There are dozens of factual inaccuracies in his charges and he was well known to be loopy long before his book came out. He was loopy under Reagan. (spend some google time)

The only people that believe he is telling the truth also believe that Bush was AWOL, Al gore invented the internet and that the Tooth Fairy really exists.

And there is just no reasoning with those people.

Yes, I think that's right. He was looking for a chance to blow OBL up rather than work a deal to facilitate his capture. The advantage of criticizing a failed policy of the past is that we know what happened didn't work and it's possible that a rejected option would have.

See my update.

Well, sorry, Brett. As much as you might prefer that they just lie there and try to enjoy it, when one is attacked, one has the right to fight back. Clarke put his own credibility squarely at issue when he claimed that he warned them what to do and they ignored him. If, in fact, that isn't quite true, then it is in no way "character assassination" to point that out.

I'm really not sure that the charge is "if only they'd listened to me, we'd have avoided 9/11." I just read the bulk of the book, and it's the final two chapters that are really worth focusing on, it seems to me (of course, I read them last so they're in my thoughts). The argument is that in order to avoid another 9/11, we need to get serious about going after al Qaeda, and the war in Iraq does little toward that goal (and is probably counterproductive). I can understand why the Bush administration has focused on the criticisms of its pre-9/11 policies, but to be honest, it's the rest of the argument that's got me worried.

That's a reasonable enough argument, although certainly not a novel one. It's certainly not what 60 Minutes focused on. Of course, I've long quit watching that show, since Hewitt doesn't even bother to pretend to be an honest journalist anymore.

I'm not sure what else it is we should be doing to fight al Qaeda. We're certainly killing a lot of them in Iraq, although I think that's a happy accident rather than the plan behind the war.

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