OT: Yep bootz
One on one, he's more than a match for any of them. But he's only one and they are many. And while he holds all the powerful fact "cards", they hold most of the strategic trump cards.
Starting with the fact that they can selectively de-classify anything they want to from the entire paper trail. They've got dozens of people full-time working on finding ways to pull stuff out of context, knowing that he has no access to the full documents even to show how they've taken him out of context, not to mention countering with all the damning evidence against Condi.
His only counter to it is to issue the challenge he did yesterday ... "O.k. you want to go back to my e-mails and records and declassify? Good. I am requesting that you declassify them ALL and declassify and present all the responding correspondence from Dr. Rice too." Problem is, that's as far as he can get. He's powerless.
Which is a shame. I think it's pretty clear, while Clarke might not exactly look perfect if all the truth and documents came public, he would come out as obsessively trying to convince people an Al Qaeda attack was imminent and doing most everything he could to get Condi's office do something about it.
The BIG CARD that's not getting played in all of this is George Tenet. I'll guarantee you he'll have one hell of a book to write when he's done. Clarke has made it clear that Tenet briefed Bush nearly daily and that he repeatedly brought up Al Qaeda and it's threat as both urgent/imminent and top priority -- and that he got completely blown off. Either that, or Clarke is lying his butt off in claiming Tenet told him that over and over. It strains credulity to believe Clarke made that up.
I think Tenet has been made the fall guy for an immense amount of stuff, including Cheney's uranium/State of the Union scam.
I am waiting for the day Tenet gets free and clear and tells his story.
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