Reply #113: He's been mentioning for a long time....it's even in his book.....

[FrenchieCat]

written in 2002-2003!

You know what happened when he mentioned it on MTP back in June of '03?

Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence
6/20/03

Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.

But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.

Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842

They discounted his words since he had no proof, and instead called him crazy.....

General Wesley Clark, the late entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for president, is making what critics called a “bizarre,” “crackpot” attack on a small Washington policy organization and on a citizens group that helped America win the Cold War.

In a Tuesday interview with Joshua Micah Marshall posted yesterday on the Web site talkingpointsmemo.com, General Clark gave his evaluation of the Clinton presidency. He said that the Clinton administration,“in an odd replay of the Carter administration, found itself chained to the Iraqi policy — promoted by the Project for a New American Century— much the same way that in the Carter administration some of the same people formed the Committee on the Present Danger which cut out from the Carter administration the ability to move forward on SALT II.”
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/10/02&ID=Ar00100

Wesley Clark's Conspiracy Theory
The general tells Wolf Blitzer about the neoconservative master plan.
by Matthew Continetti
12/01/2003 2:00:00 PM

Yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition," for example, Clark said--not for the first time--that the Bush administration's war plans extend far beyond Iraq.

"I do know this," Clark told Wolf Blitzer. "In the gossip circles in Washington, among the neoconservative press, and in some of the statements that Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Wolfowitz have made, there is an inclination to extend this into Syria and maybe Lebanon." What's more, Clark added, "the administration's never disavowed this intent."

Clark has made his charge a central plank of his presidential campaign. Clark writes in his book, "Winning Modern Wars," that in November 2001, during a visit to the Pentagon, he spoke with "a man with three stars who used to work for me," who told him a "five-year plan" existed for military action against not only Afghanistan and Iraq, but also "Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark has embellished this story on the campaign trail, going so far as to say, "There's a list of countries."

Clark's proof? None. He never saw the list. But, the general recently told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "You only have to listen to the gossip around Washington and to hear what the neoconservatives are saying, and you will get the flavor of this."

You probably get the flavor of what Wesley Clark is saying, too. It tastes, as THE SCRAPBOOK pointed out three weeks ago, like baloney. And sometimes, as in the case of yesterday's interview with Blitzer, it tastes like three-week-old baloney.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/445cqeal.asp

Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to implement Iraq invasion plan
Clark told me how he learned of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece. Shortly after 9/11, Clark visited the Pentagon, where a 3-star general confided that Rumsfeld's team planned to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. Clark said, "Rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to the problem." Clark was told that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for 9/11, had devised a 5-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.

Clark's central contention-that Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to attack Saddam-has been part of the public debate since well before the Iraq war. It is rooted in the advocacy of the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think tank that had been openly arguing for regime change in Iraq since 1998.
Source: The New Yorker magazine, "Gen. Clark's Battles" Nov 17, 2003

Gen. Wes Clark layed out the PNAC mentality in a long article.

Here's some excerpts from Clark's article, "Broken Engagement"

During 2002 and early 2003, Bush administration officials put forth a shifting series of arguments for why we needed to invade Iraq. Nearly every one of these has been belied by subsequent events.
snip
Advocates of the invasion are now down to their last argument: that transforming Iraq from brutal tyranny to stable democracy will spark a wave of democratic reform throughout the Middle East, thereby alleviating the conditions that give rise to terrorism. This argument is still standing because not enough time has elapsed to test it definitively--though events in the year since Baghdad's fall do not inspire confidence.
snip
Just as they counseled President Bush to take on the tyrannies of the Middle East, so the neoconservatives in the 1980s and early 1990s advised Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush to confront the Soviet Union and more aggressively deploy America's military might to challenge the enemy.....
snip
As has been well documented, even before September 11, going after Saddam had become a central issue for them. Their "Project for a New American Century" seemed intent on doing to President Clinton what the Committee on the Present Danger had done to President Carter: push the president to take a more aggressive stand against an enemy, while at the same time painting him as weak.
snip
September 11 gave the neoconservatives the opportunity to mobilize against Iraq, and to wrap the mobilization up in the same moral imperatives which they believed had achieved success against the Soviet Union. Many of them made the comparison direct, in speeches and essays explicitly and approvingly compared the Bush administration's stance towards terrorists and rogue regimes to the Reagan administration's posture towards the Soviet Union.

