If, as Clark and Condi agree, no counterterrorist measure taken between January 20 and September 11, 2001, could have stopped the attacks on New York and Washington, this is all the more reason to cleave to a strict noninterventionist foreign policy. If there is no way to stop the people that intervention will make angry from striking back, then let's mind our own business and not make them angry.

Sheldon Richman - 4/12/2004

I've been watching the hearings. In a direct question on this point from Slade Gorton, Clarke distinctly said adoption of the measures he had urged would not have stopped the attacks. Conservative columnists have made much of this.

Michael Meo - 4/9/2004

But Clarke quite famously doesn't agree with your statement (I don't know that Rice does or doesn't); that is the reason why he rates the Bush Administration as a 'disaster' in countering terrorism.

Clarke said that if Bush had done what Clinton did, and convened a task-force meeting of the principal cabinet-level officers on a daily basis, who had to go back to their departments every night and see what progress had been made, that this "shaking of the tree" very well might have turned up the information, already in government hands, that could have prevented 9/11.

But at this point I have to ask you, where have you been?