03.06.2014 - 17:22 [ Truthout ]

Ex-Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Committed War Crimes

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, there’s not too much of a parallel. I resigned, quit the government altogether, testified before congressional committees and before the 9/11 Commission, wrote a book revealing what the Bush administration had and had not done to stop 9/11. And what they did after the fact. How the president wanted me, after the fact, to blame Iraq for the 9/11 attack. What Snowden has done has clearly exposed programs that were stupid, that were, I think, were illegal, some of them, personally, my view, and those programs have — some of them have stopped. And I have been part of the effort to stop some of them, particularly the 215 telephone metadata program, which I did not know about. I had been out of the government for 10 years. When I found out about it as a result of the Snowden revelations, I was gob smacked. I couldn’t believe that the government was doing it.