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Clarke's credibility takes another hit as a witness contradicts large portions of his book's account of the events at the White House on September 11th.

In Mr. Clarke's telling, he gathered the staff around and told them to leave for their own safety, particularly those with young children. They declined, and according to Mr. Clarke, Mr. Miller then "grabbed a legal pad and said, `All right. If you're staying, sign your name here,' " so that a list could be e-mailed out of the building. The purpose, he recalled Mr. Miller saying, was "so the rescue teams will know how many bodies to look for."
...
"That paragraph was a complete fiction," Mr. Miller said. His recollection is that after Mr. Hadley issued his instructions to keep the Situation Room operating, Mr. Clarke came over to Mr. Miller and said, "You realize what we signed on to 10 minutes ago?" Mr. Miller said that this "is a very different spin" on events.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry takes on Clarke's "tenor and tone" at NRO.

Clarke's tenor suggests that it was bizarre that it took Bush officials, many of whom weren't in place until the spring of 2001, eight months to bring to the verge of presidential approval a plan to eliminate al Qaeda. But policymaking takes time. The Clinton administration's Presidential Decision Directive 39 identified terrorism as a national-security concern, and was "signed in June 1995 after at least a year of interagency consultation and coordination." At least a year.

Read it. That is all.

Posted by Bill at March 29, 2004 11:04 PM | TrackBack (1)