Scrapbook
Scrapbook Tomorrow's Opposition Research Today Memo to all the Democratic party presidential candidates who aren't retired Gen. Wesley Clark: On August 27, 1994, representing the Joint Chiefs of...
...Thousands of calls came in...
...I got a call on 9/11...
...The picture appeared in several European newspapers, U.S...
...11, 2001, urging him to go on CNN and blame Saddam Hussein for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon...
...Our favorite interview tidbit, however, came when Krugman was asked about the media...
...But wait, there's more—there's a "visual," as they say in the 30-second attack-ad business...
...According to a contemporaneous Washington Post report: "On Fri- fl day [August 26, 1994] and again Ml on Saturday, State Department officials said, they instructed [Clark] not to go, but he went anyway...
...official comHerewith, then, Wesley Clark, Democratic candidate for president of the United States, cavorting with "Hermann Goering"— the suspected war criminal Ratko Mladic, who to this day is a fugitive wanted by the U.N...
...Kind of like the feeling we get every Tuesday and Friday when our New York Times arrives, and there's another Krug-man column in it...
...Journalist-in-the-way-we-used-to-think revealed his own work habits...
...A few weeks back Dave Barry, in the best tradition of cranky newspaper column-writing, published the phone number of the American Teleservices Association, the telemarketing lobby...
...Readers were encouraged to call and "tell them what you think...
...The association was forced to stop answering its toll-free line...
...You're basically just part of a propaganda machine...
...Recently, they served up a toadying Q & A with New York Times columnist/Princeton professor/professional Bush-basher Paul Krugman that made for lots of unintended laughs...
...And there's this feeling of creeping dread...
...Clark, you'll remember, told Tim Russert last June that the attempt to link Saddam and 9/11 "came from the White House, it came from people around the White House, it came from all over...
...Clark accepted as gifts Mladic's hat, a bottle of brandy, and a pistol inscribed in Cyrillic, U.S...
...Reading Krugman is like watching a baby seal get clubbed while its head is being held under icy Arctic waters...
...Hear, hear...
...But according to Harper, the man who called Clark was Thomas Hecht, who heads the one-man Montreal office for the Israel-based Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies...
...And in a Washington Post profile earlier this year, Mr...
...Dept...
...It struck a chord...
...On the other hand, a "fair number of people, including my friends," look at the news now and "extrapolate the lines forward...
...Okay, we made up that last part, but see if we're not on to something...
...Instead, he talked to "a man from a—of a Middle East think tank in Canada, the man who's the brother of a very close friend of mine in Belgium...
...Barry's intent...
...war crimes tribunal and presumed to ter be hiding somewhere in Serbia...
...This is state-sponsored terrorism.'" Clark eventually admitted that he never received a call from the White House...
...What a hoot...
...The un-bylined interviewer could barely contain his/her excitement, writing that "Coming across Paul Krug-man's column in the New York Times is like finding an oasis in the desert...
...In the interview, Krugman looks back fondly on the Clinton years, which he thinks historians will recall as a "sensible, well-intentioned government that dealt successfully with a bunch of crazies...
...Mladic was already the subject of multiple U.S...
...war-crimes charges: "artillery attacks on civilians in Sarajevo" and the "razing of Muslim towns and villages," along with random acts of "mass murder...
...The Cult of Krugman Every now and then, after The Scrapbook has whiled away too many hours on the web, we like to take a break from reading cogent political analysis and enjoy a hot sauna of hysteria courtesy of the lefties at Buzz-Flash.com (typical headline: "Bush lied and our soldiers died...
...of Cheerleading This story has already run its course, but we loved it and thought you might have missed it...
...Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way we used to think...
...The retired NATO commander melodramatically said he received the call on 9/11...
...The meeting "occurred as the Clinton administration is trying to isolate the Serbs in advance of possible military action against them...
...We can't speak for our Moonie colleagues, but we Murdochi-ans think he's got the stuff to be a swell propagandist...
...officials said...
...Krugman told Howard Kurtz that he wouldn't know how to conduct an interview, and besides, "it's not clear to me that on many issues it's important to do legwork...
...I don't know why I would be confused with the White House," Hecht said...
...Interviewing Krugman was like drinking from a cool pond in 120-degree weather...
...Which is not to say Clark doesn't have an overactive imagination...
...Hecht, for his part, doesn't understand how his phone call became a central part of Clark's sordid tale of intrigue and corruption at the highest levels of government...
...I don't even have white paint on my house...
...12 or Sept...
...It's like cavorting with Hermann Goering,' one U.S...
...Krugman, by the way, once described himself as "the lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption...
...In an article in last Thursday's Toronto Star, reporter Tim Harper uncovered the identity of the man who supposedly called Wesley Clark on Sept...
...officials said...
...Clark's Source Revealed Who says nothing worthwhile comes out of Canada...
...Hecht says the call was "either Sept...
...What State Department officials said they found especially disturbing was a photograph of Clark and Mladic wearing each other's caps...
...Clark said the call was evidence of a conspiracy to link Hussein to 9/11...
...So THE SCRAPBOOK was wrong to refer to the caller as Clark's "imaginary friend...
...Wesley Clark: On August 27, 1994, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a factfinding mission to Bosnia, Clark "ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians in a campaign known as ethnic cleansing" and paid a courtesy call on Serbian army commander Ratko Mladic...
...Hecht says he called to invite the general to give a speech, and in the course of the conversation mentioned possible links between Saddam and international terrorist groups...
...Complaining last week to the Associated Press, Tim Searcy, the executive director of the group, said, "It's difficult not to see some malice in Mr...
...Clark's explanation threw The Scrap-book for a loop, because we couldn't locate a "Middle East think tank in Canada...
...Said Barry: "I'm sure they'd love to hear your constitutionally protected views...
...Showing off his legendary soft touch, Barry responded: "I feel just terrible, especially if they were eating or anything...
...I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You've got to say this is connected...
...If you work for any Murdoch publication or network," he harrumphed, "or if you work for the Rev...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 3
