9-11 commission, preliminary findings

Please elaborate.

O'Neill's account thus far stands challenged only by right wing supplysider Hubbard, as far as I know, it has not been retracted, nor has the President himself denied saying it.

(I suggest you be quite careful with what you say here, as Ron Susskind is scanning more and more documents every day, interesting reading. That signature bit seriously irks you though, doesn't it? Are you hurt because it makes your president look dumb or because it makes him look compassionate? )

If it has been retracted or otherwise proven dubious, please inform me of such. The only thing we've heard about O'Neill since that story broke was his exoneration by the Treasury Dep't about the classifed papers, and the corroboration of his version of certain events by Clarke.

By the way, answer the question

Why did you lie to us about John Kerry's stance on terrorism, or were you just misinformed?

 

He thought the prime threat was al Qaeda and was instead ASSIGNED to cyber-terrorism.

Are your reading comprehension skills really that bad???

 

Technically it would be listening comprehension as this criticism comes straight out of Rush:

RUSH: All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?
CHENEY: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame.
(Josh Marshall: )
Cheney frequently gets a pass for what his aides later portray as unintentional misstatements of fact. But there are two or three levels of dishonesty involved in this response. The key one is timing. It's convenient that Cheney doesn't "recall the exact time frame" since the time frame puts the lie to his entire point.

Clarke was put in charge of cyberterrorism (a pet interest of his); but that was after 9/11.

He's saying that Clarke wasn't really so central to the terrorism big picture prior to 9/11 because he was tasked with dealing with cyberterrorism (which Cheney describes as something like a glorified version of Norton AntiVirus). But, as noted, this happened after 9/11 -- after Clarke's claims about the White House's inattention were in the past.

 

Come on, basso, you know this is BS. It was BS when Cheney lied to millions of Americans about it on Limbaugh. It's BS now. Is it that you can't help yourself? Does Clarke look French?? What's your problem.

 

Sorry, I just assume that since I actually read and analyze the information in front of me that others do the same. I forgot how many of the bobble-heads get their garbage directly from Rush, O'Reilly, or Coulter.

I really wish some of them would follow the lead of other intelligent conservatives and actually think about the things that are going down in DC.

 

I will say it again! It's too bad these people will not testify under oath...

-------------------------------------------

CLAIM #3: "[Clarke] was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things."
– Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04

FACT: "Dick Clarke continued, in the Bush Administration, to be the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and the President's principle counterterrorism expert. He was expected to organize and attend all meetings of Principals and Deputies on terrorism. And he did."
– White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #6: "Well, [Clarke] wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff…"
– Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/22/04

FACT: "The Government's interagency counterterrorism crisis management forum (the Counterterrorism Security Group, or "CSG") chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period."
– White House Press Release, 3/21/04

 

Maybe if we tatoo this stuff on Rush, Basso & Cheney's bodies, they won't forget it and will learn it, like so:

 

oh basso

 

Actually, I think Leonard Shelby is the perfect analogue to the Bush administration's (and its syncophants) approach to truth:

of Memento's compelling narrative is the analogy between the psychological denial of personal iniquity and the falsification of American imperial history. What Nolan (working from his brother Jonathon's short story "Memento Mori") sets out to exploreis the peculiarity of protagonist Leonard Shelby's inability to form new memories. And to depict Leonard's deliberate decisions to lie about his own past. Leonard is doomed to repeat those lies over and over until he himself believes them, to destroy evidence that would undermine those lies, and to fabricate new memories that further mask the truth. By so doing, Leonard not only justifies to himself an indefinitely extended series of new murders, but ensures that those crimes too will fall into the memory hole.

See? it fits perfectly:

of Clarke's compelling narrative is the analogy between the psychological denial of personal iniquity and the falsification of American imperial history. What Clarke sets out to exploreis the peculiarity of protagonist Bush Administration's inability to form new memories. And to depict the Bush Administration's deliberate decisions to lie about its own past. Bush Administration is doomed to repeat those lies over and over until he himself believes them, to destroy evidence that would undermine those lies, and to fabricate new memories that further mask the truth. By so doing, Bush Administration not only justifies to himself an indefinitely extended series of new wars, but ensures that those crimes too will fall into the memory hole.

 

Wrong. I didn't say that blame is equal, just like you aren't implying not to vote Republican nor Democratic...Let's proceed with the healthcare issue as unsafe for anyone to deal with at any speed...

 

Four 9/11 Moms Watch Rumsfeld And Grumble
by Gail Sheehy

In the predawn hours of Tuesday, March 23, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza dropped off their collective seven fatherless children with grandmothers and climbed into Ms. Breitweiser’s S.U.V. for the race down Garden State Parkway to the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. It’s a journey that they could now make blindfolded—but this one was different. On March 23, testimony was to be heard by the commission investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others.

