8-6-01: A Date That Should Live in Infamy

(Graphic by Tengrain, blogswarm idea by Ripley at The Zen Cabin, and thanks to Blue Gal for spreading the word.)

While the Bush administration rattles sabers once again and insists on more unchecked surveillance power and fewer civil rights for Americans, and Democrats seem set to capitulate for no good reason, it's worth taking stock of the Bush administration's actual record on terrorism.

First, let's take stock of the present legislative and political peril from Bush's new wiretap push, captured nicely by Digby:

Let's set aside the idea that "trusting" the Bush administration with warrantless wiretaps is like trusting your four year old with a zippo lighter, what kind of bucket-of-lukewarm-spit kind of politics is this? What are they afraid of, that the Bush administration will blame them if a terrorist attack occurs and they didn't approve another blank check? Guess what? It wouldn't matter if the Democrats named Bush king with the power to draw and quarter hippies and Muslims on the white house lawn, they will still blame the Democrats if there is another terrorist attack.

That's not to mention that the four year old in this case is a proven arsonist. It's not just the Bush administration. Rudy Giuliani bases his entire campaign, public persona and rhetorical attacks on 9/11, even though his actual 9/11 record is shameful. His paper tiger game is nothing compared to the Bush administration's, however.

Before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice blew off warnings from Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke and others that their biggest threat would be Al Qaeda; Rice initially didn't seem to know who they were. Before 9/11, Cheney insisted on being in charge of Bush's anti-terrorism task force, and met all of... zero times. And before 9/11, six years ago today, a little document was presented to George W. Bush and his inner circle: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S."

This is the same critical Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that Condoleezza Rice shamelessly, cravenly insisted was merely a historical document. Read the PDB, watch the video, and recoil anew at Rice brazenly lying to the 9/11 Commission that the PDB did not speak of current threats. Rice asserts that the PDB "was not a warning," a blatant falsehood that betrays her lack of integrity and the Bush administration's criminal incompetence.

However, Rice's lies and Cheney's ineptitude pale in comparison to the spectacle of George W. Bush's reaction to the PDB, as reported in Ron Suskind's 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11. The accuracy of this passage has never been challenged by the White House (to my knowledge). Although pressed on this very subject by Richard Ben-Veniste during her testimony, Rice left this tidbit out:

The "what ifs" can kill you.

Something missed. A failure of will. A turn in one direction when the other one was the right path.

Over time, people tend to get past them. We did what we could, they say, and move on.

But, in terms of the tragedy of 9/11, a particular regret lingers for those who might have made a difference.

The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President — "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" — has been widely noted in the past few years.

But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the president — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.

The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were in the red. They didn't know place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know.

Verbal briefings of George W. Bush are acts of almost inestimable import in the affairs of the nation — more so than is the case for other recent presidents. He's not much of a reader, this President, and never has been, despite White House efforts to trumpet what serious books he is reading at various times. He's not a President who sees much value in hearing from a wide array of voices — he has made that clear. His circle of truly trusted advisors is small — smaller as President, in many ways, than it was when he was governor. But he's a very good listener and an extremely visual listener. He sizes people up swiftly and aptly, watches them carefully, and trusts his eyes. It is a gift, this nonverbal acuity, that he relies on in managing the almost overwhelming duties of the presidency: countless decisions each day, each one important; a daunting array of issues to grasp; an endless stream of politicized experts and expert politicos, all speaking in earnest tones. What does George W. Bush do? He makes it personal. He may not have a great deal of experience, especially in foreign affairs, before arriving in the job, but — because of his trust in those interpretative abilities — he doesn't view that as a deficit. The expert, sitting before him, has done the hard work, the heavy lifting, and the President tries to gauge how "certain" they are of what they say, even if the issues may be unfamiliar to him. Do they seem nervous or unsure? Are they fudging? Why do they think what they do... and what do they think of him>? That last part is very important.

