TOP SECRET. YOUR EYES ONLY.

GENERAL CLARK’S BATTLES. The candidate’s celebrated—and controversial—military career (Peter J. Boyer, New Yorker, 11/10/03)

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team—planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. “They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11,” Clark said. “So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem.” Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.

If the basic elements of the story have a familiar ring, it is because Clark’s central contention—that the Bush Administration used September 11th as a pretext to attack Saddam—has been part of the public debate, much discussed in many publications and broadcasts, since well before the Iraq war. It is rooted in the advocacy of an organization called Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, whose influential circle—including Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the defense adviser Richard Perle—had been openly arguing for regime change in Iraq, by military force, if necessary, since 1998. That Rumsfeld turned his attention to Iraq almost immediately after the September 11th attacks was reported by Bob Woodward in his book “Bush at War,” published in November, 2002. Clark, in repeatedly telling his account, seems to suggest that he had special knowledge of a furtive Pentagon plan that would have the Administration “hopscotching around the Middle East and knocking off states,” as he put it. He has acknowledged, “I’m not sure that I can prove this yet.”

Always eager to help out a General, I've hacked into a secret administration database and now have the carefully concealed evidence of the neocon's secret plot to overthrow Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.

(I see that Andrew Sullivan has more to say on the inimitable General Clark.)

Posted by David Cohen at November 11, 2003 8:13 PM