 |
|
Richard Clarke just rocked at the 9/11 commission hearings today. He was the only person so far who has said that not only the US government, but he personally had failed the families. He was the only official who has publicly apologized to the families. He conceded that the last time he registered to vote -- in Virginia in 2000 -- it was as a Republican, and that he had voted for Bush. He said under oath that he would never accept a position in the Kerry administration.
And when the Republican commissioners John Lehman (Reagan's former Navy Secretary who employed Richard Perle at his lobbying firm with its own whiff of scandal in the early 1980s, and whose brother Chris, Juan Cole notes, worked in the Office of Special Plans), Fred Fielding and former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson -- lined up, presumably with their faxes from the White House, to attack him, Clarke was unflappable. At one point Thompson tried to imply that Clarke lacked credibility because he had tried to highlight in an August 2002 background press briefing the White House's efforts to counter terrorism. [Copies of the Fox News report on Clarke's background (e.g. not for attribution) briefing were made plentifully available at the hearing today, a point which commissioner Bob Kerrey quipped showed just how "occasionally fair and balanced" Fox is]. Clarke calmly called Thompson's accusations that he lacked integrity for having tried to make the president he then worked for not look totally derelict in that briefing "politics." At which point the hearing room broke out in total sustained applause. Thompson got flustered and said he was just from the Midwest and had never worked for a president inside the Beltway, lah de dah, and ultimately fled the hearing room.
[For their part, the Democratic commissioners former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, former Congressman Tim Roemer, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben Veniste and former Sen. Bob Kerrey never missed an opportunity to remark on their sorrow that Dr. Condoleeza Rice had not been permitted by the White House to testify publicly at the hearings like her former Clinton administration counterpart.]
Word from friends of Clarke is his book is the number one bestseller in the US and has just gone for its fourth printing. That would be since Monday. And that "the White House is taking on water."
Post script: Slate's Fred Kaplan agrees, that Clarke dazzled at the hearings today. I feel like some major turning point has been crossed -- and the whole facade of the Bush administration's toughness in the war on terror is punctured.
Post-script II: As I just wrote a friend, as far as I am concerned, this is not really about Clarke as a person. I take Kaplan and others at their word that Clarke is an egotist who plays hardball with the best of them. But he clearly knows where the bodies are buried, quite literally. He's exposed with extraordinary credibility and insight the fact that the Bushies are totally incapable of understanding the post-Cold war world. That terrorism was not even on their radar. And that after 9/11, the only thing that occurred to them was all they knew - bombing iraq. And now they are stuck trying to hold it together before they lose the next election.
They are goners. Rice has all but resigned. Hadley has been exposed as a spineless pathetic nincompoop who unfailingly yields to Cheney's line. Rumsfeld may well be out next term. Wolfowitz is finished. Powell is out. Cheney is going to croak sometime. Tenet is out. Ashcroft is disgraced.