The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markers can be crucial — especially in terms of handling the posturing of top officials — they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it.

And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.

He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.

"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."

That's from Suskind's first two pages, in his preface. The picture doesn't get any rosier. The Washington Post's review highlighted this incident. Many bloggers have covered it (I did here, among other places). And Fahrenheit 9/11 featured Rice's attempted obstruction and Bush's paralysis on 9/11 itself.

This is the man nominally leading our country. Anecdotes such as this abound; this is merely one of the most egregious, maddening, and inexcusable. Suskind is relatively diplomatic and understated. The idea that a leader should focus on substance and also, y'know, read, shouldn't be radical propositions. If ever one doubted that the modern Republican party has deep contempt for the American people, it should be clear from the fact that they thought George W. Bush, who they knew behaved in this manner, was the very best person out of their entire party to be President of the United States.

As several others have noted as well, incompetence is not a bug of secretive, authoritarian regimes. It's a feature. The Bushies and other movement conservatives are bullies, with really only a few moves: secrecy, lying and bluffing. Giuliani doesn't want the general public to watch the video (linked above) made by 9/11 firefighters because they'd learn the truth about him and his shoddy record on terrorism. Similarly, the Bush administration has never wanted an honest, rational examination of their record on terrorism or anything else. These people are not acting in good faith, and have never acknowledged their catastrophic mistakes, which they are hell bent on repeating. That's why these issues are so important. The MSM has proven it will rarely call the GOP on its many lies, and the MSM accepts the Bush administration's secrecy. The MSM is wary of digging up the past because of its own glaring culpability. Meanwhile, too many Democrats are currently afraid to call the Bushies on their many shameless bluffs. The crucial subtext of Bush's presidential campaign against Kerry in 2004 was that if Kerry wouldn't stand up to ridiculous, scurrilous attacks by — the Bush campaign! — how could he be trusted to stand up to foreign foes? The Bush administration got one thing right (maybe the only thing they've got right) — it's important to stand up to bullies.

If we're to restore the Constitution and get America back to some semblance of sanity, this dynamic needs to change. These bullies, alarmists, propagandists and chickenhawks need to be called on their bluffs. Approval ratings show that the public's sharp enough to know that Bush and Cheney are bad for the country, but the details are important, most of all so that more citizens pressure Congress to do the job of running the country responsibly that the Bush administration will never do voluntarily. The epigraph Suskind chose for The One Percent Doctrine is from Thomas Jefferson: "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." To effect positive change, the Bush administration needs to be examined far more frankly far more often, so that the public is better informed. A good starting point is revisiting that crucial PDB and how the Bush administration responded.


(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Bogus Letter Became a Case for War

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

The Washington Post's Peter Eisner reports on the front page today (4/3/07):

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.

Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war.

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

Some of the information in the article is not new, but the piece does fill in many details. Seymour Hersh reported some of the core information in his 10/27/03 article "The Stovepipe," one of the first major post-invasion pieces on the Bush's administration's cherry-picking of intelligence. Blogger Josh Marshall also covered several aspects of this story over at Talking Points Memo (here's parts one, two and three). In a previous post we mentioned some of Slate's coverage on then DCI George Tenet being asked to fall on his sword for false tales the CIA had debunked (here's Jack Shafer, here's William Saletan, and here's John Dickerson). Then there's this section from Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctine, occurring after the CIA had debunked several pieces of "evidence":

Relentless pressure is a strategy. Usually quite successful. It was employed both in the "war on terror" against al Qaeda, and by the White House against the CIA.

[...]

Libby and Hadley, meanwhile, continued to push, and push hard, on the analysts, asking the same question Tenet was often asked in high-level meetings. Aren't these potential threats precisely why an invasion is necessary? Is there even the slimmest possibility—a one percent chance—that uranium was bought in Niger, that the aluminum tubes were usable in uranium centrifuges, or that Mohammed Atta managed to meet with an Iraqi, any Iraqi, in Prague?

