartment, authorities discovered papers tying him to the 1993 WTC plot and “Operation Bojinka,” al Qaeda’s 1995 plan to blow up 12 jets over the Pacific at once.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F27%2Fwalq27.xml
While sifting through the Mukhabarat’s bombed ruins last April 26, the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter, the London Daily Telegraph’s Inigo Gilmore and their translator discovered a memo in the intelligence service’s accounting department. Dated February 19, 1998 and marked “Top Secret and Urgent,” it said the agency would pay “all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden, the Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.” The memo’s three references to bin Laden were obscured crudely with correction fluid.

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http://tennessean.com/nation-world/archives/03/06/34908297.shtml?Element_ID=34908297

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/889jldct.asp

Journalist Stephen F. Hayes reported in July that the official Babylon Daily Political Newspaper published by Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, ran what it called a “List of Honor.” The paper’s November 14, 2002, edition gave the names and titles of 600 leading Iraqis, including this passage: “Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.” That name, Hayes wrote, matches that of Iraq’s then-ambassador to Islamabad.

*Carter-appointed federal appeals judge Gilbert S. Merritt discovered this document in Baghdad while helping Iraq rebuild its legal system. He wrote in the June 25 Tennessean that two of his Iraqi colleagues remember secret police agents removing that embarrassing edition from newsstands and confiscating copies of it from private homes. The paper was not published for the next ten days. Judge Merritt theorized that the “impulsive and somewhat unbalanced” Uday may have showcased these dedicated Baathists to “make them more loyal and supportive of the regime” as war loomed.

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You seem to like Clarks words so much read these from his PBS frontline interview. Do you see Clinton or Bush culpability?

CLARKE HAD FEW WORDS OF CRITICISM for President Clinton on 60 Minutes, despite having worked at the senior levels of his administration. At least he’s consistent. Consider an interview with Clarke from PBS’s Frontline: Clarke initially defends President Clinton, but an astute interviewer from Frontline with obvious knowledge of the chronology following the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, presses him:

FRONTLINE: Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?

CLARKE: The interagency group on which I sat and John O’Neill sat–we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved . . .

FRONTLINE: But didn’t you push for military action after the [al Qaeda bombing of the USS] Cole?

CLARKE: Yes, that’s one of the exceptions..

FRONTLINE: How important is that exception?

CLARKE: I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn’t have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.

FRONTLINE: Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?

CLARKE: Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole “Come to Afghanistan where you’ll be safe and you’ll be trained”–well, that wouldn’t have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That’s the one thing that we recommended that didn’t happen–the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened.

FRONTLINE: So that’s a pretty basic mistake that we made?

CLARKE: Well, I’m not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. None of these decisions took place in isolation. There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals.

The “conveyor belt” was, of course, never destroyed. But that fact seems not to matter to Clarke, who nonetheless suggests that the Bush administration bears most of the responsibility for September 11. Eight months in Office versus 8 YEARS

Wow it just keeps coming:

Clinton administration diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz charged Monday that one-time White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke blocked efforts to gather intelligence on al Qaeda and torpedoed a deal to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks.

“I was personally asked to brief Condoleezza Rice’s deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on exactly what had gone wrong in the previous efforts to get bin Laden out of the Sudan, to get the terrorism data out of the Sudan, which I negotiated the offer for,” Ijaz told Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.”

He said he also personally negotiated an deal “to get bin Laden out of Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2000, using at Abu Dhabi Royal Family as a proxy to get him out on an extradition offer.”

But Ijaz told Fox:

“In each case of things that were involved in the Clinton administration, Richard Clarke himself stepped in and blocked the efforts that were being made over and over and over again.”

The unofficial diplomat said that if Clarke hadn’t put up roadblocks to obtaining Sudanese intelligence, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 might have been prevented.

He called Clarke’s account denying offers of Sudanese cooperation “absolutely disingenuous; it comes very close to flat-out lying.”

After months of denials from his former aides, ex-President Clinton finally admitted that he personally turned down the offer by Sudan to arrest bin Laden.

“We’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again,” Clinton told a New York business group in February 2002.

“They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

“So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, ’cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn’t and that’s how he wound up in Afghanistan.”

In his book, “Against All Enemies,” Clarke called reports that Clinton had turned down the Sudanese offer “a fable.”

Don’t you have your own blog? You’re posting on mine more extensively than your own. What’s with that?

Ijaz is a self-aggrandizing, born-again right-wing hit man with delusions of granduer and a serious bone to pick with the Clinton administration for dismissing him for what he was. He has no proof of anything but his own word, and that has proven unreliable.

I agree with Luis. Watching the 9-11 commission today, Clark’s story seems generally well-supported. Speaking to Rumsfeld, one commissioner noted that the Clinton administration officials were very generous with their time during the transition. In other words, they were there, ready to brief them on the status of things (like Al-Qaeda) and provide a layout of options available. So did these meetings take place, he asked? Rumsfeld answered that he didn’t have any such meeting, some other people might have…he thinks he could probably name one or two.

It’s been said over the past four years that the moment the Bush team arrived, they began an ‘ABC foreign policy.’ ABC = Anything But Clinton. In other words, it looks like they were relatively uninterested in what Clinton administration officials had to say. Their issues were (as Clarke put it) “frozen in amber” from when many of the same people walked out the door in ’93. Paul O’Neill’s recollections corroborate this — he says that Iraq was on the table from day one.

I might be willing to entertain debate over Ijaz — that is, if he hadn’t been director of Reagan’s SDI. Of course he’s going to come to the rescue of Bush.

