You folks really don't understand Washington. Take the 9/15/01 e-mail to Rice. She's getting ready to deal with the press, so she tells her aide (Clarke) to put together everything they'd done to counter bin Laden. When your superior asks for that, you pull together what you've got to make a case. You don't put together a memo outlining all the ways the USG f---ed up.Same for the August 2002 press briefing. You defend your boss's position. You don't tell the press that the policy is completely inadequate, or underfunded, or misconceived.A lot of people in this town make a living defending their boss's position, even if they don't necessarily agree with it, either because they need the job or because they agree with their boss on a host of other issues.Arguably perhaps Clarke should have resigned earlier if he felt so strongly. But he probably wanted to get his thirty years in.None of which matters, since you're mostly interested in defending one side and slamming the other. Whereas most Americans would just like to feel assured that we know what went wrong and everything possible is being done to assure that it never happens again. So much for changing the tone.