Jesus' General

Leslie Stahl gets it

Those of you who caught 60 Minutes last night saw how former Bush terrorism czar Richard Clarke took Our Leader to task for ignoring warnings about Al Qaeda. You heard Clarke tell Leslie Stahl how we are less secure now than we were before we invaded Iraq. You heard him say that if Bush had reacted to Al Qaeda "chatter" in the same way Klinton had, 9/11 could have been avoided. And you heard the following:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

After all of this, Leslie Stahl finally addressed Our Leader's most important post-9/11 act. "Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11, showed strength, got us through it, you don't give him credit for that," she asked Clarke.

That is when the piece turned the corner for me. Leslie Stahl gets it. All of the other things--the report, the pressure to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, the failure to react properly to the chatter--doesn't matter. It was our Leader's photo-ops, comments and his tough-talking speech that were important.

Thank God, we have reporters like Leslie Stahl out there. Otherwise, the speech, or rather, "The Speech," and the photo-ops might have been forgotten as people focused on these other, more trivial details.

Editing note The General was sure he heard Stahl say, "but what about the speech," however, a transcript posted by that French lady at Sadly, Non! does not show her asking that question. I've updated the last two paragraphs to reflect that.