Here's Satan himself, Mr. Neocon, who along with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz drinks the blood of Christian bab--oops, sorry, been reading La Vanguardia again. Here's Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard on why the Richard Clarke flap doesn't mean a damned thing. The exchange quoted is from the Congressional hearing; Gorton is Senator Slade Gorton of Washington state.

GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No.

There have been occasions in the past when government officials properly took responsibility for actions under their direction that went terribly awry. Janet Reno accepted responsibility for the deaths in Waco in 1993. John Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In those cases, apparently reckless U.S. government actions directly caused unnecessary deaths. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans. It would be no more appropriate for President Bush to apologize today than it would have been for President Roosevelt to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Richard Clarke's pseudo-apology has cheapened the public discourse.