USA TODAY
Clarke wants records opened
Mon Mar 29 00:57:57 2004
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Clarke wants records opened
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-28-clarke-usat_x.htm

WASHINGTON — Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief under attack by the Bush administration over his criticism of its actions before Sept. 11, said Sunday that all his private testimony and e-mail exchanges with his former boss should be made public.

At the same time, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Clarke's former supervisor, said again Sunday that she will not testify in public before the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes, Rice said, "I'm not going to say anything in private that I wouldn't say in public. I'm legally bound to tell the truth. I'm morally bound to tell the truth."

Republican Thomas Kean, a former governor of New Jersey who chairs the 9/11 commission, told Fox News Sunday that all 10 of the panel's members want Rice to testify in public. She has been interviewed privately by the commission for four hours. She says she won't talk under oath because precedent prevents White House staffers from testifying about their advice to a president.

"We think in a tragedy of this magnitude that those kind of legal arguments are probably overridden," Kean said. But he said the panel probably will not subpoena her.

Sunday's developments suggested that the political battle that has engulfed Washington for a week since the release of Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, will not end soon. Clarke charged in the book and in subsequent appearances on TV and before the commission that the White House did not pursue terrorists aggressively until the United States was attacked. Administration officials have attempted to discredit Clarke by saying that he was out of the loop, angry over a demotion and motivated by politics.

Republicans in Congress have said Clarke's July 2002 testimony to intelligence committees should be declassified. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Friday that Clarke's testimony then contradicts the criticism he is now leveling. A decision to declassify that testimony or more recent private talks with the 9/11 commission would have to come from the administration, which had no comment Sunday on Clarke's suggestion. "Let's declassify all of it," Clarke said on NBC's Meet the Press.

Vice President Cheney told Time that Clarke is trying to "promote himself and his book," which was No. 1 Sunday on two non-fiction best-seller lists.

A Newsweek poll taken after Clarke's testimony last week to the 9/11 commission showed that Americans' support for Bush's handling of terrorism has slipped, from 65% a month ago to 57% now. But two-thirds of those polled said Clarke's testimony has not affected their view of the president. Half said they believe Clarke is acting for personal and political reasons. One in four said he's a dedicated public servant.

Rice rejected Clarke's assertion that Bush didn't do enough to prevent Sept. 11. But, she said, "We would not be honest with the American people if we said that before 9/11, this country was on war footing."
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Rice Defends Refusal To Testify
Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, yesterday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31904-2004Mar28.html

Rice Rejects Public Testimony to 9/11 Panel
Sun Mar 28, 2004 06:49 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4680155§ion=news

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webfairy@thewebfairy.com wrote:

What Poop.
This is obviously not the same Michael Elliott from http://911review.org
He knows about hijacker patsies, and AL CIA-DUH.

The thrust of this article is if we had adopted police state tactics
sooner, 911 could have been prevented.

Clarke is Very high on my Perp list.
*http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LOU403A.html

*I know what he says is lighting a fire under the Bushies, but the
Non-Bushie Globalists have their own reasons for wanting to keep the
police state intact and growing.
Somewhere in the Chicago Sun Times, it was reported early this week that
Clarke was warning about hijackers ramming planes into buildings back in
July. This is fine for those foolish enough to believe that 911 was
accomplished by hijackers ramming planes into buildings, but to me it
shows he was auditioning the Official Story even before the event.