1115.org

(1)
In July 2001, two months before 9-11, then CIA Director George Tenet and his aide Cofer Black held a briefing for Condi Rice, in which they tried to get her to understand that al Qaeda constituted an urgent threat requiring immediate attention. Condi spent much of the last quarter of 2006 lying about this meeting, flatly denying the meeting ever occurred, before finally being forced to admit that it had. For those who would like to refresh their memories, go here, here and here.

Tenet’s forthcoming book, “At the Center of the Storm”, has focused new attention on that meeting.

In an interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Tenet said he had delivered an unambiguous message to Rice at that meeting:

We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.

On Sunday morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rice was invited to comment on Tenet’s claim, and responded with:

SECRETARY RICE: But the idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact and I — and we’ll have to –

QUESTION: Well, why would he say something like that?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.

For some strange reason, no one at all has been asking that in the last 24 hours. What a very large number of people have been doing instead is asking Rice: “Remember Osama bin Laden? Al Qaeda’s training camps?”

Technically, of course, this is not a whopper, just a piece of misguided sarcasm on Rice’s part. But most of the vast army of Bushmen who mis-led us into the Iraq War did it without ever technically lying, so to hell with technicalities.

(2)
On CNN’s Late Edition, Condi tried a boondoggle she has successfully pulled a few brazillion times before. The lady, in her arrogance (and very much unlike Buttercheeks, let me add), obviously never prepared for these remarks. She obviously said to herself: “I’ve said this a few brazillion times. I can do it in my sleep. Only the Buttercheeks of this world prepare for interviews, press conferences and hearings. Not distinguished professors at Stanford University, not even if their Ph.D.s are from the University of Denver.”

The boondoggle was the tried and trusted “We weren’t the only ones who were misled by the intelligence into believing that Saddam had WMDs; everyone was misled by the intelligence.”

Except, this time she got carried away, and forgot to stick to facts that are in fact true:

…but we all thought that the intelligence case was strong. To the degree that there was an intelligence problem here, it was not just an intelligence problem with George Tenet, it was not just an intelligence problem with U.S. intelligence, it was an intelligence problem worldwide. We all thought, including UN inspectors, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

As anyone with half a mind and a passing interest in the administration’s so-called case for war will remember — in fact, has firmly etched into that half a mind — the UN weapons inspectors firmly and consistently and very publicly and very loudly and repeatedly stated that there was no evidence whatsoever that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

This one is undeniably a whopper in the classic style.