Both Lieberman and Biden state that Clarke's assertions are not only false, but devoid of fact.
They did? Source?
Clinton ignores terrorism for 8 years,
"Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations--meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives."
Glad someone was minding the store in December, 1999.
I guess Richard Clarke, the latest Daniel Ellsberg wannabe, will have his moment in the sun.
Daniel Ellsberg was a Vietnam War veteran who initially supported the war but then turned against it. In 1971 he leaked the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971. The documents revealed, among other things, that the government had planned to go to Vietnam even when president Lyndon Johnson was promising not to, and that there was no plan to end the war.
Lying to the people in order to manipulate the country into a war.....hhmmm......call me crazy, but I'm starting to see a pattern here.
The US is on the same moral plane with two totalitarian states who were or are avowed enemies of the United States?
That wasn't really his argument. I think his argument was more about double standards, not moral equivalency.
most of the CIA (including its director) has pretty high confidence that there was a long-standing link between the secular and the religious totalitarians [i.e., between Saddam and Bin Laden]. Why wouldn't there be? In fact, UBL all-but-mentions Saddam by name in his Declaration of War on the US, essentially reiterating the longstanding Arab tradition (couched this time in religious Islamic terms) that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
How do you know what "most of the CIA" thinks? And what kind of "long-standing link"?
Here is Bin Laden's Declaration of War. There's no mention of Saddam, either directly or indirectly.
The Czech intelligence continues to believe that Atta was [in Prague] to contact a bag man from the Mukhabarat.
How do we know this? And on what basis does Czech intelligence purportedly still hold this finding? Because a man who looks like Atta and an Iraqi gov official supposedly did lunch? I'm not claiming there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda; I just haven't seen it.
I think it's fair to say that President Bush did not react strongly enough to terrorism prior to 9-11. So what?
Protecting the nation from all enemies foreign and domestic should be job one. The picture that emerges from reading James Bovard, Richard Clarke, Karen Kiatkowski and quite a few others is that the Bush team were alseep at the switch. These are serious allegations with factual evidence that cannot be dismissed as just the plaintive whining of leftwing Gore supporters who just hate America first.
Considering the public opposition to invading Afghanistan and Iraq AFTER 9-11,
Public opposition? On the contrary, the American people supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by substantial majorities. 80% in favor of attacking the Taliban, about 65% in favor of attacking Iraq.
No, failure to stop the attacks rests squarely with the Clinton Administration
Regardless of what Clinton did, or Carter and Stansfield Turner did, or the Church Committee did way back whenever that supposedly hamstrung our intelligence agencies, it is uncontroverted that our intelligence agencies were picking up intel in the spring and summer of 2001 that the US would be attacked. Blaming Clinton for the failure of the political leadership in the summer of 2001 doesn't cut it, no matter how much David Horowitz beats the "blame Clinton" drum.
I've been watching Soros and other anti-war folks make this claim for over a year, and I have yet to see them demonstrate that a single person in the Administration ever claimed that Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Not sure if anyone ever specifically used the I-word, but that sure was the picture that he, Cheney, Rice and and Rummy painted for us - flasely, as it turned out.
In a Sept. 7, 2002, news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Bush said: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon."
The International Atomic Energy Agency stated that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist. "There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," stated Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman. "We've never put a time frame on how long it might take Iraq to construct a nuclear weapon in 1998," said the spokesman of the agency charged with assessing Iraq's nuclear capability for the United Nations.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," said the president, defending his administration's case that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.
Well, I suppose some truthful evidence might be nice, but instead we got claims about Niger uranium, aluminum tubes, a Saddam-Al Qaeda conspiracy, and a six-month windows til Saddam gets Nukes. All BS.
state that Clarke's assertions are not only false, but devoid of fact. 
