Fun! Courtesy the RNC

You have to wonder why someone that tells the truth is admonsihed for it. I mean, after all, as childern we were told, "honesty is best policy." Am I wrong?

I'm ripping this directly form the RNC website!

Is Clark Unprepared or Unprincipled – or Both?

Something to Yak About: Is Clark Unprepared or Unprincipled – or Both?
Remember when Howard Dean was busy shopping around those wacky left-wing conspiracies? Looks like the former governor of Vermont has some competition in the race for the Tin Foil Hat Award. Wesley Clark is now telling voters in New Hampshire that the Clinton Administration had a plan for fighting al Qaeda and gave it to the Bush Administration, which Clark claims ignored it!

No, We Are Not Making This Up
The fired Army general is extensively quoted in The Boston Globe as saying, among other things, that Clinton’s folks "built a plan (to fight al Qaeda) and turned it over to the Bush Administration," which, according to the general, "failed to do its duty to protect the United States of America before 9/11."

Hold the Phone - Sandy Berger Says No Dice
But roughly 16 months before Wesley Clark trotted out this freshly hatched conspiracy theory, former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told Congress flat out, "there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush Administration during the transition." Click here to read the operative sections of Berger’s remarks to the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence back in the Fall of 2002! So does all this make Clark sloppy or deceptive? You make the call!

How Does Anyone Say There Will Be No More Attacks?
It’s a bird… it’s a plane… no, it’s… Wesley Clark who was quoted by the Concord Monitor as saying that all we have to do to prevent a 9/11-style attack is to elect him president. "We are not going to have one of these incidents," Clark told a Monitor editorial board late last week. How, pray tell, does a president stop wackos with C4 strapped to their bodies from blowing themselves and others up? And you thought the Patriot Act was tough!

Overstating The Point
The Yak is confident Wes Clark would try his level best to keep America safe, but who in their right mind tells voters he won’t let any more 9/11-style attacks happen? Clark rivals John Edwards, Joe Lieberman and Richard Gephardt aren’t buying it either.

Just how 'unprincipled' is Clark?

From Rebuplicons:

"They [the Clinton administration] built a plan and turned it over to the Bush administration," Clark told the Globe. “[The Bush] administration failed to do its duty to protect the United States of America before 9/11."

How wild and spurious are these claims? In October 2001, CNN reported that the CIA trained and armed about 60 Pakistani commandos in 1999 with plans for them to enter Afghanistan and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. CNN’s sources were unnamed US officials.

The plan apparently unraveled in the wake of the Musharraf coup and the stronger Pakistani ties with the Taliban. On September 23, 2001, President Clinton told reporters he had authorized a plan to arrest, and if necessary, kill bin Laden and had even contacted a group in Afghanistan to carry out the plan according to CNN.

And according to a 2002 article in Time magazine Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger and terrorism expert Richard Clarke outlined Al-Qaeda threats in briefings they provided for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in January 2001, a few weeks before she and her team took up their posts.

According to Time, at the briefing, Clark presented proposals to "roll back" Al-Qaeda which closely resemble the measures taken after September 11, 2001. Its financial network would be broken up and its assets frozen. Vulnerable countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines would be given aid to help them stamp out terrorist cells.

Clarke's plan detailed how the US would go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Plans would be drawn up for combined air and special forces operations, while support would be channeled to the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies.

Clarke, who stayed on in his job as White House counter-terrorism expert, repeated his briefing for vice president Dick Cheney in February 2001. However, the proposals got lost in the clumsy transition process, turf wars between departments and the separate agendas of senior members of the Bush administration.

It was, the Time article concluded, "a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat".

The Time report quotes Bush officials as well as Clinton aides as confirming the seriousness of the Clarke plan. The sources said it was treated the same way as all policies inherited from the Clinton era, and subjected to a lengthy "policy review process."

The proposals were not re-examined by senior administration officials until April, and were not earmarked for consideration by the national security heads of department until September 4.

All of this is a matter of public record. The 9/11 commission has yet to finish its job - given the latest revelations about Iraq, fiscal policy etc. one can conclude that we haven't seen the last of the GOP's logical fallacies. Utter rubbish.

Fear is often a motivator for misrepresentation. I am not about to say that the RNC fears Wesley Clark, but to dismiss that they do not is not responsible. Until we know what the facts are, we can not draw conclusions.