NSA Condi Rice

Great, another post that makes absolutely no sense.

Is there another message board out there similar to ET? Someone posted one a while back from the UK that was their version of ET. Anyone have the link?

 

At first glance, Mav appears to be an interesting creature and able to cast a good old "conspiracy" theory remark here and there at will . . . I know that he has done this with me, especially when I made a case several weeks ago about how I believed that the CIA had been "prostituted" by the Bush Administration in their effort to build a case for invading Iraq. I presented some evidence to this effect, but Mav merely cast it off as yet another one of my "conspiracy" theories . . .

But I guess my posting about the August 6th, 2001 "briefing" was not so much of yet another "conspiracy" as it was fact.

Gee, whiz.
Go figure.

 

LOL...and you *claim* to have a high IQ. That too is likely just another "Mav Fact".

JB

 

CONDI RICE DID IT! CONDI RICE DID IT!

 

The FBI doesn't even talk to Condi Rice, nor does the CIA talk to the FBI . . . That's how 911 happened in the first place.

Duh.

 

from Condi Rice that she was aware of b]70 full-fledged FBI field investigations[/b] going on at the time of the August 6th, 2001 briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in The U.S."

And even with all sorts of spikes in "terrorism" chatter thru the Summer of 2001, and even CYA's going out about possible airline hijackings, this did not ring a bell for NSA Condi Rice???

Amazing.

If there wasn't a silver bullet in the al-Qaida bombing of the WTC back in 1993, the attempted bombing of LAX at the Millennium, and then the USS Cole . . . I don't know what is!

No leadership.
No accountability.
Same old same old at the Ok corral.

 

BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of the FBI?

RICE: We had a structural problem in the United States, and that structural problem was that we did not share domestic and foreign intelligence in a way to make a product for policymakers, for good reasons -- for legal reasons, for cultural reasons -- a product that people could depend upon.

BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of...

KEAN: Commissioner, we got to move on...

BEN-VENISTE: ... the FBI between August 6th and September 11th?

KEAN: ... to Commissioner Fielding.

RICE: I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.

Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
She can recall a speech from Bob Kerry of over 4 years ago, word for word but she cannot recall if the Director of the FBI met with the President between August 6th and September 11th.

 

Does Rice really know her role?
How national security adviser's testimony hurt Bush

Rice appears before the 9/11 commission.
ANALYSIS

By Howard Fineman
MSNBC contributor

Updated: 8:52 p.m. ET April 08, 2004WASHINGTON - Republicans who'd been hoping that Condi Rice would calm the political waters with her testimony to the 9/11 commission have to be disappointed. Stylistically and tactically, she was serviceable. Her voice seemed to quaver at times, but overall she was a confident master of detail, choosing, for the most part, to praise rather than confront the accusatory Richard Clarke. But the larger picture she painted of herself, her president and the administration certainly won't help George W. Bush's re-election chances.

A self-proclaimed expert at understanding "structural" change in large institutions, Rice wasn't aware — may still not be aware — that the nature of her job had changed by the time she took over as national security adviser in January 2001. Reared in the Cold War era, she saw herself following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger. "National security" was largely a matter of global state-to-state diplomacy.

In fact, as her predecessor in effect warned her when he was turning over the keys, the model was no longer so much Kissinger as it was, say, Elliott Ness or J. Edgar Hoover. If, as she said, we had been at war with terrorism for 20 years; if, as she said, the terrorists are determined to attack America, then the NSC chief has to be a ruthless hunter for clues around the world — and on American soil.

Asked at the hearing why she hadn't pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn't know, about domestic terrorist threats, she acted as though the question was an odd one: It wasn't her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.

Rice identified the chief "structural" problem — that the CIA and FBI don't share information — in a speech she gave in October 2000. She even said that the problem could result in a disastrous domestic terrorist attack. And yet, based on her own testimony, she did little or nothing before 9/11 to break down those walls. The student of bureaucratic change didn't really attempt to foment any, at least not with the kind of urgency we know she needed to have.

And Rice's tone was perhaps too steely: The response to terrorism over the years had been "insufficient," she said. What a bland word when a soothing sense of regret was required. She was a bureaucrat explaining "structure" to a national audience (and a chamber full of family members) that yearned for blunt talk.

Rice, in the end, is just a cog in a machine. The real political question is: How did her testimony enrich the narrative of what the president did — or didn't — know and do about terrorism before 9/11? In an interview with Bob Woodward, Bush admitted two years ago that he didn't have a sense of "urgency" about al-Qaida. He said he wasn't "on point" — wasn't locked on a target in hunting dog fashion.

