QandO

March 25, 2004

Tapped
Posted by Jon Henke

Strange doings at TAPPED, where Matthew Yglesias cites an exchange between Paul Wolfowitz and Tim Roemer, wherein Roemer asks Wolfowitz about a Clarke account of a conversation. After citing the exchange, Matt writes....

You've got to hand it to Wolfowitz -- that was pretty clever. He didn't want to say Clarke was telling the truth, and he didn't want to lie under oath, so he just filibustered with a discussion of whether or not he ever mentions Mein Kampf. But if Clarke's account is wrong, why wouldn't Wolfowitz just say so?

...I can't recall ever saying anything remotely like that. I don't believe I could have.

In fact, I frequently have said something more nearly the opposite of what Clark attributes to me. I've often used that precise analogy of Hitler and "Mein Kampf" as a reason why we should take threatening rhetoric seriously, particularly in the case of terrorism and Saddam Hussein.

So I am generally critical of the tendency to dismiss threats as simply rhetoric. And I know that the quote Clark attributed to me does not represent my views then or now. And that meeting was a long meeting about seven different subjects, all of them basically related to Al Qaida and Afghanistan.

In yet another strange instance, Tara McKelvey writes....

Powell claims, for example, he and his colleagues "were not given a counterterrorism action plan by the previous administration," according to the testimony that's excerpted in The New York Times.

But Powell and his colleagues did have a plan -- it was provided by Albright, Richard Clarke, and other members of the Clinton administration.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.[emphasis added]

The real irony? This selective citation comes from a blog that claims calls the administrations criticism of Clarke "not only...contradictory" but "substantively deceptive".

Uh huh.

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