Ijaz on Clarke

Ijaz on Clarke

Uh-oh. Direct contradiction of Clarke's claims . . . from someone who supplied the intelligence which provides the contradiction with specific dates, times, and acts.

Yet another listing of Dick Clarke's credibility gap.

Politicized intelligence . . .

Mr. Clarke's premise that Bush national security officials neither understood nor cared to know anything about al Qaeda is simply untrue. I know because on multiple occasions from June until late August 2001, I personally briefed Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security adviser to President Bush, and members of his South Asia, Near East and East Africa staff at the National Security Council on precisely what had gone wrong during the Clinton years to unearth the extent of the dangers posed by al Qaeda. Some of the briefings were in the presence of former members of the Clinton administration's national security team to ensure complete transparency.
Far from being disinterested, the Bush White House was eager to avoid making the same mistakes of the previous administration and wanted creative new inputs for how to combat al Qaeda's growing threat.
Mr. Clarke's role figured in two key areas of the debriefings -- Sudan's offer to share terrorism data on al Qaeda and bin Laden in 1997, and a serious effort by senior members of the Abu Dhabi royal family to gain bin Laden's extradition from Afghanistan in early 2000.