129 thoughts on “Insta-comment”

  2. OK, so I’m a junkie.
    Dr. Rice has clarified her statement editing it from
    Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.
    to
    Despite what some have suggested, I received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.

  3. She must be wearing a skirt because with what is being spun here her trousers would be ablaze already.

  4. this whole fracas could have been avoided if they had been honest and defused the situation from the beginning.
    spin and take credit for something which was a disaster, and you deserve to be unspun.

  18. She’s arguing that what helped stop the millenium plot was not an efficient way to prevent terror
    Funny, though, that method actually stopped an attack.

  20. OK, she’s deconstructing that incident…saying the customs weren’t “on the alert” and that a personally alert customs agent actually stopped the LAX attack, that Clarke was not right in his assessment…score one back for Dr. Rice

  21. Gorelick just got applause, but my feed cut out just before that…what did she say?
    OK…my feed keeps breaking, I’m going to have to stop…

  23. The CSG! It was their job, damnit! Don’t you get it? Eees not my job.
    This is precisely the line Rumsfeld took about how it wasn’t DoD’s job to protect against hijacked planes being used as missiles, and he had no idea anyone had ever thought of doing such a thing.

  25. No one asked me to make any phone calls, or anything. Dick Clarke never did! I would have been happy to!
    What happened to Clarke’s repeated requests for a Principals meeting, exactly?

  26. Now she’s telling the commission what their questions should be…it’s all Clinton’s fault, being the implication of her question

  32. Slade Gorton’s turn…
    we’re still on what plans there may or may not have been and how you can’t just use them without the fully correct context…

  33. Gorton”s handed her a gift now…Please Dr. Rice take a few minutes to let us know how well you’re doing…
    Also, Moe’s asked that we stop using pronouns it gets too confusing if you’re not watching live

  35. Rice’s praising the Patriot Act now… saying it gets the balance about right.
    …and now she’s said we can’t wait (stopping just short of saying for mushroom clouds)…for threats to gather…hmmm…are we invading North Korea next week?

  45. Which attack was that, Edward?
    The attack on LAX…the terrorist who came in from Canada…
    Oooo Kerrey just blasted the “swatting flies” meme!

  46. That attack was stopped in two different ways:
    1) The guy driving the car full of explosives was completely inept in planning and executing it, and
    2) The customs officers thought the guy was nervous because he had a car full of drugs. To the extent that one of them nearly blew them all up by shaking a bottle of nitroglycering.
    No plan or policy had anything to do with stopping the attack.

  48. Kerrey opened with compliment. Never a good sign. Thank God someone finally took on the inane ‘fly swatting’ idea.

  49. Kerrey: why didn’t we respond to the Cole…
    Rice: tit for tat no good, but Kerrey’s influenced her thinking here…nice suck up and deflection

  58. Yes, it was all Dick Clarke’s responsibility.
    Say, anyone remember a Vice-President who explained to the nation that Richard Clarke was “not in the loop”?

  59. Kerrey’s insisting that 9/11 could have been prevented if the flight school info that was known had gone out over Intel Link (sp?)
    Condi’s agreeing we had a systemic problem with regard to the FBI and CIA talking…

  60. I really hate how she puts that “h” before the word “where.” I know it’s a good mic technique, but I think she overdoes it.
    She’s got a reasonable case to make. Why overdo it and go for the maximal case from the get-go? It just makes them look like they’re covering up.
    That August 6th memo isn’t going away. I predict the whole thing will be declassified at some point.

  62. Condi’s agreeing we had a systemic problem with regard to the FBI and CIA talking…
    Again, she’s right. But the blame for that situation points squarely back at Congress, I believe. If not at all of us as a nation.

  63. Again, she’s telling the commission what their job is…that’s not going to make them love her any more…
    John F. Lehman’s turn…
    softball opening…”was Clarke right that nothing would have stopped 9/11″?

  64. uh-oh, defending the FBI: I’m sure they were doing their jobs.
    Right. The FBI is clearly the biggest culprit of all of these players, and nobody has defended them. She should have known not to trust them.

  65. All of the sudden she is answering with just one sentence?
    I missed who is asking the questions…..republican?

  66. Lehman (give that man some pom poms), struck by how good a job they did considering, now asking what had Clinton’s folks told Rice about:
    1. AQ cells in the US

  68. Kerrey still has that admitting having killed over a dozen innocent women-and-children in Vietnam thing being not old news yet (it’s only been two years since the whole back and forth on that). That’s still a political handicap, and I can just imagine the opposition going on about how Kerry would want Kerrey locked up, or something.
    Otherwise, Kerrey would do wonders for shoring up Kerry’s national security/warfighting/anti-terror credentials, absolutely.
    If I were Kerry, though, I’d be afraid of being over-shadowed by my charismatic Veep, when I myself tend … to… put… people to qri2/3kq1$dg98erwkoawe;klaf
    Sorry, my head hit the keyboard; fell asleep there for a moment.