These four moms from New Jersey are the World Trade Center widows whose tireless advocacy produced the broad investigation into the failures around the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that now has top officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations duking it out in conflicting testimonies at this week’s high-drama hearings in the Hart Office Building before the 9/11 commission.

After two and a half years of seeking truth and accountability, they had high hopes for this week’s hearings, which are focused on policy failures. Instead, packed into the car at 4 a.m. in what has become a ritual for them, their hearts were heavy.

The Four Moms had submitted dozens of questions they have been burning to ask at these hearings. Mr. Rumsfeld is a particular thorn in their sides.

"He needs to answer to his actions on Sept. 11," said Ms. Kleinberg. "When was he aware that we were under attack? What did he do about it?"

When the widows had a conference call last week with the commission staff, they asked that Secretary Rumsfeld be questioned about his response on the day of Sept. 11. They were told that this was not a line of questioning the staff planned to pursue.

They were not especially impressed with his testimony. In Mr. Rumsfeld’s opening statement, he said he knew of no intelligence in the months leading up to Sept. 11 indicating that terrorists intended to hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.

It was his worst moment at the mike. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste ran through a list of at least a dozen cases of foiled plots using commercial airliners to attack key targets in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mr. Ben-Veniste cited the "Bojinka" plot in 1995, which envisioned blowing up Western commercial planes in Asia; that plot was foiled by the government and must have been on the mind of C.I.A. director George Tenet, who was having weekly lunches with Mr. Rumsfeld through 2001. In 1998, an Al Qaeda–connected group talked about flying a commercial plane into the World Trade Center.

"So when we had this threatened strike that something huge was going to happen, why didn’t D.O.D. alert people on the ground of a potential jihadist hijacking? Why didn’t it ever get to an actionable level?" the commissioner asked.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he only remembered hearing threats of a private aircraft being used. "The decision to fly a commercial aircraft was not known to me."

Mr. Ben-Veniste came back at him: "We knew from the Millennium plot [to blow up Los Angeles International Airport] that Al Qaeda was trying to bomb an American airport," he said. The Clinton administration foiled that plot and thought every day about foiling terrorism, he said. "But as we get into 2001, it was like everyone was looking at the white truck from the sniper attacks and not looking in the right direction. Nobody did a thing about it."

Mr. Rumsfeld backed off with the lame excuse, "I should say I didn’t know."

He said that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was "hosting a meeting for some of the members of Congress."

"Ironically, in the course of the conversation, I stressed how important it was for our country to be adequately prepared for the unexpected," he said.

It is still incredible to the moms that their Secretary of Defense continued to sit in his private dining room at the Pentagon while their husbands were being incinerated in the towers of the World Trade Center. They know this from an account posted on Sept. 11 on the Web site of Christopher Cox, a Republican Congressman from Orange County who is chairman of the House Policy Committee.

"Ironically," Mr. Cox wrote, "just moments before the Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker, Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why … Congress has got to give the President the tools he needs to move forward with a defense of America against ballistic missiles."

At that point, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Secret Service, the F.A.A., NORAD (our North American air-defense system), American Airlines and United Airlines, among others, knew that at least three planes had been violently hijacked, their transponders turned off, and that thousands of American citizens had been annihilated in the World Trade Center by Middle Eastern terrorists, some of whom had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet the nation’s defense chief didn’t think it significant enough to interrupt his political pitch to a key Republican in Congress to reactivate the Star Wars initiative of the Bush I years.

"I’ve been around the block a few times," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Congressman, according to his own account. "There will be another event." Mr. Rumsfeld repeated it for emphasis, Mr. Cox wrote: "There will be another event."

"Within minutes of that utterance, Rumsfeld’s words proved tragically prophetic," Mr. Cox wrote.

"Someone handed me a note that a plane had hit one of the W.T.C. towers," Mr. Rumsfeld testified on March 23. "Later, I was in my office with a C.I.A. briefer when I was told a second plane had hit the other tower."

The note didn’t seem to prompt any action on his part.

"Shortly thereafter, at 9:38 a.m., the Pentagon shook with an explosion of a then-unknown origin," he said.

He had to go to the window of his office to see that the Pentagon had been attacked? Now the moms were getting agitated.

"I went outside to determine what had happened," he testified. "I was not there long, apparently, because I was told I was back in the Pentagon, with the crisis action team, by shortly before or after 10 a.m.

"Upon my return from the crash site, and before going to the Executive Support Center," he continued, "I had one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe was the President."

