I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
The president later issued a formal directive on counterterrorism policy, Presidential Decision Directive 39, signed in June 1995. That directive characterized terrorism as a national security concern as well as a matter for law enforcement.
These efforts were to be coordinated by a subordinate NSC committee called the CSG. During the Clinton administration, these initials stood for Counterterrorism and Security Group. This committee was chaired by an NSC staff member, Richard Clarke. The CSG was the place where domestic security agencies such as the FBI regularly met alongside representatives from the traditional national security agencies.
Since 1989, each administration has organized this top NSC advisory bodies in three layers. At the top is the National Security Council, the formal statutory body whose meetings are chaired by the president.
Beneath it is the principals committee, with Cabinet-level representatives from the agencies. The principals committee is usually chaired by the national security adviser.
The third layer is the deputies committee, where the deputy agency heads meet under the chairmanship of the deputy national security adviser.
Lower ranking officials meet in many other working groups or coordinating committees reporting to the deputies and, through them, to the principals. The CSG was one of those committees.
MARCUS: This ordinary committee system is often adjusted in a crisis. Because of the sensitivity of the intelligence and military options being considered, President Clinton created a small group in which a select set of principals frequently met without aides to discuss Khobar Towers or Osama bin Laden.
The participants would usually be many of the people who have appeared at these hearings yesterday and today: National Security Adviser Berger, DCI Tenet, Secretary of State Albright, Secretary of Defense Cohen, Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg, the White House chief of staff, John Podesta, Richard Clarke and Vice President Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth. Attorney General Reno and FBI Director Freeh would also sometimes participate.
National Security Adviser Berger told us that he designed the small group process to keep highly sensitive information closely held. There were few paper records.
One trade-off of such a system was that other senior officials in agencies around the government sometimes had little knowledge about what was being decided in the small group, other than what they could obtain from the principals or from Clarke. This sometimes led to misunderstandings and friction.
President Directive 62 and the National Coordinator: In early 1998, the Clinton administration prepared a new presidential directive on counterterrorism. Its goals were to strengthen the lead agency approach in 10 program areas, to reemphasize the importance President Clinton attacked to unconventional threats at home and abroad, and to strengthen interagency coordination.
The draft directive would strengthen Clarke's role by creating the position of a national coordinator for counterterrorism who would be a full member of the principals committee or deputies committee for meetings on these topics.
As it evolved in the Clinton administration, the CSG effectively reported directly to principals and with the principals often meeting only in this restricted small group.
This process could be very effective in overseeing fast- developing but sensitive operations, in moving issues quickly to the highest levels, and in keeping secrets.
However, since the deputies and other sub-Cabinet officials were not members of the CSG, this process created a challenge for integrating counterterrorism issues into the broader agenda of these agencies and the U.S. government.
Clarke was a controversial figure. A career civil servant, he drew wide praise as someone who called early and consistent attention to the seriousness of the terrorism danger. A skilled operator of the levers of government, he energetically worked the system to address vulnerabilities and combat terrorists.
Some colleagues have described his working style as abrasive, and some officials told us that Clarke sometimes misled them about presidential decisions or interfered in their chain of command.
National Security Adviser Berger told us that several of his colleagues had wanted Clarke fired. But Berger's net assessment was that Clarke fulfilled an important role in pushing the interagency process to fight bin Laden. As Berger it, quote, "I wanted a piledriver," close quote.
[...]
The millennium alerts -- As 1999 drew to a close, Jordanian intelligence discovered an Al Qaida-connected plot to attack tourists gathered in Jordan for millennium events. Intelligence revealed links to suspected terrorists who might be in the United States. Meanwhile, a customs agent caught Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian jihadist trying to cross with explosives from Canada into the United States. Both staff and principals at the NSC were seized with this threat.
The CSG met constantly, frequently getting the assistance of principals to spur particular actions. These actions included pressuring Pakistan to turn over particular suspects and issuing an extraordinary number of domestic surveillance warrants for investigations in the United States.
MARCUS: Berger said that the principals convened on a nearly daily basis in the White House Situation Room for almost a month. The principals communicated their own sense of urgency throughout their agencies.
By all accounts the millennium period was also a high point in the troubled relationship between the White House and the FBI.
Before 9/11, the FBI did not ordinarily produce intelligence reports. Records of the FBI's intelligence work usually consisted only of reports of interviews with witnesses or memoranda requesting initiation or expansion of an investigation.