  70. Lehman’s not even waiting for her answers, so seeminlgy sure he is of what they’ll be…
    anyone in DC see them having lunch together recently?

  71. Y’know, I don’t think Lehman’s technique of attempting to shield Rice by intoning this long list of things she’s agreeing she was unaware of is a smart tactic.

  76. My feed has not broken once during Lehman’s questioning…hmmm…VWRC? or everyone simply nod off during his laundry list of softball questions and not notice they’re not connected any longer?

  77. Cutting the Saudis slack and excuses (“maybe they weren’t aware of things going on in their own country”) is also not something that impresses me.

  78. Here’s the thing: what the Clinton administration told the Bush administration about AQ (foreign and domestic threats) ought to be easily verifiable in documentation, and ought NOT to be derived strictly from verbal testimony. Still, if they’re not asking the questions, they’re doing a piss-poor job of investigation. IMO, of course.
    The flip-side of that is, that George Tenet should have been able to supply any and all testimony and documentation to that end on the foreign side, and Mueller on the domestic side. These two people ought to be source material for everything there is to know about our stature WRT AQ and other terrorist organizations before and after Bush took office. So…did we get much useful from them?

  79. Lehman’s last question…what should we do going forward?
    Rice (paraphrased): We must not unlearn what we’ve learned. The comission should help us focus on those lessons and we should build in structural changes to that end…we need to reorganize the FBI…change incentives, change culture…communication between FBI and CIA, must get rid of legal restrictions…
    those who question the Patriot act are against protecting the country (shrug)…
    it’s a pro-Patriot Act statement…in other words, you let us do whatever we want to and we’ll protect you…
    there are other threats…we have to be on the offensive…

  81. People are questioning whether the PATRIOT Act harms civil liberties?
    Shocking! What sort of people want to hinder our efforts this way?
    I need a list of names.

  86. Why do you think the Bush Administration won’t give the commission complete access to the Clinton documents?
    I have no idea. I know what they say their reasons are, but for the full Vulcan Mind Meld you’re going to have to ask Jesurgislac, our resident mentalist.
    I thought Mueller and Tenet had already testified, Gary. Or at least, that Tenet had.

  87. Roemer…why no resignations…why no accountability in the aftermath
    Rice: we didn’t have enough info or protection clearly…if we had known an attack was coming…we would have moved heaven and earth…
    how do you act on “something very very big” is going to happen…I take my oath seriously…I know who attacked us, because of who we are, are the responsible party…
    Roemer: but you’ve said your responsibility was to protect…

  89. See here.
    There are links for each hearing, but I’m not copying them; go to the above page to see them.
    Upcoming Hearings*
    The Commission will hold its tenth public hearing on “Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community” April 13-14, 2004 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission’s eleventh public hearing on “Emergency Response” and “The 9-11 Plot”, will be held on May 18-19, 2004 in New York City.
    The Commission will hold its twelfth public hearing on “National Crisis Management” June 8-9, 2004 in Washington, DC.
    Past Hearings
    The Commission held its first public hearing March 31 – April 1, 2003 at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City.
    The Commission’s second public hearing was held on May 22 – 23, 2003 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its third public hearing on “Terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim World” July 9, 2003 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its fourth public hearing on “Intelligence and the War on Terrorism” October 14, 2003 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its fifth public hearing on “Emergency Preparedness” November 19, 2003 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.
    The Commission’s sixth public hearing on “Security and Liberty” was held on December 8, 2003 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its seventh public hearing on “Borders, Transportation, and Managing Risk” January 26-27, 2004 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its eighth public hearing on “Counterterrorism Policy” March 23-24, 2004 in Washington, DC.
    The Commission held its ninth public hearing, with testimony from Dr. Condoleezza Rice, April 8, 2004 in Washington, DC.

  90. “Why do you think the Bush Administration won’t give the commission complete access to the Clinton documents?”
    That’s past news; they now have; it was in yesterday’s news with a report from the Commission staff on their analysis of those papers. 90% were found to be duplicative. 12 were found to be essential; another 54 are being analyzed.

  91. Roemer: Clarke asking for chance to talk to President…why don’t you and the President use this asset
    Rice: Bush was meeting with Tenet…Clarke is good and that’s why I kept him on … the fact is that what Clarke recommended would not have prevented 9/11…
    Ooooo, if we had done what Clarke recommended we would have been off track on Pakistan and Afghanistan
    all Clarke needed to do was say “I need time to breif the President”

  95. Roemer: Nothing went down the chain from August 6th report? Isn’t that your responsibility
    Rice: The responsibility was with the FBI…they failed, not me…

  97. Nobody at the FBI knows *anything* about a tasking of field offices, after thousands of interview.
    “Nothing went done the chain.”
    Another quotable.

