Temporary Insanity Defense Used For Years

Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council, is sick and tired of the "White House 9/11 trauma defense" used by Cheney and Condi Rice to explain every bad decision they made for years. Clarke rebukes their "you had to be there" excuse, because he was there:

"[L]istening 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.... 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.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea. [...]

Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive."

The Washington Monthly points out:

As Clarke noted, folks like Cheney and Rice want to emphasize the "trauma defense" to rationalize wrongdoing. But in the next breath, these same top officials say every decision they made was sound, legal, justified.

Maybe you can panic for 48 hours, 72 hours. The notion that the shock and psychological trauma of 9/11 excuses actions taken months or years later is just asinine.

The fact is, the Bush Administration did not listen to anyone prior to 9/11, demoting Clarke from a cabinet-level position proves this. They demoted the top counter-terrorism expert! Then after 9/11, the Bush Administration concocted WMD fables, discounted UN inspector Hans Blix, put an intellectual pygmy like Rumsfeld in charge of everything and pretty much told the world to eff-off.

The coward dies a thousand deaths. The hero dies just once.

Source: The Washington Monthly