Through the magic of TiVo, I'm watching Richard Clarke's interview last night on Larry King Live. Here, he pretty much says what I said he should have said in his testimony…
I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president — here's what happened. Time Magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on Time and said they had a plan.
Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive? Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.
But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that.
The whole interview (transcript here) is pretty good, given that it's being conducted by Larry "I don't prepare" King. Also, for those of you who don't want to sit through the video of Clarke's testimony, here's a transcript of the whole session.
I have to get back to a deadline but here's a thought I need to write down here in order to get it out of my mind for a while…
One of the tricks I learned when I was on a couple of Debate Teams back in the sixties was to seize on one of your opponent's errors — or even something that could be sold as an error through artful interpretation. Everyone gets something wrong…some trivial statistic or arguable fact. So if they're hammering you on 23 points you can't refute, you seize on this little anomaly and you say, "Well, if my opponent can't tell the difference between Oscar Mayer Bologna and Oscar Mayer Salami, we obviously can't believe a word he says about these other 23 points so I won't waste your time discussing them." The idea is to dismiss the entire person rather than address points you don't want to address.
Richard Clarke is a smart guy and given his years of service to multiple presidents, I don't think what he says about terrorism can be quickly dismissed…or should be. Is he right? I dunno. I'd like to hear an actual counter-argument to his charges rather than a wholesale attack on his character. If Clarke was out of the loop, who was in it? I'd also like to see folks stop trying to define this controversy down to "Bush good" or "Bush bad." Right now on CNN, as people talk about Clarke's testimony, the superimposed blurb reads, "Fmr. Bush, Clinton Terror Czar Claims Bush Failed to Stop 9/11." That's an unfair oversimplification of Mr. Clarke's position, and that kind of thinking is not going to help anyone.