April 5th 2004
The BNP could get 16% of the vote at the next election! That is one of the surprisingly and very encouraging results of a Poll carried out for the "Mail on Sunday". The Poll carried out by YouGov reported that 80% of respondents believed that the Government had badly handled the immigration crisis.
Both Labour and Tory parties are running scared of the rapidly growing support for the only party that will tackle the issue of immigration. It has been our policy for the last two decades and it is most encouraging to learn that large sections of the electorate are waking to the fact that both Tory and Labour Governments have in the past 15 years been unable to contain the flood of migrants and deal with the crisis which is of their own making. Voters cannot trust either party to stand firm on the issue and make decisions based on what the voters want, not what the politically correct elite want.
In testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission later this week, and in a new book to be published tomorrow, 'Against All Enemies', Clarke will bell the story of what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after September 11th. He does so first tonight, on Sixty Minutes.
STAHL (exp): {After the President returned to the White House on 9/11, he and his top advisors including Clarke began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin laden and al Qaeda but was surprised when the talk quickly turned to another target.}
STAHL: You relayed a conversation you had with Sec'y of Defense Rumsfeld.
CLARKE: Well Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq and we all said, 'No no, al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well there are lots of good targets in lots of places but Iraq had nothing to with it.'
STAHL: You wrote you thought he was joking.
CLARKE: Initially I thought when he said there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan, I thought he was joking.
STAHL: Now what was your reaction to all this Iraq talk? What did you tell everybody?
CLARKE: What I said was, you know, invading Iraq or bombing Iraq after we're attacked by somebody else, it's akin to, what if Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor instead of going to war with Japan said, "Let's invade Mexico." It's very analagous.
STAHL: But didn't they think there was a connection?
CLARKE: I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, We've looked at this issue for years, for years we've looked for a connection and there's just no connection.
STAHL: And you told them that?
CLARKE: Absolutely.
STAHL: You personally ...
CLARK: I told them that, George Tenet told them that ...
STAHL: Who did you tell?
CLARKE: I told that to the group, to the SState, the SDef, the AG. They all knew it.
STAHL: You talk about a conversation you personally had with the president.
CLARKE: Yes. THe president -- we were in the situation room complex -- the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said 'Iraq did this.'
STAHL: Didn't you tell him that you'd looked and there'd been no connection?
CLARKE: I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.
STAHL: In other words, you did go back and look.
CLARKE: We went back again and we looked.
STAHL: You did. And was it a serious look? Did you really ... ?
CLARKE: It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and down to FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'
STAHL: Come on!
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Wrong answer?
CLARKE: Do it again.
STAHL: Did the President see it?
CLARKE: I have no idea to this day if the President saw it because after we did it again it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, Leslie, I don't think the people around the President show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer [to].