In fact I do have my own blog which you very well know. And I also notice niether of you commented on Clarks own words ie,

“Well, I’m not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. None of these decisions took place in isolation. There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals.”

I will be the first to agree Clark is a “hawk” compared to most of the Clinton admin. The above passage tells it all. “People above my rank” Thats Clinton and part of the reason he didn’t act was he’s firm belief in a “law enforcement strategy” vice a military solution.

And no comments on the Clinton judge that set a legal precident for an Iraq/al Quaeda connection, or the Carter Judge’s discovery, both very important pieces of the puzzle.

And Justin is that all you have to offer? “It’s been said over the past four years…….” Who said it? What does that prove other than the ability to pass along rumors?

Justin did you also see Clinton Def Sec Cohen testify that during his time they had proof of the Iraq/al quada connection? Or did you selectivly use your remote.

And just so you are sure of my mindset I think Bush is an Idiot also, he has the right idea, but has failed to implement it correctly. But the choice is clear, Clinton had his chance, at minimum 4 times and blew it, Kerry will use the same strategy with all his multi-lateral non sense and fail also. Does that mean the US should shoulder all the work? No, but using the corrupt inept UN for anything other then sitting around drinking Latte’ is crazy.

Well, I guess that lays waste to any thoughts that Clark is anything but a book shill.

Have you heard the FoxNews tape? A tape that Clark refered to in todays Senate hearing, in his own words given at a NSC press.

What has Clark said, the White House did nothing in 2001 and that in hearing the word al Qaeda Condi Rice looked puzzled, like she had never heard of them.

What does the tape say? In Clarks words, the Bush admin changed to a policy of “pre-emption” and also the recognition of al Qaeda being the target and priority in Feb 2001, ONE MONTH after taking office.

Have you read the Clark book? I’m thru the 4th chapter, in reading you will find as I have said previously, His EGO is and was much bigger than his position in the Admin of both the Clinton and Bush.

I’ll leave with this one question.

If you were Usama bin Laden and were able to vote in the US election who would you vote for.

If I were Osama, I’d vote for Bush. This administration’s actions have radicalized the Arab world. Sentiment against the US has never been higher. Al-Qaeda has everything to gain by having him in the White House to advance their cause. My blog has notes about the Clarke NPR interview which are generally supportive of this.

Leave it to Fox to defend Bush to the end…this is an administration that demands loyalty, and you can’t tell me that there are any senior officials who are going to, without permission, make incriminating statements in public about their employers. It’s part of their job to be on the defensive about these policies! Clarke said this himself — part of his job was to put the “best spin” on what was going on.

Oh you mean Iraq, Iran, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, much of Indonesia, Lebenon, Afganistan, and Pakistan weren’t “radicalized” before Jan. 01? What history, and news reports are you reading?

And how is Fox defending Bush, that was a briefing for various reporters. I agree it was released by the WH for political reasons but that in no way counters Clarks own statements.

About loyalty in the WH, isn’t that the way in any job. If you were to make public statements how your boss didn’t accomplish his job effectivly, at the very least your upward mobility would be hampered, and worst case you would be fired.

And do you know that Terry Gross has been censured on at least one occasion by her boss for not presenting both sides of an issue, and showing extreme left leaning bias?

“In fact I do have my own blog which you very well know.”Of course I do, I said so. I’m simply referring to the fact that you post far more on my blog than you do your own. Usually it’s the other way ’round.

“Oh you mean Iraq, Iran, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, much of Indonesia, Lebenon, Afganistan, and Pakistan weren’t “radicalized” before Jan. 01?”There are degrees of radicalization, and you are well aware of that. Are you claiming that there is less or the same amount of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East today? If so, please show your source.

“About loyalty in the WH, isn’t that the way in any job. If you were to make public statements how your boss didn’t accomplish his job effectivly, at the very least your upward mobility would be hampered, and worst case you would be fired.”Um, I think that’s what Justin was saying–either toe the party line or get fired.

“And do you know that Terry Gross has been censured on at least one occasion by her boss for not presenting both sides of an issue, and showing extreme left leaning bias?”Are you referring to the O’Reilly interview? If so, that wasn’t her boss, that was an ombudsman (Source). As a reader of conservative material, you may not be familiar with the term: an ombudsman is someone who critiques their own news organization’s material. I don’t think O’Reilly has one, and has treated guests with far, far, FAR more bias than Gross did to him.

If it’s not O’Reilly, state the specifics, and cite your source.

And, finally, what is the relevance? Are you claiming that Gross’ bias made the interview matter untrue in some way? If so, specify how, and again, cite sources.

Or were you just trying to lob an ad hominem from NewsMax or Drudge in the hopes that it somehow makes you look right without actually having to be right?

Here’s a publication from the Pew Charitable Trusts showing that there is a deep mistrust of the US in Europe (indeed, much more than before) and that the Iraq war has “undermined America’s credibility abroad.” It also notes that hatred of the US in Muslim nations is pervasive and opposition to the Iraq war is nearly universal. In Jordan, fully 70% think Iraq will be worse off now, handled by the US, than under Saddam Hussein.

Read part 1 and part 2 of the transcript I typed of former Illinois governor James Thompson questioning Clarke at the 9-11 commission. It’s made crystal clear in their dialogue that the press briefing was misleading and at best a half-truth — admittedly not a lie but not exactly the whole truth either. And the President asked him to say those things. Clarke is being very forthright and honest about the whole thing now. The 9-11 commission is very different than a press briefing. He’s testifying under oath. Fox news is trying to discredit him by saying that his book contradicts the press release, but they fail to show in detail why the two are seemingly different — namely that he was a mouthpiece for the President and was asked to “spin it.”