First time to throw open the doors to a (mostly) open thread on Richard Clarke’s accu­sa­tions that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion fid­dled for sev­eral months before the real fire. Go crazy.
I’m cur­rently on dead­line and can’t really post much on this. But I hope the com­men­tary gets feisty. Please, how­ever, keep it civil.
UPDATE 1:36 PM EST March 24 2004 Clarke is tes­ti­fy­ing right now before the National Com­mis­sion on Ter­ror­ist Attacks Upon the United States.
But here’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion: Why is only Fox News run­ning the back­ground brief­ing tran­script Clarke gave in 2002? (Ref­er­enced in the com­ments.) Because Jim Angle is a Fox News reporter and the White House cleared its release. That Fox is the cur­rently the only major news out­let to run this is a seri­ous breach of jour­nal­ism ethics. The bot­tom line is that Fox burned a source and vio­lated its promise to Clarke that the brief­ing would be “on back­ground.” When I was at Colum­bia University’s Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, it was beaten into our heads not to ever burn a source. That’s what Fox did when it worked hand in glove with the White House to dis­credit Clarke.
UPDATE II Here are some of the Commission’s documents.

• Staff State­ment 8: National Pol­icy Coordination

• Staff State­ment 7: Intel­li­gence Pol­icy
• Staff State­ment 6: The Mil­i­tary
• Staff State­ment 5: Diplomacy

UPDATE III Clarke said his brief­ing (ref­er­enced above, and repro­duced in the com­ments) was to “high­light the pos­i­tive” to the press, some­thing as a spe­cial assis­tant to the pres­i­dent he’s done sev­eral times “for sev­eral presidents.”