Atrios:

On the Newshour, Richard Clarke just said that the publication of the book had been delayed for 3 months because the White House delayed clearing it for publication. So, if not for their meddling, it would have been before any reasonable person could have accused him of being "political" for releasing it during the election season.

Not likes it makes a difference for the GOP drones; they'll still lie.

...Atrios unfortunately neglects to mention that Clarke, in the Newshour interview, also pledges, categorically, that he will take no position in the Kerry administration. From the transcript:

RICHARD CLARKE: No, Margaret, I don't. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign, and I'll say this now. If John Kennedy -- if John Kerry -- gets elected president, and if John Kerry offers me a job, I will not accept it. I don't want to be part of the Kerry administration. I've done 30 years in government. That's not what this is about.

This book would have come out three months earlier if the White House hadn't taken three months to clear it. It sat in the White House for three months or else it would have been out earlier.

Clarke responds to other attacks on him, also:

MARGARET WARNER: They also say that you and, in fact, most of U.S. intelligence were focused, during this phase of the summer of 2001, there was all of this chatter, and the belief was that the attack would occur on American interests overseas not here at home and that you did not have any kind of proposals or plan for really making the homeland more secure.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, the opposite is true there as well. The CIA did say that they thought the attack would come in either Saudi Arabia or Israel, but I wasn't sure that it might not take place here. So I asked the FBI, the FAA, the Customs Service, the Immigration Service, the Coast Guard, and 18,000 local police departments -- state and local police departments -- as well as all of the aircraft owners, all of the airlines, all of the airports to go on alert.

I held a series of meetings with all of those domestic security organizations, and well before I was asked to do so by Dr. Rice, began that process of sending out alerts to domestic security organizations.

MARGARET WARNER: So what more could the president have done if he was paying the kind of attention you feel he should have that might have thwarted the 9/11 attacks?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, two things. First of all, we could have adopted a policy right away, and a strategy, given presidential authorization, presidential decisions and money, to begin the process of eliminating the al-Qaida sanctuary in Afghanistan. And moreover, if we had had those meetings, chaired by Dr. Rice with the attorney general, with the FBI director, every day or every other day after we received the threat information, they would have gone back to the Justice Department and the FBI, shaken the trees, and out of the trees we now know would have fallen information that was in the FBI that two of the hijackers were in the United States.

Margaret, if we had known the names of those two hijackers, we could have put them on the front page of every paper in the country. We could have rounded up those two hijackers, and then the FBI might have been able to pull the string and find the other members of the al-Qaida cell.

Listen to the interview here. Clarke is sober, self-assured, and very, very convincing.

That leg on the one-legged stool looks kinda shaky.