The senior FBI headquarters official for counterterrorism, Dale Watson, was a member of the CSG, and Clarke had good relations with him and with FBI agents handling Al Qaida-related investigations. But the NSC staff told us that the FBI rarely shared information about its domestic investigations. The millennium-alert period was an exception.
After the millennium surge subsided, Berger and his deputy, James Steinberg (ph), complained that despite regular meetings with Attorney General Reno and FBI Director Freeh, the FBI withheld terrorism data on grounds that it was inappropriate to share information relating to pending investigations being presented to a grand jury.
In a January 2000 note to Berger, Clarke reported that the CSG drew two main conclusions from the millennium crisis: First, it concluded that U.S.-led disruption efforts, quote, "have not put too much of a dent," closed quote, into bin Laden's network abroad. Second, it feared that sleeper cells or other links to foreign terrorist groups had taken root in the United States.
Berger then led a formal millennium-after-action review of next steps culminating in a meeting of the full principals committee on March 10th.
The principals committee endorsed a four-part agenda to strengthen the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts:
First, increase disruption efforts; second, strengthen enforcement of laws restricting the activity of foreign terrorist organizations in the United States; three, do a better job of preventing foreign terrorists from entering the United States; fourth, improve the security of the U.S.-Canadian border.
Overall, U.S. government spending connected to counterterrorism grew rapidly during the late 1990s. Congress appropriated billions of additional dollars in supplemental appropriations for improvements like building more secure embassies, managing the consequences of a WMD attack and protecting military forces.
Clarke and others remained frustrated, however, at the CIA spending on counterterrorism. They complained that baseline spending at headquarters on bin Laden efforts or on operational efforts overseas remained nearly level.
The CIA funded an expanded level of activity on a temporary basis with supplemental appropriations, but baseline spending requests and thus core staffing remained flat.
MARCUS: The CIA, on the other hand, told us that Clarke kept promising more budget support but could never deliver it. The Clinton administration began proposing significant increases in the overall national intelligence budget in January 2000 for fiscal year 2001.
Until that time at least, CIA officials have told us that their main effort had been to rebuild the agency's operating capabilities after what they said had been years of cuts and retrenchment. They believed counterterrorism efforts were relatively well-off compared with needs elsewhere.
There are a number of points here.
The daily FBI reports to the CSG during the millenium plots were a good thing; their cessation was a bad thing.
The principal's meetings were a good thing; their cessation was a bad thing.
The increases in money allegedly budgeted under Clinton to "counter-terrorism" didn't include significant money for actual intelligence and true counter-terrorism. Better architechure is not actually "countering" terrorism.
[...]
As the Clinton administration drew to a close, the NSC counterterrorism staff developed another strategy paper; the first such comprehensive effort since the Delenda plan of 1998.
The resulting paper, titled "A Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of Al Qaida; Status and Prospects," reviewed the threat, the records to date, incorporated the CIA's new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy choices. The goal was to roll back Al Qaida over a period of three to five years, reducing it eventually to a rump group like others formerly feared but now largely defunct terrorist organizations in the 1980s.
Quote, "Continued anti-Al Qaida operations at the current level will prevent some attacks, but will not seriously attrite their ability to plan and conduct attacks," Clarke and his staff wrote.
[...]
Rice and Hadley decided that Clarke's CSG should report to the deputies committee chaired by Hadley, rather than bringing its issues directly to principals. Clarke would still attend principals committee meetings on terrorism but without the central role that he had played in the Clinton-era small group.
Hadley told us that subordinating the CSG to the deputies would help resolve counterterrorism issues in a broader context. Clarke protested the change, arguing that it would slow decision-making. He told us that he considered this move a demotion to being a staffer rather than being a de facto principal on terrorism. On operational matters, however, Clarke could and did go directly to Rice.
Clarke and his staff said that the new team, having been out of government for at least eight years, had a learning curve to understand Al Qaida and the new transnational terrorist threat.
[...]
Although Clarke briefed President Bush on cybersecurity issues before September 11th, Clarke never briefed or met with President Bush on counterterrorism, which was a significant contrast from the relationship he had enjoyed with President Clinton. Rice pointed out to us that President Bush received his counterterrorism briefings directly from Director Tenet who began personally providing intelligence updates at the White House each morning.
Asked by Hadley to offer major initiatives, on January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Clarke laid out a proposed agenda for urgent action by the new administration: approval of covert assistance to the Northern Alliance, significantly increased funding, choosing a standard of evidence for attributing responsibility for the Cole and deciding on a response, going forward with new Predator missions in the spring and preparation of an armed version, and more work on terrorist fund-raising.
