Dan Darling advances his critique of the Clarke thesis, including the al Shifa incident:
So now Cohen joins Sany Berger (sic) and Clarke himself (in his book) in the defense of the al-Shifa attack and cites indirect ties between the plant, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein's WMD program. To me, this isn't exactly a non-trivial point as it predates the Bush administration and presumably any perfidy by the Neocon Cabal(TM) by nearly 2 years. So if all 3 of these men are standing by the decision to hit the plant in order to thwart Iraqi-Sudanese efforts to provide al-Qaeda with VX, that sure as hell looks to me like a definite reason to want to hit Iraq ASAP after 9/11 to prevent another attempted exchange that we didn't know about from succeeding, especially with the pre-2003 US intelligence community's conclusion (and even Hans Blix's, according to his new book) that Iraq did indeed possess such weaponry.
But he also points out that Clarke apparently takes seriously the notion of a link between the OK City bombers and al Qaeda. I am speechless. The most damning indictment of the Bush Administration's handling of terrorism seems to be their willingness to carry this guy for so long.
Posted by Demosophist at March 25, 2004 01:32 PM | TrackBack