Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Working furiously, Clarke produced a strategy paper that he presented to Sandy Berger
and other national security principals on December 20, 2000. The plan was an ambitious
one: break up al Qaeda cells and arrest their personnel; systematically attack financial support
for its terrorist activities; freeze its assets; stop its funding through fake charities; give aid to
governments having trouble with al Qaeda (Uzbekistan, the Phillipines, and Yemen); and,
most significantly, scale up covert action in Afghanistan to eliminate the training camps and
reach bin Laden himself. Clarke proposed bulking up support for the Northern Alliance and
putting Special Forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan. As a senior Bush administration
official told Time, Clarke's plan amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."
Remember how I mentioned that the National Review's Byron York wrote that Clinton's
"record is a richly detailed manual on how not to combat terrorism"? Well, if you take
out the word "not," you get a pretty good description of the plan: "a richly detailed manual on
how to combat terrorism." So Byron was just one word away from understanding the Clinton
antiterror legacy.
But the plan was never carried out. In its place Clinton's successor, George W. Bush,
and his national security team would conceive and execute a different plan entirely. A plan
called Operation Ignore.