Mildly interesting testimony, but what impresses me is this woman’s stamina.
I would love to listen but I’m soooooooo busy.
I have to agree that I’m impressed with her stamina, but I’m disappointed with her attempts to redirect her answers and filibuster her way out of further questioning.
I would in all honestly like the administration to admit they made a mistake, or several mistakes, in the case of 9/11 and stop pointing fingers and work on addressing the problem and focusing on nailing down a plan to prevent anything similar from ever happening again.
It feels like they are spending way too much time digging up the past only to place blame and not move forward.
I do admit that it is good to know what happened in the past so we can keep it from happening again, but there has to be a point of diminishing returns and I feel that we are reaching that point.
I think that she is (was as I am not listening any more) doing a great job of explaining things. I dream of a day that the idiots in Washington (Democrats) can just go along the path of “Shit Happens” and catch on to the fact that there is no crystal ball telling us of the mis deeds of others.
Was there a huge investigation of the President after the Oklahoma City bombing blaming Clinton for not knowing? How about after Pearl Harbor?
The sad part is you can tell without a doubt what party the questioner is a member of just by listening to the tone of the question.
It seems scoring political points will be the only outcome of the questioning.
Dave
There was a very comparable investigation of Pearl Harbor, but it was done years later and not in the context of presidential campaign. This investigation is a joke, but is actually better than I expected. Rice has already testified to this commision once. Half of them didn’t bother to show up.
I’m watching the testimony from my office trying to work as well.
I think Ms. Rice is doing an excellent job of explaining that no one before 9/11 had a crystal ball and the Bush and Clinton administrations did not even look for an attack from coming from within our country.
Now, with hind sight being perfect 20/20 and the first World Trade Center bombing, the US Cole attack, and the Embassy bombings, all of us should have seen the possibilities of attacks coming from within.
As always, there is always more to a stroy than meets the eye…
from which I quote
What McClellan didn’t tell reporters was that on Nov. 21 - long before Rice met with the five commissioners in February - the White House counsel’s office had sent the commission a letter saying no more than three commissioners could attend meetings with White House aides of Rice’s rank.
Given that demand, “we are a little surprised that the White House has repeatedly implied to the public that commissioners were uninterested in attending these meetings,” commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Tuesday.
I too am annoyed at how partisan the questioning is. I also think Rice is doing a fairly good job and have tremendous respect for her. One thing really annoys me though. I have yet to hear her admit/acknowledge/assert that her position has any responsibilites. She constantly references what she was told to do from above, or the information that was given from below. This is not a trial but (supposed to be) an investigation into what happened so we can learn from it. All I’ve learned from her testimony is that the National Security Advisor as no responsibility and makes no decisions. Surely that is inaccurate.
i hate monday morining quarterbacking. it’s easy to sit back after the fact and question why somebody made the decision they did. i’m sure if they had the chance to do it over again they would do things differently. but…it’s all water under the bridge now and it isn’t going to stop terrorism now or ever no matter how much you change the system. next time it happens there will be more questioning on why, even though changes were made. nobody will ever be satisfied until somebody is the scapegoat for events they can’t control.
One thing really annoys me though. I have yet to hear her admit/acknowledge/assert that her position has any responsibilites.
How is she at fault for the actions of others? Is my post her fault?
I have absolutely no respect for her anymore. But I don’t have any access to the proceedings right now. I’ll be looking for a transcript later this afternoon.
To initally refuse to testify under oath was one thing, but then when she told her story to anyone with a microphone or TV camera the weekend after Richard Clarke’s testimonty was galling. To make matters worse, she still refused to testify. I’m glad someone finally ‘convinced’ her.
Obviously most of the people that posted in this tread have not read the book. She is clearly trying to redirect the punshes not answering the questions.
But what I find even more disturbing is that the questions asked are of very general form; focus, intention, vague information…
In the book there are hundreds of facts (you may call them acusations) with names and documents attached to them. They are very easy to check, if they are true, then ask about them. If they are not true, trow the discussin out of the window including Clark. If one of those disturbing facts are true and there is no plausible answer from the Bush administration, trow them out of the office. Seem kind of simple, then again, nothing is logic in this world no more.
