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She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.
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Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. NSC officials said each of Rice's public statements is accurate. "It was and is the judgment of the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program," said Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman.
Still, a person close to Rice said that she has been dismayed by the effect on Bush. "She knows she did badly by him, and he knows that she knows it," this person said.
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Bush aides have made clear that Rice's stature is undiminished in the president's eyes. The fault is one of a process in which speech vetting was not systematic enough, they said. "You cannot have a clearance process that depends on the memory of people who are bombarded with as much information, as much paperwork, as many meetings, as many phone calls," one official said. "You have to make sure everybody, each time, actually reads the documents. And if it's a presidential speech, it has to be done at the highest levels." (my italics)
Let us pause, for a moment, to ponder the raucous, sneering, skepticism, lasting a minimum of 7 news cycles, that such a response from the Clinton White House about any question raised, whether by Republicans or by the punditterati, however trivial, would have provoked. Compare, for instance, the case of Roger Altman and the miniscule transgression of congressional priviledge that forced his resignation.
Having said that, the story strikes me as both damning, and starting to feel old news-ish. I'm not being a pessimist. I agree with those readers who feel that a corner has been turned on the media's desire and ability to pre-exonerate this administration for every bad thing that happens on its watch.
I'm only observing that the time may have come to advance and enlarge this story into one that poses the essential question: Are this administration's answers to the challenge of 9/11 the right ones?
That it will fall to critics of the Bush doctrine rather than the mainstream media to do so is strongly suggested by the absence in this article of arguably the most crucial example of Ms. Rice's failure to tell the whole truth - her statement that there was no specific intelligence that could have led anyone in the Bush administation to so much as begin to imagine that anyone might be contemplating the hijacking of airliners for use as flying bombs to be crashed into major public buildings. No aspersion being cast here on either Milbank or Allen, but in a week in which the first comprehensive report on the wheres and the whyfores of 9/11, one might have hoped...
In lieu of that, see the italicized portions of this prior post, regarding Condi's Aug 6th, 2001 security briefing with the President in Texas, and put that information in this context, graciously provided by Paul of "Half-Baked Thoughts:"
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2. Finding: During the spring and summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community experienced a significant increase in information indicating that Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida intended to strike against U.S. interests in the very near future.
Discussion: The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, reported at least 33 communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack in 2001
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Some Community personnel described the increase in threat reporting as unprecedented, at least in their own experience.
Fortunately, our side is so much better informed and organized than we were during the Big Dog's eight years. And he'd be the first one to say, don't look back and regret what wasn't done, look forward to what can and must be done.