The thing to watch out for with a program of relentless pressure is the blowback.

On Friday afternoon, January 10, Jami Miscik, the head of the DI walked down the hall on the seventh floor shaking with rage.

Josh Moseman, Tenet's chief of staff, saw her as she passed his office.

"You okay?"

"No, I'm not okay. I'm definitely not okay!"

A moment later, she'd made it to Tenet's suite.

She barely could get out the words. Stephen Hadley, Condi's second, has called from the office of "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

They wanted her down at Libby's office in the White House by 5 p.m. At issue was the last in an endless series of draft reports about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. How many drafts? Miscik couldn't remember. The pressure for the White House—and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense—had started a week after 9/11.

Cheney's office claimed to have sources. And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them at Miscik and CIA. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week. The CIA held firm; the meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi agent didn't occur.

Miscek was no fool. She understood what was going on. It wasn't about what was true, or verifiable. It was about a defensible position, or at least one that would hold up until the troops were marching through Baghdad, welcomed as liberators.

A few days before, when she had sent the final draft over to Libby and Hadley, she told them, emphatically, This is it. There would be no more drafts, no more meetings where her analysts sat across from Hadley, or Feith, or the guys in Feith's office, while the opposing team tried to slip something by them. The report was not what they wanted. She knew that. No evidence meant no evidence.

"I'm not going back there, again, George," Miscek said. "If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report... I'm resigning, right now."

She fought back tears of rage.

Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley.

"She is not coming over," he shouted into the phone. "We are not rewriting this fucking report one more time. It is fucking over. Do you hear me! And don't you ever fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!"

They did not rewrite the report.

And that's why, three weeks later, in making the case for war in his State of the Union address, George W. Bush was not able to say what he'd long hoped to say at such a moment: that there was a pre-9/11 connection between al Qaeda and Saddam.

One down. But two salient points—wobbly, but still standing—on the heart-stopping issue of nuclear weapons remained in the text: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

Both statements were crafted to carry the clarion ring of proof, and both were known, by people inside the CIA and the White House, to fall short of that standard.
(pp.189-191, hardcover edition)

Then there's all of Plamegate. This was not some innocent, bureaucratic snafu, and that's the one aspect of this article I don't trust — not that bureaucratic gaffes might not have complicated matters. There are dozens of stories and incidents like the one Suskind relates, but the key element never changes: the Bush administration acted in bad faith. They never sought an objective threat analysis on Iraq. They wanted to go to war, and dug and scrounged for justification, not proof. They didn't care if Iraq was an imminent threat or not (or, for some, they were so certain it didn't matter). They were interested in what would sell. Iraq was never a challenge of national security for the Bush administration. It was a challenge of PR.

There are folks out there that know this material backwards and forwards, and I'll be interested to see what they make of this new article. Yet to my mind, its main value is that this is The Washington Post, front page, confirming earlier reports and filling in some details. Even more importantly, more people seem willing to speak out now. This is nothing for the Bush administration to celebrate. These sort of issues tend to build up a critical mass (witness all the peripheral scandals the Attorney scandal has started to flush out). As the saying goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant, and with this administration, there can't be enough of it.

Update: It's no surprise that TPM weighed in on the Eisner article, and they offer a valuable perspective.

Also today, Eisner discussed the article online with readers, and clarified several points. Apparently, he's got a book coming out on this whole deal.

Woodward Watch

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

If you’ve been following the news, there’s a slight chance you may perhaps have noticed that Bob Woodward has a new book out, State of Denial: Bush At War, Part III. Most Woodward books tend to be “events” among journalists and news junkies, and true to form, DC is abuzz about the book (in addition to the Foley scandal). In case you missed a few of the many excerpts or reviews, here they are.

