Inside Politics

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Clarke cheerleaders

The news divisions of ABC, NBC and CBS acted as cheerleaders for former terrorism official Richard A. Clarke, despite considerable evidence that Mr. Clarke was acting as a political partisan, the Media Research Center reports at www.mediaresearch.org.

"Several events on Wednesday undermined former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's contention that the Bush team's failure to adequately pursue al Qaeda in its first months in office made the attacks possible," the conservative media watchdog said in a summary of Wednesday's news broadcasts.

"[Fox News Channel] disclosed how in 2002, Clarke had defended the Bush record, during his testimony Clarke conceded that any actions by the Bush team would have been too late to prevent the attacks and commissioners pointed out how, in 14 hours of private testimony, Clarke hadn't made any of his anti-Bush claims. Yet none of the developments bruised Clarke's credibility with the networks who treated his anti-Bush take as authoritative.

"They looked at Clarke's 2002 words not from the perspective of his inconsistency, but as proof of how he's under attack from the White House. ABC called it 'a ferocious counterattack.' CBS's John Roberts characterized Clarke's testimony as 'electrifying' and trumpeted: 'What Richard Clarke had to say captivated all who heard it.' "

Kerry's past

In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being "murdered by the United States of America" and said he had gone to Paris and "talked with both delegations at the peace talks" and met with communist representatives, the Boston Globe reports.

Mr. Kerry, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, confirmed Wednesday through a spokesman that he did go to Paris and talked privately with a leading communist representative. But the spokesman played down the extent of Mr. Kerry's role and said Mr. Kerry did not engage in negotiations, reporters Michael Kranish and Patrick Healy wrote.

Asked about the appropriateness of Mr. Kerry's saying that the United States had "murdered" 200,000 Vietnamese annually when the United States was at war, Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan said "Senator Kerry used a word he deems inappropriate."