Then commission member Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general and general counsel for the Department of Defense in the Clinton administration, had her turn with Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Where were you and your aircraft when a missile was heading to the Pentagon? Surely that is your responsibility, to protect our facilities, our headquarters—the Pentagon. Is there anything we did to protect that?"

Mr. Rumsfeld said it was a law-enforcement issue.

"When I arrived at the command center, an order had been given—the command had been given instructions that their pilots could shoot down any commercial airlines filled with our people if the plane seemed to be acting in a threatening manner," he said.

Ms. Gorelick tried to get Mr. Rumsfeld to say whether the NORAD pilots themselves knew they had authority to shoot down a plane.

"I do not know what they thought," he answered. "I was immediately concerned that they knew what they could do and that we changed the rules of engagement."

One of the hardest things for the families to hear was how every witness defended how he had done everything possible to combat the threat of terrorism. No one said, "We fell short."

Secretary of State Colin Powell complained that the Bush administration was given no military plan by the Clinton administration for routing Al Qaeda. He then described how Condoleezza Rice undertook a complete reorganization of the failed responses of the Clinton years—not too much more than a series of meetings that took up the next eight months.

"Then 9/11 hit, and we had to put together another plan altogether," said Mr. Powell.

He also claimed that "we did not know the perpetrators were already in our country and getting ready to commit the crimes we saw on 9/11."

Some of the widows groaned. In fact, the Moms had learned, the F.B.I. had 14 open investigations on supporters of the 9/11 hijackers who were in the U.S. before 9/11.

And after the Clinton administration foiled the Millennium plot to blow up LAX, the C.I.A. knew that two Al Qaeda operatives had a sleeper cell in San Diego. F.B.I. field officers tried to move the information up the line, with no success.

What’s more, most of the 9/11 hijackers re-entered the U.S. between April and June of 2001 with blatantly suspicious visa applications, which the Four Moms had already obtained and shown to the commission. The State Department had 166,000 people on its terrorist watch list in 2001, but only 12 names had been passed along to the F.A.A. for inclusion on its "no-fly list." Mr. Powell had to admit as much, though he said that State Department consular officers had been given no information to help them identify terrorist suspects among the visa applicants.

One of the key questions that the Moms expected to be put to Mr. Powell was why over 100 members of the Saudi royal family and many members of the bin Laden clan were airlifted out of the U.S. in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks—without being interviewed by law enforcement—while no other Americans, including members of the victims’ families, could take a plane anywhere in the U.S. The State Department had obviously given its approval. But no commissioner apparently dared to touch the sacrosanct Saudi friends of the Bush family.

When Republican commissioner James Thompson asked Mr. Powell: "Prior to Sept. 11, would it have been possible to say to the Pakistanis and Saudis, ‘You’re either with us or against us?’", Mr. Powell simply ignored the issue of the Saudi exemption and punted on Pakistan.

Fox in the Chicken House

To the Moms, the problems with the 9/11 commission were always apparent. But the disappointing testimony from Mr. Rumsfeld was especially difficult to bear. The Moms had tried to get their most pressing questions to the commission to be asked of Mr. Rumsfeld, but their efforts had foundered at the hands of Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director.

Indeed, it was only with the recent publication of Richard Clarke’s memoir of his counterterrorism days in the White House, Against All Enemies, that the Moms found out that Mr. Zelikow—who was supposed to present their questions to Mr. Rumsfeld—was actually one of the select few in the new Bush administration who had been warned, nine months before 9/11, that Osama bin Laden was the No. 1 security threat to the country. They are now calling for Mr. Zelikow’s resignation.

Ms. Gorelick sees their point.

"This is a legitimate concern," Ms. Gorelick said in an interview, "and I am not convinced we knew everything we needed to know when we made the decision to hire him."

But despite her obvious discomfort at the conflicts of interest apparently not fully disclosed by Mr. Zelikow in his deposition by the commission’s attorney, Ms. Gorelick believes that the time is too short to replace the staff director.

"We’re just going to have to be very cognizant of the role that he played and address it in the writing of our report," she said.

That doesn’t satisfy the Four Moms. They point out that it is Mr. Zelikow who decides which among the many people offering information will be interviewed. Efforts by the families to get the commission to hear from a raft of administration and intelligence-agency whistleblowers have been largely ignored at his behest. And it is Mr. Zelikow who oversees what investigative material the commissioners will be briefed on, and who decides the topics for the hearings. Mr. Zelikow’s statement at the January hearing sounded to the Moms like a whitewash waiting to happen:

"This was everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault."

The Moms don’t buy it.

