Gen. Wesley Clark may not, at this point, be a declared candidate, but conservative pundits are already targeting Clark for criticism.
Clark’s media critics appear to have settled on one comment the general made on Meet the Press in June on which to focus their attacks. The conservatives seem to believe they caught Clark in a damaging slip-up. When you check the transcript against the accusations, you realize the critics are wrong, and worse, are misleading their readers.
First up is George Will, who went after Clark in his Washington Post column on Sunday. Will cites apparent Clark “confusion” about attempts to tie Iraq to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
Will wrote, “[Clark] compounds the confusion that began when he said on June 15 that on 9/11 ‘I got a call at my home’ saying that when he was to appear on CNN, ‘You’ve got to say this is connected’ to Iraq. ‘It came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over.'” Will goes on to quote a subsequent clarification, in which Clark said a month later, “No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11.”
Matthew Continetti in the conservative Weekly Standard makes an identical point in this week’s issue, arguing that Clark is “another slippery candidate from Arkansas.”
“Just look at Clark’s story, first told on Meet the Press, that he received a call on 9/11 from ‘people around the White House’ urging him to publicly link the terrorist attacks to Saddam Hussein,” Continetti wrote.
To hear Will and Continetti explain it, Clark’s comments sound potentially damaging. Both conservatives point to apparent quotations in which Clark said that he was asked by White House officials to assert Iraq’s connection to 9/11. Do Will and Continetti have something here? No. They’re both deceptively playing fast and loose with the transcript.
Let’s look at exactly what Clark said on Meet the Press.
Clark: I think there was a certain amount of hype in the intelligence [about Iraq], and I think the information that’s come out thus far does indicate that there was a sort of selective reading of the intelligence.
Russert: Hyped by whom?
Clark: Well, I…
Russert: CIA, or the president or vice president? Secretary of Defense, who?
Clark: I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.
Russert: By who? Who did that?
Clark: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, “You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.” I said, “But — I’m willing to say it but what’s your evidence?” And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had — Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn’t talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.
This transcript conveys a very different message from the one Will and Continetti would have us believe. When Clark said “it came from the White House,” he was talking about the effort on the part of the administration to convince America to wage war in Iraq. Later, Clark talked about getting a call while working for CNN about connecting Iraq and 9/11, but he certainly never said he was contacted by Bush administration officials.
Continetti insisted that Clark claimed to have “received a call on 9/11 from ‘people around the White House.'” This is completely untrue. Clark never said anything of the sort.
Even worse, look again at the way George Will put this. His column quotes Clark, but takes different sentences and rearranges them to convey a different message. The result is Will making Clark sound like he said calls “came from the White House” to say Iraq was connected to 9/11, though the transcript shows that isn’t what was said at all.
By reversing the order of Clark’s comments, Will has shamelessly misled his readers, even more than usual.
I’ve certainly never been a fan of Will, but even I am surprised he’d stoop to amateur hackery like this. This is outrageous and the Post, if it had any gumption at all, would punish Will for this kind of deception.