Missed again!

With most US media, even newspapers, acting more like a headline service than actual carriers of news, it's not surprising that some important things get overlooked if not ignored. A great deal of ink - there's an expression that's beginning to seem dated, yes? - was devoted to the testimony of Richard Clarke, and rightfully so. Even more space was devoted to the Bushites ad hominem attacks, and wrongfully so - but leave that for now. (For Fred Kaplan's interesting take on Clarke's appearance, go here.)

But with the focus on the fireworks, other things get lost in the shuffle. An example was Bob Kerrey's denunciation of the White House's "antiterror plan." This was the plan that the Shrub team was supposedly working on from "day one," the one that was to be the "comprehensive plan" to "eliminate" al-Qaeda, the one they were working on all through the spring and summer of 2001, which is why they paid no attention to all the warning signs and dismissed Clarke's complaints, and why it's so unfair now to accuse them of not taking it all very, very seriously. In short, their excuse.

Turns out it's as lame as everything else about them. From the International Herald Tribune for Thursday:

While Bush administration officials complained Wednesday that the Clinton administration had failed to provide them with a fully developed antiterror plan, Kerrey said that he had been briefed Wednesday morning on the plan Bush officials came up with. "I would say fortunately for the administration, it's classified," Kerrey said, "because there's almost nothing in it. It calls for more diplomacy; it calls for increased pressure" and "for some vague things to try to oust Mullah Omar," then the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some hint as to what that plan consisted of was contained in an AP story for March 23, literally at the very end.

At a Sept. 10, 2001, meeting of second-tier Cabinet officials, officials settled on a three-phase strategy. The first step called for dispatching an envoy to talk to the Taliban. If this failed, diplomatic pressure would be applied and covert funding and support for anti-Taliban fighters would be increased.

If both failed, "the deputies agreed that the United States would seek to overthrow the Taliban regime through more direct action," the report said. Deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley said the strategy had a three-year time frame.

In other words, they ignored the briefings they got from the Clinton transition team and ignored Clarke, because they wanted a "comprehensive" plan - and after eight months of what they'd have us believe was unremitting toil they come up with a plan not only almost identical to the Clinton plan but actually proposing to back up a few steps and start all over again.

In other words, they accomplished exactly nothing. And other than what's above and a passing reference in Reuters' coverage, I saw nothing about it in the US media (of which, in fact, the Herald Tribune should not be considered part).

Now, I want to make clear here that this is not an endorsement of harsher military action than was undertaken or proposed. (John Kerrey was advocating military assaults on Afghanistan well before September 11, so he's not exactly an unbiased observer, himself.) And one thing I do agree with the White House on is that an attack on the Taliban for their role as "host" to al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001 would likely have had no effect on September 11. I have said numerous times that ultimately the only effective weapon against terrorism is justice and I'll expand that here to say that military action is probably the least effective weapon - or is Israel a whole lot safer now that they've assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin? (Even Sharon doesn't argue that it is.)

What this is about is the bullshit being dispensed freely by the Bush administration and how often the media, caught up in the "hot story" or busy playing "he said she said" as if being court stenographers to royalty constituted journalism, have let them get away with it even when someone points it out right in front of them.