Lies, damned lies

Geesuz, this is getting tiring.

Condoleezza Rice resumed her previous incarnation as the lying sack of shit she was as National Security Advisor during the first Bush term. Back then, you'll recall, and before the 9/11 commission, she claimed that the August 6 PDB entitled "bin Laden determined to strike US," was a mere "historical" note, nothing to be alarmed about. It was an odd bit of revisionist history to look back from the seat of the 9/11 commission and say that a Presidential Daily Brief warning of an imminent attack, which came one month later, was not an urgent warning. But that was the hand she played and stuck to it.

Now after a couple of years of galavanting about the globe and playing piano when mood strikes, which appears to occur during full scale war, Rice has been called into service to respond to statements made by Clinton during his Fox News interview. Clinton made the claim that his administration delivered a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al Qaeda and responding to the USS Cole attack. On the way out the White House door, Clinton told the new Bush administration that bin Laden would be their most serious problem. But Rice now disputes this. Well, she doesn't dispute it so much as lie through her big white teeth about it.

We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.

She told this to another of Murdoch's trash tabloid cage liners, The New York Post, which never bothered to investigate her claim any further. Which is odd because I am sure that most everyone remembers Richard Clarke saying that he, in fact, had done this.

What am I saying? The New York Post not bothering to fact check a Bush administration hack is hardly odd at all.

Fortunately, the good folks at Martini Republic have already done the work here, so I let them present the facts, fact that are sorely lacking from both the mouth of Rice and the paper in question:

Within days after taking office, National Counterterrrorism Director Richard Clarke left a memorandum for then National Security Advisor Rice summarizing the responses to al Qaeda which had been formulated to respond the threat of al Qaeda and the Cole attack, which had been linked to the terrorist group in late 2000.

More importantly, attached to Clarke’s Memorandum was the very thing Rice now denies she was given: a 13 page document entitled, Strategy for Eliminating Jihadist Networks of al Qida.

I recommend reading Alex's whole post as it further buries Condi's lies with Bush administration actions. But there is one statement Rice made to which I can add something further:

What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years.

No one has any idea what this putative aggression resulted in other than a load of brush getting cleared in Crawford. But besides Clarke's testimony to the 9/11 commission that the Bush White House simply ignored the threat entirely, demoted him and eliminated the office of counterterrorism, we know one other thing about the Bush administration's focus in the days before 9/11.

After Bush had been delivered the now infamous PDB of Aug. 6, 2001, which described a determined attack by bin Laden on the US, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was due to give a talk on security threats to the United States. The date of the scheduled talk was September 11, 2001. In this talk, she was to argue for ... a national missile defense system. Had the speech been delivered, she would have warned America of

the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.

The speech would also have criticized the Clinton administration for not paying enough attention to the real threat -- the threat of tomorrow as she planned to call it -- of long range missiles. After being handed a strategy document by the chief of counterterrorism detailing the elimination of jihadist networks of al Qaeda, no mention of al Qaeda or bin Laden would be found in the address.

Naturally, she buried the speech, preferring to hide in a bunker after al Qaeda operatives had slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center.

I can't help but wonder how long these people can keep lying and lying and lying about everything. It must take something out of them, even a band of mendacious cowards as this administration. Perhaps it will last just as long as places like Fox News and The New York Post keep letting them spout their lies without every bothering to follow it up. I'm no lawyer, but this bald-face lie by Rice seems actionable, at least to the point of enforcing a printed retraction and, oh how sweet this would be, an apology in The New York freaking Post.

[thanks to allhatnocattle for the pic]