Secretary Rice was all over the Sunday gabfests, trying to stem the eventual tide of questions sure to come because of George Tenet's new book. Of course, the attacks on his character and such will follow soon enough as well; for now, it was enough to put on Rice to dispel some of the obvious questions that may arise as Tenet's book comes out.
One of those questions concerns Tenet's claim that he advocated a strike against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden in the summer of 2001. Over at Crooks & Liars they have video and transcript, from which I borrow the following:
SCHIEFFER: So, what he is saying is that you just sort of brushed him off. […] Well, why would he say something like that?
RICE: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.(emphasis added)
[C&L commentary] Apparently responding to the Cole bombing — after it was traced back to bin Laden — wasn't on the Bush administration's radar. Then again, it seems the Bushies didn't take seriously Tenet's Aug 6 PDB that warned about imminent al-Qaeda attacks either. But can you really blame them? The PDB only warned of potential attacks in the United States (possibly NYC) using hijacked airplanes. That kind of vague intelligence is hard to work with.
Remember when we approaching Doomsday because of all the scary horrors that didn't exist in Saddam's arsenal? Remember how she warned that "not acting" could lead to a mushroom cloud over one of our cities? Funny enough, not acting resulted in something very much like that, because we didn't act against Bin Laden and 3000 people lost their lives in September, 2001. We had to act, and act now against a non-existent threat. Perhaps because we didn't strike pre-emptively against a threat for which we had all sorts of information? Maybe Rice should use that line, instead of just . . .
LYING TO US AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.
