Rice Lies, "Revises" Her Lies, And Then Repeats the Same Original Lies Again. This is Standard Procedure in the Bush Administration. We Have Entered Some Sort of Orwellian Parallel Universe.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Provided by David Sirota of the Center for American Progress:

Here are two absolutely CRITICAL points to watch for when Condoleezza Rice testifies before the 9/11 Commission on Thursday. As of Wednesday, Rice and the White House still appear insistent on spreading these two clear lies:


CLAIM #1: "In four hours of private discussions with the commission in January, Ms. Rice was asked about statements she made in 2001 and 2002 that 'we could not have imagined' that terrorists would use aircraft as weapons by piloting them into buildings. She told the commission that she regretted those comments." - NY Times, 4/6/04

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/politics/07PANE.html

FACT: Even after telling the 9/11 Commission in January of 2004 she regretted her 2002 denials, Rice proceeded to tell the exact same lie just three months later in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed. In the piece, she again falsely claimed "we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles."

CLAIM #2: "Rice told the commission in the private session that she should have said, 'I could not have imagined," according to one official familiar with the testimony, making it clear that some in the intelligence community knew about those threats but that she did not. 'Information about possible use of airplanes as missiles to destroy buildings was not briefed to her prior to that statement in May 2002,' Mr. McCormack said." - NY Times, 4/6/04

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/politics/07PANE.html

FACT: Even if Rice missed all 12 previous intelligence reports noting "that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons," it is impossible for Rice to claim she had no knowledge of such a plot, considering she accompanied the President to the 2001 G-8 Summit in Genoa, where she and the Administration were explicitly warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner" into the summit. - LA Times, 9/27/01; NY Times, 4/4/04

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story - removed

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

See: [CBS Interview Link for "Face the Nation" (.pdf file)]

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Multiple warnings on aircraft attacks

In reality, Bush had received a memorandum barely a month before the attacks, on August 6, 2001, warning that Al Qaeda was capable of launching a major attack within the US and that such a strike could involve the hijacking of US aircraft. Just a month earlier, the administration had also been warned that terrorists had considered the use of civilian airplanes as missiles.

Two years before the terrorist attacks, a document prepared for the National Intelligence Council, a body that advises the White House on potential threats, specifically warned that Al Qaeda could hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings in retaliation for US air strikes against targets in Afghanistan.

“Suicide bomber(s) belonging to Al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House,” the September 1999 report stated. The year before, US intelligence agencies learned of a plot to fly an explosive-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center towers.

In her own private testimony before the 9/11 commission (which was classified and not transcribed) Rice had asked to revise the statement about the impossibility of imagining the September 11 attacks, saying she “misspoke,” according to commission member and former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste. She acknowledged that Clarke had himself warned of the possibility of such an attack.

That Rice has continued to “misspeak” throughout her attempts over the past week to refute Clarke’s charges, was spelled out in an article by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post published last Friday.
“Rice’s rebuttals of Clarke’s broadside against Bush, which she delivered in a flurry of media interviews and statements rather than in testimony, contradicted other administration officials and her own previous statements,” wrote Pincus and Milbank.

In an opinion piece she wrote for the Washington Post, for example, she dismissed Clarke’s proposals as a “laundry list” of failed policies of the Clinton administration and claimed that he had no plan relating to Al Qaeda. In an interview on NBC two days later, however, she claimed that the administration had accepted Clarke’s proposals and acted upon them “very quickly.”

Alleged contradictions between charges made by Clarke in his testimony before the 9/11 panel and earlier statements he had made when he was working as a White House advisor have led to vitriolic suggestions by leading Republicans that he be charged with perjury. Rice, however, faces no such threat, as none of her conflicting statements have been made under oath.

Perhaps the greatest deception carried out by Rice is her denial that the immediate and overriding response of the Bush administration to September 11 was the desire to exploit the catastrophe in order to stampede the American people into a war against Iraq.

In her interview with “60 Minutes,” Rice claimed: “It was Afghanistan that became the focus of the American response. And Iraq was put aside with the exception of worrying about whether Iraq might try and take advantage of us in some way.”

Yet according to multiple sources from within the administration, Iraq was placed directly on the front burner. In a January 12, 2003 article, the Washington Post reported that “six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2 ½ page document marked ‘TOP SECRET’” that ostensibly dealt with Afghanistan but “directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.” This followed a September 2002 CBS News report that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”

Paul O’Neill, the former Bush administration treasury secretary, provided similar testimony in the book by Ron Suskind, “The Price of Loyalty.” He described a meeting of Bush’s “war cabinet” at Camp David the weekend after the terrorist attack in which the discussion, led by Rice, quickly turned to Iraq.
“It was like changing the subject—Iraq is not where bin Laden is and not where there’s trouble,” said O’Neill. “I was mystified. It’s like a bookbinder accidentally dropping a chapter from one book into the middle of another one. The chapter is coherent in its own way, but it doesn’t seem to fit in this book.”

Perhaps the most chilling moment in the “60 Minutes” interview with Rice came when Bradley asked her whether she believed it was appropriate for her to apologize to the families of the 9/11 victims for the administration’s failure to halt the attacks.

Rice dodged the question, declaring: “You couldn’t be human and not feel the horror of that day. We do need to stay focused on what happened to us that day. And the best thing that we can do for the memory of the victims, the best thing that we can do for the future of this country, is to focus on those who did this to us.”
Rice: 9/11 an “enormous opportunity”

Rice’s real reaction to September 11 was spelled out in a speech she delivered, some seven months after the attacks, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. There she described the horrific event as an “enormous opportunity.”

“An earthquake of the magnitude of 9/11 can shift the tectonic plates of international politics,” she declared. She described the emerging situation as “a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states—Japan and Germany among the great powers—to create a new balance of power...”
The comparison to the US occupation and restructuring of two countries defeated in war was no accident. By this time, plans for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq were well advanced, and the administration was manufacturing the case for such a war, with Rice playing a leading role in advancing lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and phony links between the Iraqi regime and September 11.
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