The Washington Post printed two excerpts from the book, ”Secret Reports Dispute White House Optimism” and ”Should He Stay?” (focusing on Rumsfeld). Newsweek printed another section on Rumsfeld that can be read here.

The 60 Minutes interview is here.

(The Charlie Rose footage is not available yet, except in small clips.)

The Fresh Air radio interview, where Woodward actually gets choked up, is here.

The PBS NewsHour interview and transcript is here.

The transcript of the Larry King interview is here (the video is on YouTube, but in about 7 parts).

Howard Kurtz covered the book and Woodward for The Washington Post here. Dan Froomkin covered the book in his Friday, 9/28/06 column here and has been covering other accounts, and the Bush administration’s flimsy and failed denials since.

Michiko Kakutani reviews it for The New York Times here, and also looks over the “floodlet” of books on Bush in ”All the President’s Books.”

The Salon review, which zeros in on some key details, is here.

The book is sure to be dissected more in the coming month. But already, there’s corroborating accounts.

In The Washington Post, Tom Ricks (author of Fiasco) reports that ”U.S. European Commander Confirms Quotes in Book.”

Meanwhile, one of the most explosive and contentious charges deals with a July 10th, 2001 meeting called by George Tenet and Cofer Black with Condoleezza Rice to warn her about Al-Qaeda. Greg Sargent summed up many of the small contradictions and remaining questions here. Mahablog managed to answer some of those questions here, drawing on Dan Froomkin and Taylor Marsh. Marsh in turn cites an important Countdown segment and posts the video here. In a later post, Marsh examines and posts some of the Charlie Rose interview with Woodward, viewable here.

Bush is an Idiot, Cheney is a Dangerous Nutcase

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

This really can’t qualify as a “news” item. But over at Hullabaloo, Digby has two more striking, insightful posts up. ”Meanwhile, Back In Iraq” is primarily an examination of exactly how bad Iraq is — but it ends with a brief observation of the macho-unmoored-to-reality mentality of Cheney and the gang that lead to what Digby accurately calls a “meatgrinder.” Meanwhile, ”Nuts And Dolts” delves, err — skims — the intellect that is George W. Bush. As Digby writes:

I'm really beginning to resent all those people who say Bush really is smart, he's just incurious. No. He's clearly an idiot and an arrogant, immature idiot at that. He's been manipulated by a bunch of wily, evil men with competing agendas creating lawlessness, chaos and incoherence in our government.

Over the last six years when we watched Bush shift uncomfortably and babble incomprehensibly in response to complicated questions, when we saw him lash out at anyone who dared to question his judgment or his authority, when we observed him humiliating those around him, we weren't hallucinating and it wasn't an act. This intellectually deficient, petulent man-child was exactly what he appeared to be --- and his inept, arrogant administration is a perfect reflection of him.

The same post also offers this telling glimpse of Cheney:

Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait."

The problem with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush is they’re stubborn and relentless in pursuing a course of action, but never bother to get the course right before they set out. Even after Tenet and others disproved the Niger-uranium allegations, and kept on insisting they be removed from pre-war speeches, Cheney and his capos kept on slipping them back in, in each new draft, and in new speeches. Cheney apparently used the same approach for battle plans. And in many ways, the entire Bush administration is merely Cheney, Rumsfeld and their gang re-fighting all the battles of the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

The Bush administration would be a marvel of satire if only they were as fictional as the grandeur they think they possess. Being consistently flat-out, disastrously wrong apparently gives pause only to lesser men. They are the Peter Principle in action, raised to the level of Biblical plague. Their first National Security Advisor, Rice, was still fighting the Cold War, never mind that it had ended nine years previously (so was Cheney). One of their key lawyers (John Yoo) was meddling with constitutional law despite a stunning ignorance of the United States Constitution. Dick Cheney was pushing for a combative foreign policy despite his apparently disastrous handle on war strategy and tenuous grasp of reality. They had a brainless brain trust in the aggressive but unrealistic neocons of Wolfowitz, Feith, Addington, Libby, and countless other members of the Cheney cabal. Their outside “grey beard” was Kissinger, a man who, unlike even Robert McNamara, was still unwilling to admit obvious and cataclysmic mistakes 30 years after the fact and was also still fighting the Cold War on the most un-winnable front possible — Vietnam.