And the neoconservative goal was more ambitious than merely toppling dictators: By creating a democracy in Iraq, our success would, in the president's words, "send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran--that freedom can be the future of every nation," and Iraq's democracy would serve as a beacon that would ignite liberation movements and a "forward strategy of freedom" around the Middle East.

The neoconservative rhetoric glosses over this truth and much else. Even aside from the administration's obvious preference for confronting terrorism's alleged host states rather than the terrorists themselves, it was a huge leap to believe that establishing democracies by force of Western arms in old Soviet surrogate states like Syria and Iraq would really affect a terrorist movement drawing support from anti-Western sentiment in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html

Apparently for the neoconservative civilians who are running the Iraq campaign, 9-11 was that catalyzing event—for they are now operating at full speed toward multiple, simultaneous wars. The PNAC documents can be found online at newamericancentury.org.

his new book, Winning Modern Wars, retired general Wesley Clarkcandidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, offered a window into the Bush serial-war planning. He writes that serious planning for the Iraq war had already begun only two months after the 9-11 attack, and adds:

I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. . . . I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."

A five-year military campaign. Seven countries. How far has the White House taken this plan? And how long can the president keep the nation in the dark, emerging from his White House cocoon only to speak to us in slogans and the sterile language of pep rallies?
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0342,schanberg,47830,1.html

Was David Brooks “careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic?” David Brooks was careful, all right. You can see how “careful” he was in the passage which slimed Wesley Clark:

BROOKS: The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.
We’d sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh010904.shtml

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize the foreign and defense policies of the Bush administration, but Winning Modern Wars would have us believe that the president dangerously derailed the nation’s security policy and diverted resources from the war on terrorism to the dead-end enterprise in Iraq. He blames Bush for everything he believes has gone wrong, and gives him no credit for anything that has gone right, including major steps toward transforming the US military from a Cold War force to one more suited to the current and likely future security environment.

In Clark’s world, vulnerability to terrorism is all George Bush’s fault. Of course, Bush had only been in office for eight months when Al Qaida struck on 9/11. The threat had been incubating during the Clinton years, but that administration had done little or nothing to address it. The most Clark can say about the Clinton administration’s inattention to the emerging terrorist threat is that "in retrospect, it clear that he could have done more."

Clark is a member in good standing of the "Bush lied" school - an outlook based on the claim that the president and his advisers had intended to invade Iraq from the very beginning, and knowingly deceived Congress and the American people in order to drag them into this unnecessary war. As evidence for this, he cites a 1998 letter from an organization called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) calling on president Clinton to remove Saddam from power. Those who signed the letter included Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/owens/04/clark.html

EXCERPTS FROM HARDBALL INTERVIEW 12/17/04

CLARK: ...I think, you know, a guy like Bill Kristol, what he sees is that Secretary Rumsfeld‘s plan is not unfolding the way that the neocons thought it should unfold in the Middle East. This was supposed to be like a scaffold. You know, you just go in there and carve out Saddam Hussein, boom, the people are liberated. And they‘re all democratic. And then the Syrians jump on board and say, hey, by golly, come and save us too. And then the Iranians and the Lebanese.

It hasn‘t worked that way, because what the neocons didn‘t understand is, that you don‘t get the kind of Democratic reform you want in the Middle East at the barrel of a gun. And they‘re holding Rumsfeld responsible for that. But really, it‘s a flawed conception.

MATTHEWS: That‘s interesting. You‘re the first person I‘ve heard say that, general. Because a lot of people look at it much more narrowly and they say the reason we‘re getting criticism of the general is there aren‘t enough troops there. He said he had enough troops, when really in reality, it was the conception that justified the low troop level. Is that your point? That you did not need a lot of troops, because you weren‘t going to face much of an insurgency.

CLARK: .....One is the point of the neocons, which is not military at all. It is the point of the operation and the fact that you could sort of go in there and lance the boil of Saddam Hussein, get him out of there and everything would turn out OK. And it hasn‘t.
http://securingamerica.com/node/60

More Wesley Clark speaking up about the PNAC plan being reported here...
http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve03/1160usplans.html

Wes Clark really is the man for the job to clean up the shitstorm we are now facing. He knows where all of the bodies are buried. Only Nixon could go to China....and so, it goes!

