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Tuesday, June 10, 2003
The failure that is Condoleezza
As Bob Scheer points out, Condoleezza Rice has admitted again how much she doesn't know:
Ever since the tragedy of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has relied on selective and distorted intelligence data to make the case for invading Iraq. But the truth will out, and the White House is now scrambling to explain away its mendacity.
On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice admitted that President Bush had used a forged document in his State of the Union speech to prove Iraq represented a nuclear threat: "We did not know at the time — maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency — but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course it was information that was mistaken."
In her position as National Security Advisor, isn't it her job to give accurate and thoughtful advice to the President? Considering her job performance up to this point, and the fact that the State of the Union speech was condsidered to Bush's most important, when he would make his pitch for unilateral war, wouldn't you think she would try to get it right this time? Here's Condoleeza on 9/11:
The White House admitted Wednesday that intelligence reports last summer suggested the United States could be the target of a terrorist attack, perhaps a hijacking.
But officials said nothing in those reports could have prevented the attacks that struck New York and Washington on September 11, killing more than 3,000 people.
"At the time, we were looking at something very different," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters Thursday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney pledged that the Bush administration would cooperate with any investigation into the events leading up to September 11.
[snip]
"I think it's shameful that they didn't warn the American people," said Stephen Push, whose wife was killed aboard the American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon. (Full story)
Rice said the administration was justified in not publicizing the information at the time.
"There was no time. There was no place. There was no method of attack," she said.
"It simply said, 'These are people who train and seem to talk simply of hijacking.' You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such general information," she said during a presentation at the White House. (Transcript)
She said Bush's August 6 presidential briefing suggested that al Qaeda operatives might carry out a "hijacking in the traditional sense," most likely to demand the release of convicted terrorists held in U.S. prisons.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the White House should have revealed the warning earlier.
"The fact that they've waited this long to get it out is troubling," said Shelby, R-Alabama.
However, he said the top members of the House and Senate intelligence committees -- himself; Graham; Florida GOP Rep. Porter Goss, the House Intelligence Committee chairman; and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House panel's ranking Democrat -- received the same classified information as the president.
Rice also told Senate Democrats in a meeting Thursday that some of them were privy to the same information.
Graham told reporters he and his colleagues were given a less detailed briefing than the one given to the president, and said he was never given information about potential hijackings.
And some members of the intelligence committees complained that they had not been informed at all.
"That information should have been given to us, and it wasn't," said Rep. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Of course, after that debacle, you would think that Rice would want to find out why she was so badly misinformed and hence passed along bad information to the vacationing President. You would think that she would want public vindication. You would be wrong.
The Bush administration does not support a public commission to investigate the intelligence failures leading up to the September 11 attacks, fearing such disclosures could harm the war against terrorism, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
Rice told CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" the Senate and House intelligence committees, which already are investigating what went wrong, are the "proper venue."
"In the context of this ongoing war, it is extremely important to protect the sources and the methods and the information so that we can try and disrupt further attacks," she said.
"The problem is that this is an act that is not finished. It is ongoing. We are still fighting a war on terrorism."
Condoleezza Rice's job performance to this point only looks competent when compared to the performance of her boss. And praise can't get any fainter than that.
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