"Conclusion? I'm just examining the man's potential motives..."

i'll throw this into the examination of potential motives. perhaps he is a person who has served his country and 3 presidential administrations and thru that period followed the whole development of al-quada terrorism as closely or more closely than anyone in the business. he may have a real sense of the true danger we face and has seen our defense bungled by a bunch of ideologically impaired cold war hacks. disaster happens on their watch (9/11) and he feels that this group failed to do everything they could have to protect this country and also started a war that has no meaning in terms of stopping the terrorist threat that he has worked against for so long. then he leaves the administration after doing what he could on the inside to address the threat and then feels a duty to tell the american people just what kind of trouble they're really in. in other words, a truly patriotic act.

or maybe he's just a washed-up beaurocrat pissed about his demotion who wants to sell a few books. jeez, it seems like a guy like that might not want to risk it all and testify for 15 hours in closed session, 6 hours of congressional hearings, publicly UNDER OATH which makes him liable for perjury charges if the bush admin can prove anything he said was untrue, but then again i guess he could be so petty and prideful that he'd go for that. i don't know him personally so anything i say about his motives is speculation.

"In truth, in my company, in most of business, no one is ever demoted. If an issue is serious enough to warrant a demotion, they're fired instead. Demotion stirs too much resentment and rarely turns out well."

if this is true i guess it shows that the bush admin is not only venal and slimy but stupid and incompetant as well. i don't believe they fired clarke.