Can Richard Clarke Be Trusted?

March 24, 2004

It's awfully confusing, all this rhetoric about the Iraq war and who knew what and when. It's only muddled further by the fact that this is an election year. Motivations – on both sides – become suspect. It is my goal to help you cut through some of the bovine scatology and understand what's real and what's not.

 

Let's take former terrorism advisor to the president, Richard Clarke. On the surface, it would appear that Mr. Clarke has been a faithful public servant, serving both Democrat and Republican presidents including Reagan, Bush, Clinton and W. Bush. Keep in mind that his loyalty now seems to be to his publisher. His suspiciously-timed book on who dropped the ball on terrorism comes complete with a 60 Minutes kickoff. This exclusive interview was gratuitously hyped during the NCAA basketball tournament as evidence that President Bush totally ignored the real terrorists in order to attack Iraq. Clarke claimed the president was a “total failure” when it came to the war on terrorism. He boldly proclaimed that on national television in spite of the fact that we routed the Taliban in Afghanistan and captured many of the leaders of al-Qaida, including many of the masterminds behind September 11 th . He completely dismissed any connection between Osama bin Laden and Iraq yet his book tells a different story.

 

NewsMax.com points out that in one of Clarke's chapters in his new book, Against All Enemies , he tells about an Iraqi/bin Laden connection when they teamed up in Sudan to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. “ What was an Iraqi chemical weapons agent doing in Sudan?” he asks. Then he explains, “ UNSCOM and other U.S. government sources had claimed that the Iraqis were working on something at a facility near Shifa. Could Sudan, using bin Laden's money, have hired some Iraqis to make chemical weapons? It seemed chillingly possible.” It appears that all this nonsense about Bush dropping the ball was simply Dick Clarke's American Grandstand.

 

On the very same day as the 60 Minutes propaganda piece, I was watching a special on the History Channel commemorating the first anniversary of the Iraq War. In one part, they described how allied forces annihilated an al-Qaida training camp near the Iran border in order to free up some Kurds to help fight the Iraqis with us. As you'll recall, we also discovered another al-Qaida training camp during that campaign, complete with an airliner on the ground used for training terrorists to take over airplanes. Do you think there's any chance Richard Clarke doesn't know this?

 

Meanwhile, as Clarke was selling books through his 60 Minutes infomercial, demonstrators across the country and across the world were protesting our action in Iraq. Locally, the demonstrations were organized by our old friends at The Nashville Peace and Justice Center. I should remind you who they are. It was almost exactly one year ago that I established a solid link, on the radio and in this column, between the NPJC and the communist party. Although they initially denied the accusations, when I confronted them with irrefutable evidence they admitted once sharing an office and affiliation with the Communist Party USA. Keep that in mind when you see their demonstrations in the paper and on television. Their motivation is not peace and justice. It's a total dismantling of our way of life. They hate Bush, not war. If peace were their primary motivation, they would've opposed Clinton's war in Bosnia.

 

You have to keep all of this in mind if you're to make heads or tails of the news these days. Once you understand motivation, the truth becomes crystal clear.