And Bush, the boy king, clearly has always been in way over his head, a dolt and an imbecile unwilling to grow into the job and too insecure to surround himself with wise men and women, smarter than he, to counsel him. He must insult academics, ridicule nuance and degradingly reduce the world to simplistic, black and white terms because he simply cannot engage on a higher plane, and must resort to bullying and power rather than reason or rightness to win. He has prized perceived loyalty over all competence, viewed dissent as disloyalty, and hewed to horrible, snap decisions with the mad desperation and stubbornness of a man terrified of actually — thinking. Bob Woodward believes Bush hasn’t lost ten minutes of sleep over the fact that they never found any WMDs in Iraq. The empty mind is the untroubled mind; ignorance is bliss. (Ignorance, in the empty mind, is strength.)

The Bush administration is a perfect storm of arrogant, pugnacious, deadly idiocy. The only thing we can hope for is that such storms are as rare in politics as they are in nature.

Notice a Pattern?

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

I know, I know, it’s hard to keep up with all the scandals these days! Well, face it, if you’re in the GOP, you’re not spending any time actually governing the country, or discussing ways to make things better, be it in America or Iraq. And idle hands makes for securing the Devil’s massive campaign contribution to your war chest. Let’s recap, shall we? In the past week or so, we learned that:

1. The National Intelligence Estimate flatly contradicts President Bush on at least two key points. One, the war in Iraq has made the “War on Terrorists” even worse. Two, we’re losing in Iraq. Bush’s solution is to come out and play his usual poker game, claiming the NIE supports his claims – but only his diehard followers believe this crap at this point. President Bush is either a liar or delusional, but it’s an academic question. He’s unfit for leadership. But let’s note the pattern — Republican is incompetent, tries to cover it up, lies about it, is exposed and denies and downplays everything.

2. Abramoff and his staff visited the White House close to what, 500 times, versus the few times Scott McClellan, Karl Rove and George Bush claimed – hardly surprising, given the tightness of the Rove-Norquist-Reed-Abramoff-Ralston circle. E-mails with Rove show Abramoff had real influence, too (Rove offered to block a nomination at Abramoff's request). So — the Republicans are corrupt, try to cover it up, lie about it, are exposed, and try to downplay everything.

3. Like Cofer Black on Rice: The most explosive revelation so far of Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, is that George Tenet and Cofer Black demanded a meeting with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to warn her about the pressing threat of Al-Qaeda. Rice and the other Bushies brushed this and all warnings off, continuing to be more concerned about missile defense. This past Friday, Rice admitted the meeting took place, but as of this Monday is trying to pretend it never happened, let alone that she received such dire warnings. Meanwhile, members of the 9/11 Commission are upset that they were never told of this crucial, central meeting. Rice’s meeting took place on July 10th, 2001, about a month before a CIA briefer flew out especially to Crawford, Texas to brief Bush (since Bush doesn’t like to read and prefers personal briefings). The CIA agent delivered an important PDB, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S.” and Bush responded, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.” So — the Republicans are incompetent, try to cover it up, lie about it, are exposed, and try to deny and downplay everything.

