Oh yeah... more evidence that Condi is a liar

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog has a whole bunch of fascinating fact-checked detail (here and here) on a subject dear to my heart -- what a lying scumbag Condi really is. Unfortunately for Condi, O'Brien takes her up when Condi said: "I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 commission report". What results is an extensive elaboration of the evidence that refutes Rice's claims, point by point -- it's a real eye-opener. I've excerpted lots of these articles but I encourage you to go and read the whole thing.

But one bit really caught my eye. O'Brien quotes it to refute Rice's claim that she was being "at least as aggressive" as the Clinton Administration. But O'Brien doesn't seem to pay as much attention to this prescience on the part of Clarke as I do. I've hi-lighted it -- check it out and decide for yourself.

But now I want to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report quote from above. This bit is on page 212:

The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The "real question" before the principals, he wrote, was "are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time."

The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. Yeah, real aggressive, Condi. Took you more than seven months to hold a bleeping meeting.

The Principals Committee of the National Security Council was established by Poppy Bush, a.k.a. “41.” Apparently this is a Big Deal committee. Richard Clarke sent a memo to Condi Rice on January 25, 2001, which said “We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network.”

The “urgent” meeting was held, finally, on September 4. In Condi World, urgent and aggressive mean “dither for more than seven months.”

As for Clarke not having really been demoted:

Now, let’s go back to the New York Post story for Condi’s other criticism of the Clinton interview.

She also said Clinton’s claims that Richard Clarke - the White House anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country’s “best guy” - had been demoted by Bush were bogus.

“Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some several months later,” she said.

How can you tell when Condi Rice is lying? It’s when her lips are moving. As Fred Kaplan explained,

Clarke wasn’t a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton’s NCC, he ran the “Principals Committee” meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals’ meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke’s book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

As for the claim that Clarke didn't leave a strategy:

Finally, let’s go back to the New York Post story one more time:

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.

Would it surprise you if I told you Condi is lying? Let’s go back to this page.

Washington, D.C., February 10, 2005 - The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice - the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration’s policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke’s memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke’s request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11, Rice stated in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed, “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”

Two days after Rice’s March 22 op-ed, Clarke told the 9/11 Commission, “there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s a plan or a strategy or a series of options — but all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done. They were done after September 11th. They were all done. I didn’t really understand why they couldn’t have been done in February.”

Also attached to the original Clarke memo are two Clinton-era documents relating to al-Qaeda. The first, “Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,” was released to the National Security Archive along with the Clarke memo. “Tab B, September 1998 Paper: Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida,” also known as the Delenda Plan, was attached to the original memo, but was not released to the Archive and remains under request with the National Security Council.

It appears The NSC is still sitting on Tab B, “Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida.” Or else sometime on September 12, 2001, Condi ran it through a shredder.

Update: More about the “comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda” that Condi doesn’t remember at ThinkProgress. Apparently the 9/11 Commission says she got it.

As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years …[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]