"Why did it take Condi Rice nine months to develop a counterterrorism policy for Al Qaeda, while it took only two weeks to develop a policy for regime change in Iraq?" Ms. Kleinberg asked rhetorically.

Dr. Rice has given one closed-door interview and has been asked to return for another, but the commissioners have declined to use their subpoena power to compel her public testimony. And now, they say, it is probably too late.

"That strategy may not turn out well for the Bush administration," Ms. Gorelick said.

Bob Kerrey, the commissioner who replaced Max Cleland, expressed the same view in a separate interview: "The risk they run in not telling what they were doing during that period of time is that other narratives will prevail."

The Four Moms have enjoyed some victories along the way. The first was when the White House finally gave up trying to block an independent investigation; the commission was created in December 2002. The Moms shot down to Washington—stopping in traffic to change out of their Capri pants and into proper pantsuits—to meet with the new commissioners, who thanked them for providing the wealth of information they’d been gathering since losing their husbands on Sept. 11. Ms. Gorelick expressed amazement at the research the women had done, and vowed it would be their "road map."

"We were their biggest advocates," said the husky-voiced Ms. Kleinberg. "They asked us to get them more funding, and we did. It could have been a great relationship, but it hasn’t been."

Mr. Zelikow’s idea of how to conduct the investigation, the Moms said, is to hold everything close to the vest.

"They don’t tell us or the public anything, and they won’t until they publish their final report," said Ms. Casazza. "At which point, they’ll be out of business."

Ms. Kleinberg chimed in: "Why not publish interim reports, instead of letting us sit around for two years bleeding for answers?"

"We have lower and lower expectations," said Ms. Van Auken, whose teenage daughter often accompanies her to hearings; her son still can’t talk about seeing his father’s building incinerated.

The irony is that two of the Four Moms voted for George Bush in 2000, while another is a registered independent; only one is a Democrat. But until they felt the teeth of the Bush attack dogs, they were either apolitical or determinedly nonpartisan. Now their tone is different.

"The Bush people keep saying that Clinton was not doing enough [to combat the Al Qaeda threat]," said Ms. Kleinberg. "But ‘nothing’ is less than ‘not enough,’ and nothing is what the Bush administration did."

An unnamed spokesman for the Bush campaign was quoted as saying of Sept. 11, "We own it." That comment particularly disturbed the Four Moms.

"They can have it," said Ms. Van Auken. "Can I have my husband back now? "

"If they want to own 9/11, they also have to own 9/10 and 9/12," said Ms. Kleinberg. "Their argument is that this was a defining moment in our history. It’s not the moment of tragedy that defines you, but what you do afterwards."

If the final report of this 9/11 commission does indeed turn out to be a whitewash, the Four Moms from New Jersey have a backup plan. Provided there is a change of leadership, they will petition the new President to create an independent 9/11 commission. As if one never existed before.

This column ran on page 1 in the 3/29/2004 edition of The New York Observer.

 

WHY WON'T THIS WOMAN PUBLICALY TESTIFY???????


White House Asks 9/11 Panel to Meet Rice

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Trying to blunt allegations the Bush administration mishandled terror threats before Sept. 11, the White House is offering to let President Bush's top national security aide meet privately for a second time with a federal panel investigating the terrorist attacks.

The White House said in a letter late Thursday to the independent Sept. 11 commission that such a session would allow Condoleezza Rice to clear up "a number of mischaracterizations" of her statements and positions.

Rice, who has spoken frequently and written about the administration's pre- and post-Sept. 11 strategy, still would not testify publicly before the panel, as the members and many relatives of victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks want.



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm..._go_ca_st_pe/rice_commission&cid=542&ncid=716

 

I initially heard that she also wouldn't testify under oath either. That it had to be private and not under oath. I haven't seen the under oath part lately. Does anyone have any information on that?

 

FranchiseBlade the attached article goes into the explanation from White House council on that.

 

I read the article but I didn't see anything saying that the interview she wants to do now has to be in private and not under oath. Just that it had to be private.

It's quite possible I missed it. It's very early and I'm tired.

 

Why won't she testify? Because she is a liar! And she knows it!

-------------------
Neither Silent Nor a Public Witness
Presidential Adviser Rice Becomes a 9/11 Focal Point as Contradictions Appear

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A08


This week's testimony and media blitz by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke has returned unwanted attention to his former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The refusal by President Bush's top security aide to testify publicly before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks elicited rebukes by commission members as they held public hearings without her this week. Thomas H. Kean (R), the former New Jersey governor Bush named to be chairman of the commission, observed: "I think this administration shot itself in the foot by not letting her testify in public."

