Clueless.

“Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

“Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans,” Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a “defining” experience that “caused everyone to take a serious second look” at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. “Part of our responsibility, as we saw it,” Cheney said, “was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America.”

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president’s national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president’s office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. “If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people,” Rice said in her recent comments, “then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.”

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years — on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping — were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney’s admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack. “

This coming from the assclown who’s inactions prior to 9/11 helped bring that awful day to reality. Clarke’s proven misrepresentation of the facts both after 9/11 and before show him to be a liar, and worse a traitor to this nation. Obviously haven been off the radar for a few years he’s still auditioning for a position as “Dishonesty Czar” with the Obama administration.

The fact is that Clarke fresh off of failure before the 9/11 attacks, cannot stand the fact - as liberals everywhere - that the Bush administration was so successful at preventing another attack. Instead of incompetence that led to 9/11, the Bush administration should extreme professionalism and competence in protecting this nation.

Back to Lowry’s 2004 expose on Clarke and his many fabrications and distortions:

“This is just the beginning of the contradictions and mistakes.

In his testimony yesterday, Clarke said that the Clinton administration had “no higher priority” than fighting terror. No. In his own book, he says trying to force a Middle East peace agreement was more important to Clinton than retaliating for the attack against USS Cole.

Clarke says in his book that Bush asked him to look into a possible Iraq connection to 9/11 in an “intimidating” way. No. Two other witnesses say there was nothing intimidating about Bush’s manner.

Clarke says Condi Rice appeared as if she hadn’t heard of al Qaeda before he mentioned it to her in early 2001. No. Rice made public statements in late 2000 noting the threat from bin Laden.

Given all of this, it’s hard to believe that anyone takes Richard Clarke seriously — including himself.”

Believe me, no one but the Kos kids and the rest of the loony left do.

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