It's clear that Clarke's plans were insufficient, but they did constitute an actual submission.
[...]
Clarke asked on several occasions for early principals meetings on these issues, and was frustrated that no early meeting was scheduled.
No principals committee meetings on Al Qaida were held until September 4th, 2001. Rice and Hadley said this was because the deputies committee needed to work through many issues relating to the new policy on Al Qaida.
The principals committee did meet frequently before September 11th on other subjects, Rice told us, including Russia, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East peace process.
The idea that none of the principals had anything to contribute to counter-terrorism does not reassure me.
The other key point:
Clarke and other perceived the process as slow, and Clarke argued that the policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan did not need to be settled before moving ahead against Al Qaida.
The delay until September 4th seems indefensible.
[...]
MARCUS: Within the NSC staff, Clarke was asked to put together a broad policy to eliminate Al Qaida to be codified in the presidential directive.
Clarke and his staff regarded the new approach as essentially similar to the proposal they had developed in December 2000 and put forward to the new administration in January 2001. Clarke's staff produced a draft presidential directive on Al Qaida, Hadley circulated it to his counterparts in early June as, quote, "an admittedly ambitious program." The draft had the goal of eliminating the Al Qaida network as a threat over a multiyear period. It had headings such as "No Sanctuaries" and "No Financial Support."
From April through July alarming threat reports were pouring in. Clarke and the CSG were consumed with coordinating defensive reactions. In late June Clarke wrote Rice that the threat reporting had reached a crescendo.
On July 2nd, the FBI issued a national threat advisory. Rice recalls asking Clarke on July 5th to bring additional law enforcement in domestic agencies into the CSG threat discussions, and that was done.
This would seem to be one of the few, if not unique, occasions when Advisor Rice initiated action, rather than simply being a passive receptor of intelligence who then digested it for the President.
[...]
Neither the White House nor the CSG received specific credible information about any threat of attacks in the United States. Neither Clarke nor the CSG were informed, however, about the August 2001 investigations that produced the discovery of suspected Al Qaida operatives in the United States, nor did the group learn about the arrest or FBI investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota.
The system failed here; this was preventable.
At the beginning of August, Rice and Hadley again reviewed the draft presidential directive on Al Qaida. Rice commented it was very good and principals needed to discuss it briefly before it was submitted to President Bush. This meeting was scheduled for September 4.
The first-ever meeting of principals in the Bush Administration deemed worth calling. That's notable; they did think it a good idea -- finally. Too late.
Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger began his testimony.
The following point is in the public record, but it's worth emphasising:
BEN-VENISTE: Moreover, we have received information that suggests, ironically, on September 10th, 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft axed $58 million from the FBI's counterterrorism budget. During your tenure, did you understand there to have been any specific requests for counterterrorism funding that was denied?
BERGER: I believe that during our period funding for counterterrorism at the FBI went up 350 percent. I believe actually that Director Freeh used that number in his press conference when he left office in July of '01.
A valid criticism of the Clinton Administration:
LEHMAN: I've got one quick question just to follow up, really.
Have you read this book "Ghost Wars"?
BERGER: No. I just read the two excerpts, Governor, from The Washington Post.
LEHMAN: Yes. It's a good book. I mean, it confirms a lot of what we're finding out in this investigation. I'd recommend it.
But one of the things that it does detail similar to our findings is that there was a real disconnect between what you all believed was the policy in Washington from what was going on in Afghanistan, including the famous comment by Masood, when he was read an order on a legal opinion as to what could be done and couldn't be done with bin Laden.
And I guess my question is it seems a fact to me anyway, from the book and from our research, that there was this disconnect. You were meeting every day. I mean, you were meeting every week anyway, your principals and everything else. You had a clear understanding of what was going on. How could this occur? How could the...
BERGER: Perhaps that's a question you should ask the director of central intelligence because he -- there was no communication. -- or Cofer Black, who was in the White House twice a week and never took me aside and said, "Sandy, we got a real problem in the field because the instructions are confusing," or, "We've got a lot more capacity to act than you've given to us." Never. Never.
LEHMAN: Though somewhere, though, there was disconnect. It obviously affected policy.
This is undeniable, and the Clinton procedures failed, badly, here.
I'm not quoting, because it would be repetitive, any of Senator Kerrey's going hammer-and-tongs after Advisor Berger, no less than he later did after Advisor Rice and others from both Administrations, but it's in the record if you wish to check it.
I'll continue in part IX with Richard Clarke's testimony, if there's anything new left to be noted or observed.
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