At the same time, some of Rice's rebuttals of Clarke's broadside against Bush, which she delivered in a flurry of media interviews and statements rather than in testimony, contradicted other administration officials and her own previous statements.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before 9/11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban; the CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats; and Rice's assertion this week that Bush told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies.

National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack defended many of Rice's assertions, saying that she has been more consistent than Clarke.

This is not the first time in her tenure that Rice has been questioned over disputed national security claims by the administration. Making the case about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in September 2002, she said that aluminum tubes the United States intercepted on their way to Iraq were "only suited for nuclear weapons programs." But at the time, the U.S. intelligence community was split over the use of the tubes, and today the majority view is that the tubes were for antiaircraft rockets.

Rice so far has refused to provide testimony under oath to the commission that could possibly resolve the contradictions. On Wednesday night, she told reporters, "I would like nothing better in a sense than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."

Other presidential aides have waived their immunity; President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, did, as did President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. McCormack said the comparisons are not applicable because Berger did not testify in public about policy matters.

The White House, reacting to the public relations difficulties caused by the refusal to allow Rice's testimony, yesterday asked the commission to give Rice another opportunity to speak privately with panel members to address "mischaracterizations of Dr. Rice's statements and positions."

Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she misspoke; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies and Clarke had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles.

In an op-ed published Monday in The Washington Post, Rice wrote that "through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda" that included "sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime" including the use of ground forces. But Armitage, testifying this week as the White House representative, said the military part was not in the plan before Sept. 11. "I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11," he said. McCormack said Rice's statement is accurate because the team discussed including orders for such military plans to be drawn up.

In the same article, Rice belittled Clarke's proposals by writing: "The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or 'roll back' the threat. Once in office, we quickly began crafting a comprehensive new strategy to 'eliminate' the al Qaeda network." Rice asserted that while Clarke and others provided ideas, "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." That same day, she said most of Clarke's ideas "had been already tried or rejected in the Clinton administration."

But in her interview with NBC two days later, Rice appeared to take a different view of Clarke's proposals. "He sent us a set of ideas that would perhaps help to roll back al Qaeda over a three- to five-year period; we acted on those ideas very quickly. And what's very interesting is that . . . Dick Clarke now says that we ignored his ideas or we didn't follow them up."

Asked about this apparent discrepancy, McCormack pointed a reporter to a Clarke background briefing in 2002 in which the then-White House aide was defending the president's efforts in fighting terrorism.

Similarly, Rice implicitly criticized Clarke on CNN on Monday, saying that "he was the counterterrorism czar for a period of the '90s when al Qaeda was strengthening and when the plots that ended up September 11 were being hatched." But in a White House briefing two days later, she said she kept Clarke on the job because "I wanted somebody experienced in that area precisely to carry on the Clinton administration policy." McCormack said Clarke was kept on for continuity.

Among the most serious discrepancies in Rice's claims to emerge this week is about a briefing on terrorism Bush received on Aug. 6, 2001.

Rice had said on May 12, 2002, that the briefing was produced because Bush had asked about dangers of al Qaeda attacking the United States. But at the commission hearing, Ben-Veniste said that the CIA informed the 9/11 panel last week that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA.

McCormack said that when the CIA briefer presented the paper, he said it was in response to the president's questions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25177-2004Mar25.html

 

Rice talks out of both sides of her mouth, and few other orifices as well. She lied about the aluminum tubes, she tried to keep news outlets from printing or airing OBL's statements claiming that they could be used to send signals to operatives, as well as his message might encourage others to support him.

Sadly the news agencies went along with her on that one. It was ridiculous.

Then she lied about nobody having any idea of using planes as missles, she's lied multiple times about Richard Clarke etc. She lies so much about so many different things, that I think more than any other politician I've seen she'll say whatever she thinks will help her cause, with no regard for the truth.

Condi Rice is probably number 3 on my most hated Bush administration folk.

1. Dick Cheney

2. Paul Wolfowitz

3. Condi Rice

 

Noooo! It's separation of powers! She is demonstrating the utmost respect for the Constitution and its provisions!

FranchiseBlade, you have to sneak Ashcroft in there somehow, but I'm with you, Condi is reptilian.

 

Really? I never really thought she was a liar like Rummy and Cheney. I always thought she was just sort of useless. It seems to me that foreign policy is made by Rummy, Wolfy & Cheney and a few of the rest of the boys high up in DoD, and Condi does some briefings and hangs out but doesn't really run the show.

Accordingly she is left out to dry and its not always her fault. I do have a feeling that the Clarke thing may be her undoing, though I don't know if she really had a "doing" in the first place.

I love this picture of her from yesterday though:


ouch! that has b een up on CNN off and of for two days...stop scowling for god's sake!