I'm not sure what to make of this, but it amuses me:
Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."
In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.
Former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik:
Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July [2001] that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.
Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.
(via a comment on Tim Blair's site)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he wasn't -- he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff. And I saw part of his interview last night, and he wasn't --Q He was demoted.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was as though he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example, with the President of Pakistan, laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and the importance of going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al Qaeda. This was, say, within three weeks of our arrival here.
Hmm.
Posted by oscarjr at April 1, 2004 10:57 PM | TrackBack