That admission caused few ripples when it was published. But now voters may revisit the remark. Why? Because it's now clear that the president may have had urgent reason to be "on point." Rice was told about al-Qaida cells by Richard Clarke in February of 2001. When, if ever, did she tell the president about them? The president was given the now-famous PDB of Aug. 6, 2001, which suggested not only that Osama bin Laden was "determined " to attack inside the United States, but that the FBI had picked up a pattern that suggested the possibility of hijackings here. Did Bush follow up with the FBI? What did he do in the days immediately after getting that PDB? Rice may insist that it wasn't a "warning," but we'll see soon enough when it's released to the public, as it almost surely will be in the days ahead.

The president in the classroom: On vacation?
Remember the picture of the president in the classroom being told by Andy Card of the attack? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated. That won him enormous sympathy and patience from the voters. But what if he was literally on vacation — at the ranch in Crawford — when he should have been making sure that someone was ringing alarm bells throughout the bureaucracy?

Already on the defensive for his leadership in the post 9/11 world — the war in Iraq grows less popular by the day — Bush now finds himself with questions to answer about his pre-9/11 leadership. He says he's running for re-election as a "war president." But by Rice's own standards, the war was well under way by the time he took office. He was a "war president" the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one? The election may hinge on the answer.

Howard Fineman is Newsweek’s chief political correspondent and an NBC News analyst.

 

Published April 8, 2004:

Side Show

Bush pursued continuity; who knows what the 9/11 Commission is pursuing.

Give Condoleezza Rice credit for candor. Testifying before the 9/11 Commission today, President Bush's national-security adviser acknowledged that the United States "simply was not on a war footing" at the time the terrorist atrocities of 9/11 were committed.

When should the U.S. government have taken the threat of radical, ideological Islamism seriously? Perhaps as far back as 1979, when our embassy in Tehran was seized by Iranian theocrats; perhaps as far back as 1983 when Hezbollah suicide terrorists slaughtered hundreds of U.S. Marines and diplomats in Beirut; certainly as far back as the attacks over Lockerbie, at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole.

But that's not what happened. Instead, one American administration after another, Democratic and Republican alike, made gestures, sent signals, and mobilized lawyers armed with subpoenas. The terrorists and their masters could only have been amused. Yes, it would have been brilliant had President Bush entered the Oval Office, looked at this pattern and quickly concluded: "From this moment on, defeating terrorism and the ideologies driving terrorism should be seen as America's top priority. I want these networks rolled up ASAP. Use whatever means necessary."

Actually, President Bush came close to saying that. He asked for a policy review and a comprehensive strategy. But even had Dr. Rice — or counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke — come up with such a plan within 24 hours, President Bush could not have implemented it during his first eight months in office. The U.S. government simply did not have the means at its disposal. Consider:

The FBI's mission and culture stressed solving crimes, not preventing them.

The intelligence community didn't have good enough intelligence — which led, for example, to Clinton bombing a Sudanese aspirin factory a few years earlier, thinking it was a WMD factory.

The Pentagon didn't know much about terrorists — the Defense Department's manual on fighting "small wars" was written in 1940.

The Foreign Service hadn't prepared the ground — Pakistan was still cozy with the Taliban and would not have permitted the U.S. to mount acts of war from their territory. Key foreign-service officers were still supporting what they called "moderate" Taliban elements.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service was too hopeless a muddle to distinguish between tourists eager to see the Statue of Liberty and terrorists eager to mass murder infidels.

And Congress — Democrats, for sure, but also such Republican mandarins as Senators Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar — would have been apoplectic had President Bush attempted to take any of the measures necessary to root out the long-established weeds of terrorism. Imagine the uproar had Bush begun assassinating terrorist leaders around the world or preemptively invaded Afghanistan.

Instead, of course, as Condoleezza Rice made clear today, the new Bush administration did the reasonable thing, the responsible thing, the bipartisan thing: It maintained continuity. It sailed the course set by President Clinton, and it even used key members of the Clinton crew.

George Tenet was retained as director of Central Intelligence. Dick Clarke kept his job as White House terrorism adviser. Others who might have expected to receive pink slips were instead given a pat on the back and told to keep up the good work. A Democrat — Norman Mineta — was named secretary of transportation, the Cabinet position most responsible for airline safety.

President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor. That was a wise move, but then Roosevelt did not face the kind of hyper-partisanship that plagues America these days. (Washington Post columnist David Broder recently pointed out that when FDR ran for reelection during World War II, he emphasized his record as a war leader. Broder might have added that FDR's Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, declined to criticize the president in regard to foreign policy during a time of war. It's almost hard to believe that there was a time when Americans knew the difference between their foreign enemies and their political adversaries.)

Increasingly, it seems the 9/11 Commission is losing its way. Its mission is to learn lessons — not to lay blame. Its mission is to come up with recommendations for a more effective antiterrorism strategy.

Its mission is not to stage a reality-TV show, not to hold an inquisition, not to promote books (and, no doubt, movie deals), not to scold Rice as though she were a student who claimed her dog had eaten her homework.

But that's what the public is seeing out here in TV-land.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism

 

True.