Richard Clarke "Undercuts" Bush: "Basic Credibility in Jeopardy" -- March 23, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for March 23, 2004

Richard Clarke "Undercuts" Bush:
"Basic Credibility in Jeopardy"

Anti-Bush accusations from former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke's predictably make the front page of Tuesday's Times. Reporters Elisabeth Bumiller and Judith Miller outline the debate raised by Clarke's new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."

The opening line puts a negative spin on the Bush administration's rebuttal to Clarke's charge that Bush pushed Iraq as the culprit immediately after 9-11: "As the White House opened an aggressive personal attack against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, a furious debate broke out on Monday about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after the Sept. 11 attacks to see if there was a link with Saddam Hussein."

Later on, they write: "The angry White House response to Mr. Clarke, which was authorized by Mr. Bush, reflects the administration's fears over the book's potential political damage."

While Bumiller and Miller are relatively reserved, reporter Todd Purdum, in a "News Analysis," sounds positively enthused in his insistence that the Bush administration is on the defensive (the headline itself reads: "An Accuser's Insider Status Puts the White House on the Defensive.")

The analysis by Todd Purdum (husband of former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers) opens with both eyes on the political threat Clarke allegedly poses to Bush: "John Kerry himself has never dared to make such a bald charge: That President Bush failed to adequately grasp the threat of Al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, then followed up with 'an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.' But that is the stinging indictment of Mr. Bush's own former top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, published this week in a memoir. At the worst possible moment, it undercuts Mr. Bush on the issue that he has made the unapologetic centerpiece of his administration and a linchpin of his re-election campaign: his handling of the global war on terror."

Wishful thinking? Neither Purdum nor anyone else can yet know if Clarke's accusations will actually "undercut" Bush--after all, the media firestorm is but two days old, not enough time for the charges to be sifted for accuracy.

Purdum continues: "Just as Mr. Bush appeared to be gaining the upper hand over Mr. Kerry in the fledgling general election campaign after weeks on the defensive over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Mr. Clarke has put the White House squarely on the defensive again." ("On the defensive" is of course the Times favorite Bush position.)

After noting that Clarke has a close friendship with Rand Beers, who now advises John Kerry's campaign on national security, Purdum argues for Clarke's credibility: "But his critique can hardly be chalked up to partisan politics as usual. He was a registered Republican in 2000, a career White House civil servant under three presidents, one of the few national security experts held over from the first Bush administration into the Clinton years, and then held over again under the current President Bush."

After noting that Clarke's charges have "elated the Kerry campaign," Purdum argues Clarke's comments (on the CBS program "60 Minutes") could add to Bush's political woes while insisting Bush's credibility is endangered by the lack of WMD in Iraq: "But the continuing failure to find chemical or biological weapons has put Mr. Bush's basic credibility in jeopardy, and several recent polls have found that a bare majority of Americans now say the war in Iraq was not worth the loss of American lives and other costs."

Never mind that virtually every intelligence agency in the world (and Sen. Kerry) also thought Hussein had WMD.

For the rest of Purdum's piece on Clarke, click here.

For the rest of Bumiller-Miller on Clarke, click here.

The "Perceived Threat" of Hamas?

James Bennet pens one of two front-page stories Tuesday on Israel's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the "spiritual leader" of the anti-Israel terrorist group Hamas, which is committed to Israel's destruction. The Times headline avoids negative connotations: "Palestinians Swear Vengeance For Killing of Cleric by Israelis--'New Martyr' or, for Sharon, an 'Archmurderer.'"

Sheik Yassin was indeed an admitted "archmurderer," not only for Sharon and every other Jew in Israel, young and old, civilian or soldier, all avowed targets of Hamas.

Bennet writes from Gaza: "It was a measure of Sheik Yassin's status as an icon to Palestinians and as a perceived threat to Israelis that his death seemed to hold consequences for every player in the conflict, from the Israelis and Palestinians to the Egyptians and Americans."

A perceived threat to Israelis? Hamas poses not the "threat" of terror, but its reality. As Joel Rosenberg notes on National Review Online: "Let's be clear about the facts. Under Sheik Yassin's inspiration and direction, Hamas launched 425 attacks against Israel over the past three and a half years. Among these were more than 50 suicide bombings, such as the March 2002 bombing of a Passover celebration at a seaside hotel and the June 2002 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus carrying children on their way to school. All told, Hamas has killed some 377 Israelis and wounded 2,076 others, a horrifyingly huge number given Israel's relatively small population."

Bennet later adds this pitying note: "Mourners attacked Israel as having no sense of justice in using missiles to kill a gray-bearded man in a wheelchair." The cut-out line to the story actually calls Yassin an icon: "An icon is dead: A martyr for the Arabs, a killer for Sharon."

Greg Myre files the other front-page story, "Death of Sheik Raises Question Of Hamas Fate." (Again, the Times headline makes no acknowledgment of Yassin's terror tactics.)

Myre devotes a sympathetic-sounding paragraph to the killer: "While Sheik Yassin's movements were limited, he granted interviews and occasionally appeared at Hamas rallies. The father of 11 children, he maintained a simple life style and was viewed as being in touch with the poor, who make up the core constituency of Hamas. He was instantly recognizable in his white robe and headdress, with a long beard. He rarely spoke at length, and his whisper could be difficult to hear even in a small, quiet room. He suffered frequent illnesses, and had poor eyesight and hearing that deteriorated during years in Israeli prisons, he said."

For the rest of Myre's story from Jerusalem, click here.

For the rest of Bennet's story from Gaza, click here.

Hamas Leader "Killed Just As He Finished the Dawn Prayers"

Arab-world correspondent Neil MacFarquhar writes from Damascus on Arab anger over Israel's assassination of the "spiritual leader" of Hamas: "The outpouring of anger and grief that rolled across the Middle East on Monday indicated that in assassinating Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, the Israelis had not targeted just another Palestinian opponent to its occupation."

Of course, Hamas isn't just "another Palestinian opponent" to Israel's "occupation." It's an anti-American and anti-Israeli terror organization responsible for deadly suicide bombings that have killed over 300 Israelis. MacFarquhar has refused to pin the "terrorist" label onto Hamas in previous articles as well.

MacFarquhar brings up Yassin's wheelchair, in what reads like some bizarre sympathy ploy (though he'd been confined to it since an accident at age 12): "None failed to point out that Sheik Yassin was a crippled man confined to a wheelchair who was killed just as he finished the dawn prayers….Sheik Yassin was elderly, crippled and a religious man, attributes that evoke respect across the Arab and Muslim world."

[Editorial Note: Yassin's infirmity seems an odd thing for either the Times or Hamas sympathizers to emphasize, given the treatment wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer received from Palestinian terrorists on the Achille Lauro.]

For the rest of MacFarquhar from Syria, click here.

• Israel | Neil MacFarquhar | Palestinians | Syria | Terrorism

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org