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By Elton Beard There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't. |
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| ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE |
| Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
Carefully Practice to Deceive.
One Republican talking point currently making
the rounds has the farsighted Bush people, even prior to 9/11, so dedicated to fighting
terrorism that they actually increased the CIA's anti-al Qaeda budget five-fold - the
implication being that they did everything they could to prevent the attack, but even
their greatly enhanced effort proved to no avail.
Two of the RNC's more prominent liberal-media operatives have recently been pushing this line.
First comes David Brooks of the New York Times (where, fortunately for him, factuality is
not
a job requirement), in an Op-Ed entitled
"See Dick Spin":
That was the Clarke who expressed frustration at the glacial pace of the pre-9/11 antiterror policy process, but who also, in 2001, sent out e-mail praising the White House for alerting agencies to a possible attack, and who praised the Bush team for "vigorously" pursuing the Clinton strategy while deciding to quintuple the C.I.A.'s anti-Qaeda budget.
Hot on Brooks' heels is George F. Will, who tells a similar tale in a Washington Post
piece today,
"His Own Worst Critic",
but in a higher-pitched voice:
By the eighth day Clarke was telling Tim Russert that the difference is that Clinton did "something" whereas Bush did "nothing." Nothing except, among other things, authorizing a quadrupling of spending for covert action against al Qaeda.Quadruple, quintuple, what's the diff? Facts apparently don't much matter on the Washington Post's Op-Ed pages either. But you get the gist. Both writers are clearly attempting to convey the impression that even before 9/11, the Bush team poured massive additional resources into battling al Qaeda. Quadrupling the budget! Quintupling it! What else, they ask by implication, what else would you have administration do?
The only problem with this story is that the massive pre-9/11 anti-terrorism resource flow didn't actually happen. During last week's 9/11 commission public hearing, former NSC counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke addressed this issue with some specificity:
THOMPSON: ... The principals met at the end of the summer [of 2001], approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold. Did they authorize the increase in funding five-fold?So contrary to the impression conveyed by Brooks and Will, the amount of new money provided to fight terrorism before 9/11 was exactly zero. A meeting was held, more money was promised - but not delivered until after 9/11. And you don't get nearly as many points for closing the barn door once the horse has exited.CLARKE: Authorized but not appropriated.
THOMPSON: Well, but the Congress appropriates, don't they, Mr. Clarke?
CLARKE: Well, within the executive branch, there are two steps as well. In the executive branch, there's the policy process which you can compare to authorization, which is to say we would like to spend this amount of money for this program. And then there is the second step, the budgetary step, which is to find the offsets. And that had not been done. In fact, it wasn't done until after September 11th.
This is not matter of opinion but fact - Clarke's statement stands undisputed. So are the two columnists lying?
Not outright. These guys are sharp - they never forget to pack the plausible deniability. Note how carefully Brooks has the administration "deciding" to increase the budget, and Will has it "authorizing" the new spending - conveying the false impression that extra resources were actually deployed against al Qaeda, without ever crossing the line and explicitly saying so. As Richard Clarke told Larry King, "people in this town are too smart to lie". Brooks and Will are smart. They don't lie. But they don't exhibit much adherence to the truth, either.
Update: Any resemblance to this Discourse.net headline is purely coincidental, but Michael Froomkin's Shorter Safire is sadly on the mark.
| Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
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Shorter Jay Severin:
Liberal talk radio? No one will buy it
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| Monday, March 29, 2004 |
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Shorter William Saletan:
Face the Fetus
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Busy, busy, busy. What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. |
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