Enemy Combatant
Monday, March 29, 2004
Who's looping who?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thanks, Rush. It's good to talk to you.
Q All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now, before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things, that is he was given a new assignment at some point here. I don't recall the exact time frame.
Q Cyber security, meaning Internet security?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, worried about attacks on the computer systems and the sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try to the system against us.
Q Well, now that explains a lot, that answer right there explains -- (Laughter.)
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.
Oh, really? Well, then, how do you reconcile that assertion (made by Cheney on Rush Limbaugh's show) with this (from the Washington Post):
But Clarke did receive a huge if unspoken acknowledgment on the morning of Sept. 11: National security adviser Condoleezza Rice declined to run the so-called principals meeting in the White House Situation Room, choosing Clarke instead to coordinate the urgent information-gathering and to formulate the security responses to put before the president. Rice repaired, with Dick Cheney, to the White House basement's bomb shelter. A hijacked plane over Pennsylvania was headed toward Washington, and the rest of the White House evacuated at full sprint -- with the exception of Clarke and a handful of security professionals, who remained in the West Wing to continue their work.
Guess when Cheney and Condi left Clarke as the highest-ranking civilian in charge aboveground at the White House Situation Room during the greatest defense crisis this country has faced since Pearl Harbor, they must have taken that "loop" down into their hidey-hole bunker with them . . .
