Richard Clarke on What We’re Doing Wrong on Terrorism
The guy served four presidents, the last two in the capacity of chief counter-terrorism person, until this current president drove him crazy with his indifference to hair-on-fire warnings. But if there’s such a thing as an expert on the subject, he’s it.
Yes, he’s something of a prima donna, an alarmist, and may even be (horrors!) gay, for all I know. Doesn’t matter. He has the one (1) qualification that in this case trumps all objections, including whatever snark-du-jour the Bush defenders fire off in their ongoing efforts to cut him down personally while avoiding his actual arguments. And that one qualification is this: his Cassandra-esque warnings were proven right on September 11. So cut the crap about how you just don’t like his taste in ties, or whatever, and go read what Richard Clarke has to say about how this whole War on Terror thing is going seriously wrong: The wrong debate on terrorism.
July 5th, 2007 at 5:57 am
[…] Ignoring for the moment such complications as the fact that the new Congress that has the responsibility for confirming the appointees will have convened for the first time less than three weeks before the swearing of oaths on the Capitol steps, how will it be possible to achieve the latter part of the suggested solution when a bedrock belief of most of the leaders of the incoming party is that the civil servants who populate those bureaucracies are at best incompetent or untrustworthy because their world view has been polluted by the outgoing administration? Recall Richard Clarke during the first six months of the Bush-Cheney cabal, reportedly “running around with his hair on fire” trying to convince the likes of Rice and Rumsfeld that al Qaeda was a vastly more imminent threat to America than was Iraq. His reward was the exile of his ant-terrorism coordination group to the bureaucratic outer darkness and Clarke, not surprisingly, chose to seek other employment to which duty he reported days before 9/11. […]