4. GOP pedophile Mark Foley wrote sexually predatory e-mails and IMs to at least one teenage boy in the Congressional page program. The GOP House leadership knew about it for at least ten months, but Hastert initially denied this, then didn’t, then offered qualifiers before issuing a denial with dubious explanations. It took the GOP a few days to get their stories straight. And the GOP tried to cut a deal with ABC’s Brian Ross to prevent him from exposing the predatory e-mails and IMs. The GOP, the supposed party of family values and national security, had no problem with one of their congressman asking a teenage boy who their institution was charged with safeguarding about how often he masturbated. While some of the details of the IMs versus the e-mails are a little unclear, and who knew what when, what’s crystal clear is the GOP should have launched an investigation and didn’t, and that they put their obsession for continued political party control ahead of the safety and well-being of minors in their care. They also attempted, and are still attempting, a cover-up. So — the Republicans are corrupt and creepy, try to cover it up, lie about it, are exposed, and try to deny and downplay everything.

Call me crazy, but I’m sensing a pattern here. And even some the rightwingers are getting disgusted now. (Foley is a perfect litmus test to see who's sane and who's erupting Kool-Aid from every orifice as they lead cheers for the apologist GOP faithful.)

What ever happened to “the buck stops here?” (Never mind – it’s been outsourced to India, along with the GOP’s credibility. Meanwhile, India has thoughtfully exported something back in return — a nifty concept called karma.)

The Republicans have always been corrupt and incompetent, it's just that the Foley scandal - and the lies around it - are very easy to understand on a gut level and produce the visceral outrage that should have been there all along for people that have remained on the sidelines, or supported the wrong side. Here's hoping for a high bounty count in the House.

Oh, and Denny, and Condoleezza, and Bush, and Tony Snow, and the rest of you? Keep on lying, please. It's political gold. ;-)

Bush Lies; Rice Lies

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)

At times, it seems as if there are no mysteries left in life, or that the mysteries are just too slight.

For instance, to any sane, well-informed adult reading the AP headline Rice challenges statements by Clinton on terror: Secretary says administration aggressively pursued al-Qaida before 9/11” it’s obvious Condoleezza Rice is lying.

And when one reads the AP headline ”Intel report: Iraq a ‘cause célèbre’ for extremists: President says NIE leak was political, denies war has worsened terrorism” President Bush is clearly either lying or delusional.

The only real mysteries are how the media will cover it, how the Bush cheerleaders will spin it, and how blatantly and aggressively Bush and Rice will insist that black is white and that they’re not lying through their teeth.

Rice’s lies were prompted by the now (in)famous interview of Bill Clinton by Chris Wallace at Fox News. The AP reports that the YouTube version has been downloaded over 800,000 times and earned “the show its best ratings in nearly three years.” (The video can be seen here and a previous post is here.) In addition to Rice calling Clinton’s charges that the Bush administration did little to stop al-Qaeda before 9/11 “flatly false,”

Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

Ah. those Bushies. They’re good at lying from plenty of practice, but at times they get sloppy and move from technically true if delusional assertions such as “I firmly believe we’re winning the war on terror” to demonstratively false statements. The Raw Story very rapidly exposed Rice’s lie:

Lady Mac is Back

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)


There's lovely symbolism in the fact that ABC's The Path to 9/11 casts Penny Johnson, best known as the Lady Macbeth of 24, Sherry Palmer, as Condoleezza Rice. Rice is a very intelligent woman, and I share her appreciation for classical music, but she's shown a brazen willingness to lie, repeatedly, to cover the collective asses of Bush and his other cronies. She's much smoother than a bully like Bolton, or the strange bulldog-éminence grise that is Dick Cheney, with his I-dare-you-to-call-me-a-liar poker approach. But her culpability is just as deep and vile.

One of the central lies in the "docudrama" features Johnson as Rice talking about how concerned President Bush is about the PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S."

Wait, does that mean it's no longer a historical document?

Does that mean that Bush didn't tell the CIA agent who flew to Crawford to brief him personally (since Bush is not a big, y'know, reader), "All right, you've covered your ass now" …?

It's just like Bin Laden being boogeyman number one one day and not a threat another; none of the Bushies or their cheerleaders can keep their stories straight. Even though it be by proxy, The Path to 9/11 is merely the latest but surely not the last attempt to re-write history and reality to their liking.