Read This Now - Richard Clarke Was There

One of the current arguments of the day coming from Bush apologists and torture pushers is that you have to remember and imagine what it must have been like to be them and inside the White House in the days after September 11 and that given those circumstances they made the right call.

There are many many things wrong with this argument, but Richard Clarke was inside the White House at the time and he says Cheney in particular is full of it...

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.