The front page story in the Sun takes Clark to task for this passage in the interview ?

Clinton administration: broad minded, visionary, lots of engagement. Did a lot of work. Had difficulty with two houses in congress that didn't control. And in an odd replay of the Carter administration, found itself chained to the Iraqi policy -- promoted by the Project for a New American Century -- much the same way that in the Carter administration some of the same people formed the Committee on the Present Danger which cut out from the Carter administration the ability to move forward on SALT II.
The piece in the Sun doesn't just disagree with Clark's point. They portray it as some bizarre or even unhinged misunderstanding of the main currents US foreign policy.

The author, Ira Stoll, got Bill Kristol to say "It's really a little bit crackpot. I don't think Clinton was really following the PNAC script. We called for regime change. Last I looked, Saddam was still there when Clinton left. Maybe he got confused."

Stoll also got Randy Scheunemann --- less publicly known, but an important neocon voice in DC --- to say Clark's comments were "bizarre."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_09_28.php#002044

Andrew Sullivan--HOW LOOPY IS CLARK? The answer, I fear, is that he's Ross Perot without the emotional stability.

The backdrop to the Clark-bashing from the White House and its helpers. This from Charlie Cook's weekly newsletter "Off To The Races" ...
For the White House, it is particularly important that Clark's credibility be impeached as soon as possible. President Bush now has a 40 percent disapproval rating on "handling foreign policy and terrorism." That is without a Democrat with any credibility in national security having thrown a punch. A credible Clark could inflict some very serious damage on this president, particularly after Bush's admission last week that there was no direct connection between the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Saddam Hussein. That was news to 69 percent of Americans, who told Washington Post pollsters in August they thought a connection was likely. The Bush campaign cannot afford to have a credible Clark throwing fastballs at them for the next 15 months, whether he is the nominee, running mate or sitting on the sidelines.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_09_21.php#002019

October 21, 2003
The one they're afraid of
Posted by Mark Kleiman
Nick Confessore at Tapped reports that the Republican strategists he talks to think that Wesley Clark would be the toughest candidate for Bush to handle. That helps explain the rough ride he's been getting in the media lately.
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/wesley_clark_/2003/10/the_one_theyre_afraid_of.php

September 27, 2003
Spinsanity Takes on the Spin Machine
Posted by Mark Kleiman

There's nothing more boring than the game of pin-the-lie-on-the-liar, but Spinsanity does a good job on a couple of stray slanders against Wesley Clark. Don't understimate the importance of this stuff: if the public can be convinced that Clark is somehow untrustworthy, that will put a big hole in his ability to make the "character" issue against Bush.

Remember the punchline of Lyndon Johnson's story: you don't have to prove your opponent has sex with pigs, you just have to make him deny it. It worked against Al Gore.

So far, it doesn't seem to be working against Clark, at least among Democrats; Clark's favorable/unfavorable among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters stands at 49/11 in the latest Newsweek poll. <*> But the Bush forces and their media allies are clearly more scared of Clark than of any other candidate, so expect the slanders to keep coming.
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/wesley_clark_/2003/09/spinsanity_takes_on_the_spin_machine.php

Gene Lyons, Political Columnist and Co-Author of "Hunting of the President," Chats with BuzzFlash About General Wesley Clark
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

How do you think the right wing is going to go after Clark? What can he expect? What advice would you give Clark and the people who are working for him?

LYONS: Well, the outlines of it are already evident. They're saying he's too tightly wrapped, which is kind of akin to what they tried to do with John McCain. They're saying he's a zealot and tends to become unhinged. They're suggesting he's crazed with ambition.

I wrote in a column a couple of weeks ago that one of their lines of attack would be to portray him as sort of General Jack D. Ripper, who was the megalomaniacal general in Dr. Strangelove who was so concerned with his precious bodily fluids. And that's what I think they will try to do. They might go all the way to the edge of suggesting some kind of mental illness. I don't think he's very vulnerable to that sort of smear.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/10/int03221.html