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http://snipurl.com/cso4 The National Security Archive today [2/10] posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice - the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration's policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke's memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke's request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001. Read the memo at: http://snipurl.com/csoj --------------- http://snipurl.com/csog Richard Clarke's January 2001 memo warned Bush of al Qaeda threat Posted on Friday, February 11 By JoAnne Allen, Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly released memo warned the White House at the start of the Bush administration that al Qaeda represented a threat throughout the Islamic world, a warning that critics said went unheeded by President Bush until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The memo dated Jan. 25, 2001 -- five days after Bush took office -- was an essential feature of last year's hearings into intelligence failures before the attacks on New York and Washington. A copy of the document was posted on the National Security Archive Web site on Thursday. The memo, from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, had been described during the hearings but its full contents had not been disclosed. Clarke, a holdover from the Clinton administration, had requested an immediate meeting of top national security officials as soon as possible after Bush took office to discuss combating al Qaeda. He described the network as a threat with broad reach. "Al Qaeda affects centrally our policies on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, North Africa and the GCC (Gulf Arab states). Leaders in Jordan and Saudi Arabia see al Qaeda as a direct threat to them," Clarke wrote. "The strength of the network of organizations limits the scope of support friendly Arab regimes can give to a range of U.S. policies, including Iraq policy and the (Israeli-Palestinian) Peace Process. We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qaeda poses." The memo also warned of overestimating the stability of moderate regional allies threatened by al Qaeda. It recommended that the new administration urgently discuss the al Qaeda network, including the magnitude of the threat it posed and strategy for dealing with it. The document was declassified on April 7, 2004, one day before Rice's testimony before the Sept. 11 commission. It was released recently by the National Security Council to the National Security Archive -- a private library of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The meeting on al Qaeda requested by Clarke did not take place until Sept. 4, 2001. ------------- Resistance Fantasies by Diane Thiel, faculty member at the University of New Mexico We like to think we would have been Hans or Sophie Scholl, scattering anti-Reich leaflets for our lives. We like to think we would have given our homes, our future children for the safety of our neighbors. We like to think we never could have owned slaves or better yet, that we were abolitionists. We never would have paid a factory death wage. We never would have sat at bulging tables while the potato famine harvested the villages or packed people into coffin ships. We hear of every trail of tears: The only good Indian is a dead Indian How could the people come to that - solution? And then we close our newspapers, somewhat aware of what our investments might support, disturbed to be reminded, in the news or in a poem. We might quietly recognize ourselves when we hear that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. And yet go home to our lives and our Silence, that true rough beast, hiding in the hole of our full bellies. so easily convinced there is nothing we can do. And each of us continues to dream of having been willing to give anything. at that moment in history, of having been, at the very least, an active resister. 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