1115.org

Sure enough, Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice is now trying to argue that although the briefing of July 10, 2001 did indeed take place exactly as alleged, it did not constitute an urgent warning because it was not based on any new threat information.

Once it was confirmed that the briefing had in fact occurred, one didn’t exactly need to be a rocket scientist to predict that that’s what Condi’s defense would turn out to be.

Of course it’s a lie, but at this stage Condi’s credentials as a compulsive liar are pretty firmly established. If you nod off at the wheel and end up being responsible for the deaths of more than fifty thousand people – that’s adding the Iraq death count to the 9/11 toll – you are compelled to lie about nodding off at the wheel. The point of this post is not to tax her with lying, per se. (I already did that in advance on Monday, and got it out of the way.) What makes me mad is the arrogant stupidity of her approach to the job of National Security Adviser, the criminally stupid arrogance that makes all this lying necessary.

This lady obviously thinks she’s bloody smart. Actually, she’s too damned smart. She suffers from the peculiar variety of that illness that is much worse, much more dangerous than simple stupidity.

As National Security Adviser, her job was bloody well not to be making intelligence judgments. If she had had the common sense to see that back in 2001, she might have actually tried to do something to foil the al Qaeda threat that George Tenet was so desperately trying to get her to recognize.

The reason we have an intelligence community is so that the business of intelligence can be left to professionals, instead of being usurped by amateurs who consider themselves to be more intelligent than everyone else. It’s the job of the intelligence community to a) collect information, and b) to draw inferences from that information. Those two activities together are the province of the intelligence community. Not a very difficult concept to grasp. I doubt if even George Bush needs to have that explained to him. Yet Condi’s intellectual arrogance doesn’t permit her to either grasp it or to accept it.

Here’s another simple concept, which seems to have entirely escaped our Condi: sometimes intelligence assessments will change because there is new information, sometimes they will change because the intelligence community reaches a different consensus about the inference warranted by existing information.

Even if there was no new threat information in that July 10 briefing, you had the Director of the CIA and its counter-terrorism chief trying to communicate to you the urgency of the inference they were now drawing from all the information they had. If you’d had respect for their opinion instead of contempt, you might have listened. And you might have done something more than sit on your bloody behind.

What you did instead was decide that you were the proper judge of what inference should be drawn from all the available intelligence information. You decided that urgency couldn’t possibly be warranted because there was no new threat information. You decided to overrule the intelligence experts.

Rumsfeld couldn’t leave war to the generals. And now we have that whole never-ending mess in Iraq. You couldn’t leave intelligence to the intelligence professionals. And now we have the never-ending mess that is The War On Terror.

The whole point, dear Condi, is that it doesn’t bloody matter if there’s no new threat information. If the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency comes to you and pushes the panic button based on existing information, you bloody well listen to him. You don’t substitute your fancy-pants amateur judgment for the collective judgment of the intelligence professionals.

You know why? Because lives are at stake, you stupid cow.

Or if you do make the colossal error of judgment of substituting your fancy-pants amateur judgment for theirs, and therefore take none of the actions that might possibly – possibly – have prevented 9/11, then you don’t bloody well defend yourself afterwards, and claim to have done everything you could have and should have.

You take responsibility. You resign from your post. And then either you find some meaningful way to atone for your colossal sins of omission, or you disintegrate into drugs or alcohol or suicide. And frankly, the amount of contempt I have for you at this point, I really don’t care which endpoint you arrive at.

Because the fact of the matter, my dear Condi, is that even if you refuse to publicly acknowledge it, you’re too smart not to be fully aware of exactly what you failed to do. Brazen it out in public all you want, but you’re still going to be facing those same endpoints. Good luck to you, lady. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the gold in Fort Knox.