Interesting associates of Mary McCarthy

The Belmont Club quotes Flopping aces on people who have worked with McCarthy in the past. They include Zbigniew Brzezinski, General Wesley Clark, General Anthony Zinni, as well as Richard Clarke and Sandy Berger. Not too many supporters of the administration in that group. Will reporters be asking them questions about the secret war against the Bush administration?

Thomas Joscelyn describes how McCarthy and Clarke worked together on targeting the Sudan aspirin factory that selected because of Iraq working with al Qaeda on chemical weapons manufacturing.

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Two days before the embassy bombings, Clarke's staff wrote that Bin Ladin "has invested in and almost certainly has access to VX produced at a plant in Sudan." Senior State Department officials believed that they had received a similar verdict independently, though they and Clarke's staff were probably relying on the same report. Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director responsible for intelligence programs, initially cautioned Berger that the "bottom line" was "we will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options." She added that the link between Bin Ladin and al Shifa was "rather uncertain at this point." Berger has told us that he thought about what might happen if the decision went against hitting al Shifa, and nerve gas was used in a New York subway two weeks later. [Emphasis Added.]

But as Daniel Benjamin, another former NSC staffer, wrote in October of 2004, McCarthy had changed her tune by April 2000:

The report of the 9/11 Commission notes that the National Security staff reviewed the intelligence in April 2000 and concluded that the CIA's assessment of its intelligence on bin Laden and al-Shifa had been valid; the memo to Clinton on this was cosigned by Richard Clarke and Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director for intelligence programs, who opposed the bombing of al-Shifa in 1998. The report also notes that in their testimony before the commission, Al Gore, Sandy Berger, George Tenet, and Richard Clarke all stood by the decision to bomb al-Shifa.

Now, of course, Clarke and Benjamin argue that: (a) the decision to strike al-Shifa was justified because (b) the intelligence connecting Iraqi chemical weapons experts to al Qaeda's chemical weapons efforts was sound, but (c) this doesn't mean that Iraq and al Qaeda had a significant relationship because (d) somehow this collaboration occurred without either party realizing that it was working with the other! Sound bizarre? It is.

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It is hard to understand people like Clarke and McCarthy and their opposition to Bush policy in the context of their previous work, unless you put it in the context of what they say while working for a Democrat and contrast it with what they say when a Republican is in office. With the partisan gloss things become clearer.