there has been a lot of hubbub these past weeks about richard clarke, beginning with his 60 minutes interview and culminating wednesday with his testimony before the 9/11 commission, and rightly so.
even though others have come out in the past year to shine a light on the bush administration’s agenda or to simply voice serious concerns, they have been medium-sized blips on the media radar, with doubt about their intentions quickly sown… book deals and such. clarke’s words seem to carry more weight, his character harder to assassinate, his long bipartisan service plain to see. he comes across as someone fed-up enough to be honest. his testimony resonates in a way that no finely tooled policy speech or bout of podium semantics ever does, because he says what we intuitively suspect, that yes, the administration is a festering boil, but that it’s a festering boil attached to a diseased beast, the political machine itself.
well, o.k. he didn’t say that exactly, i’m not quoting. that is why i’m posting this actually. there is a whole lot of editorializing on this subject right now, the back and forth is heated, the sound bites whizzing past like rubber bullets. and, as always, if you missed the testimony or the interviews your not likely to get a full picture. so here are some transcripts:
2) on frontline
3) speaking with the guardian uk
4) his 9/11 commission testimony
of course clarke is only one voice, for a real understanding of not only why his testimony feels unique but, you know, the actual issues at hand you might want to check out some of the other speakers, for instance:
1) george tenet, director of the c.i.a.
2) richard armitage, deputy secretary of state
3) rumsfeld
4) powell
6) william cohen, former secretary of defence
now the commission will roll on for a while longer with more heavies scheduled to speak and some very notable exceptions. clinton and gore have agreed to appear before the panel with no time limit (as they ought to considering they are both lowly civilians at this point) whether under oath or not i’m not sure. what about bush and cheney? well, they have agreed to meet with the two heads of the commission, not the whole panel, behind closed doors, not publicly, and for a limited period only, said period decided by them. i guess all the testimony the commission got from airline security personnel, port authority employees, and new york firefighters ought to really shed all the light needed, i mean what special knowledge could the president and vice president of the united states really have to add? christ.
meanwhile condoleezza rice, as i’m sure you’re aware, has refused to testify under oath, for reasons having something nebulously to do with principle. yeah, this is a great instance to stand on principle, “just because”. good choice condi. we all admire your principled stand so much. don’t let that damned commission push you around! the truth is, of course, that she is not legally bound to testify under oath and so unless she’s subpoenaed, or it’s a public relations necessity, she will not. and this is actually par for the course here, which, now that a few big names have sat in the chair, everyone is forgetting. the commission has been resisted every step of the way, having to fight for time, testimony, and documents it needs to do it’s job. the whole thing is sickening… dealing with a VERY diseased beast, no question.
if your interested in the commission you might want to get a sense of who is actually wearing the top hats in this particular circus. the meaningfulness of this whole process might even be questioned i suppose. i find it hard to believe that any Truth will be revealed, at least not with any one who has anything to lose resisting and anyone who has anything to gain pointing the finger. this search for truth will be a great exercise in reading between the lines i would guess. whether any valuable answers will be found, or whether that is even the real point of all this i hesitate to guess.
in any case the commissions web site has a lot to offer. all testimony, including that of mayor bloomberg, governor pataki, people from the intelligence community, contractors, survivors, and victim’s families is offered in transcripts as well as video clips. they offer the submitted testimony of the rank and file, as well as their own initial reports. let’s hope this is real and yields something, however unlikely the diseased beasts track record makes it.