Clinton almost got trown out of office because of a lie about a blow-job. Should be easy to find out if Bush lied about CIA and FBI information, right?
I have absolutely no respect for her anymore. But I don’t have any access to the proceedings right now. I’ll be looking for a transcript later this afternoon.
To initally refuse to testify under oath was one thing, but then when she told her story to anyone with a microphone or TV camera the weekend after Richard Clarke’s testimonty was galling. To make matters worse, she still refused to testify. I’m glad someone finally ‘convinced’ her.
Jesus man WAKE UP!!! She WAS NOT ALLOWED! This was not her call to say no, it was the call of the founders of this country and how the branches of Govt works. Dont blame her - blame John Hancock if you want to blame anyone.
There is nothing that Condi Rice could have done to stop 9/11. What the heck can a new administration do in just over 200 days to solve systemic problems with homeland defense? Nothing. Too big a problem to solve that quickly, and terrorism simply was not the biggest problem at the time. There is no debating that, it wasn’t.
If they really want to point some fingers, try pointing them at the Clinton administration. The first Al Qaeda attack on the homeland happened on his watch (WTC 1993), and he did very little to reorganize the various intelligence, military and law enforcement bureaucracies to help protect us from more attacks. Then there was the Khobar Towers attack, the Embassy bombings, then the Cole, then the millennium plot. Still nothing from Clinton to resolve the core problems with how the FBI, Customs, Border Patrol, state agencies, and other military and industrial services work together. Couple that with lame responses to all of these attack - cruise missiles don’t stop terrorists - and it becomes clear that another attack in the states was inevitable. Everyone knew it. I knew it (just like I know there will be another attack some day…)
By far, the most frustrating members of the commission are the ones that appear to be so brilliant that, if provided the exact intelligence that Condi and Bush had on 9/10, could have stopped the attacks from happening. Ben-Veniste in particular.
Read the book, please read the book!
How the fuck can you plan invading Irak in your first 100 days in office but not see the terrorists comming, even though they where not nobodys, at least two of them where known by the CIA as terrorists and still managed to learn how to fly a plane in the US…
Calm down, please.
It may or may not have been her choice to testify. That is not my concern so much. I say again what I find galling is that she did plenty of ‘testifying’ on the public airwaves after the Clarke fallout. I’m assuming she did this with approval of her boss. If they weren’t afraid of exposing themselves on the public airwaves, and answering reporters questions, why were they so hesitant about her actually apearing under oath? It was not unprecedented.
Read the book, please read the book!
How the fuck can you plan invading Irak in your first 100 days in office but not see the terrorists comming, even though they where not nobodys, at least two of them where known by the CIA as terrorists and still managed to learn how to fly a plane in the US…
That is a good point Copernicus – the problem here is that in the land of the free we don’t have the Gestapo checking everyone who wants to waltz into our country. That and the fact that Clinton was to busy blanching cigars with his interns vaginal secretions to actually do anything with his eight year tenor and I think we may have part of an answer. Communication between the people who secure our country was non-existent prior to the Dept. of Homeland Security…I promise you that the FBI and or Customs had no idea that the CIA thought that these characters were not nice fellows. You can’t blame the fire chief for a fire he didn’t light – just because he is fire chief.
Again, obviously you didn’t read the book. CIA and FBI did know about those guys and they did communicate. Furthermore, The new Dep. of Homeland Security is nothing new, it’s a big burocratic moving around effort that swallows huge amounts of money, if you’re trying to get some funding in research right now, you need to try Dep. of Homeland Security and It has a good chance, even if the relation to security is sucked out of fingers.
By the way, Sep/11 and if it had been possible to prevent is not the real question. The real tragedy is how could they make everybody believe that Iraq had something to do with it and that Iraq had links to Terrorists and WMD. We know now that that was a lie but that was the fundation on invading Iraq.
PA: I do believe that the world is a better place without Sadam Husein but the reason for war in Iraq and the way it’s done is a criminal act.
She knocked it out of the park!