  98. ROEMER: would you support making the PDB public?
    RICE: sensitivity…we’ve gone to great lenghts to make things available to you

  102. The Clinton documents:

    n a statement after its meeting on Wednesday, the panel also disclosed that it had identified 69 documents from the Clinton White House that needed to be turned over the commission by the Bush administration, which acknowledged last week that it had not turned over 10,800 pages of Clinton administration files gathered by the National Archives.
    The panel said that a team of staff members reviewed all of the files this week and found that more than 90 percent of the material “had already been produced, was irrelevant to our our work or was duplicative.” In a statement, the commission said that it had identified 12 other Clinton White House documents that “we consider clearly or arguably responsive to our requests” and that should have been turned over previously.
    “The White House has now produced these documents to the commission,” the statement said, offering no other description of the Clinton files. “The review team concludes that any errors in document production were inadvertent.”
    The statement said that an additional 57 documents did not fall into categories of documents that the panel had previously questioned from the White House but that “nonetheless are relevant to our work” and should be turned over. “The commission has asked for production of these documents,” the statement said. The panel said that it was “making a parallel request for Bush administration documents.”
    The White House acknowledged last week that it had failed to turn over the files after public complaints from aides to the former president who said they feared that the panel would make judgments about the Clinton White House without full access to its records.
    While the statement described the process of gathering documents from the White House as “constructive,” one Democratic member of the panel said in an interview that he was concerned that the White House was continuing to try to hide information from the commission.
    “We have had trouble getting documents from the White House from the very beginning,” said the Democrat, Timothy J. Roemer, another former House member from Indiana. “It continues to be like extracting teeth. We’ve got these 12 Clinton documents, but we’ve 57 to go, and we want any parallel documents from the Bush administration.”

  108. Lame horses Thompson wants to push out door
    1. Please describe your relationship with Clarke…the so-called “plan”: was this something you were supposed to act upon
    Rice: What I understood it to be was a series of decisions (whether to arm Northern Alliance)…and I said put these together in a new strategy to “eliminate” al Qaida…but he never asked me to “act” on “a plan”

  111. PDB == “Presidential Daily Brief”
    Thompson Hearts Condi
    Condi: “More questions than answers … gave Clark opportunity to write a more comprehensive strategy.”

  112. PDB: Presidential Daily Brief.
    The compilation of intelligence information the President sees.
    Frankly, it’s often as much a summary of what’s in the newspapers as it is Secret Information, though some of it is Secret Information.
    Each president has prefered different ways of handling this. Studies In Intelligence, the CIA historical analysis periodical, which is fascinating reading and the declassified reports of which are archived at the CIA website, has some historical analyses of how it evolved and changed over the years; I’ve blogged much of this over the years.
    (There’s a science fiction connection, since Huntington “Ting” Sheldon was the inventor of a lot of this; his wife, Alice, was also later known as “James Tiptree, Jr.”)

  116. Thompson: Why didn’t Bush respond to Cole
    Rice: We didn’t want to respond tit-for-tat in insufficient way…it would have emboldened them…we thought it better to look ahead to more aggressive strategy…AQ was prepared for response to the Cole
    Thompson: That answer bothers me…because ‘what if’ AQ would have blown up another destroyer…what would you have done
    Rice: we were moving toward a different concept…it’s not an issue of every battle…but can you do strategic damage
    Thompson: blowing up our destroyers is an act of war
    Rice: we’ve had several acts of war, but we believe responding tit for tat…we were not going to change anything…

  121. Pundits up shortly. And isn’t that what really matters? Sort of? And yes, Tom Kean makes one last plea for the WH to declassify the August 6th, PDB.
    Bet more Americans know the meaning of that term than ever before. PDB.

  123. Pundits, All Aboard!!
    First clip played. Condi: “I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden determined to attack the United States.”
    There’s your money story. The PDB, what did the Prez know, how about that title!, and will they declassify it and when???

  125. I think a better answer as regards the Cole would be that they’d put the US Armed services on a heightened alert. If that were the case; I’d be shocked if it weren’t.

  126. Wow. PDB mania. (Wonder if Fox News has even mentioned it, anyone?)
    MSNBC has an hour show with ‘the widows.’

  127. So I guess a question I have is, was Clarke “out of the loop”, or was Cheney “out of the loop” for thinking Clarke was “out of the loop”? Or was Condi “out of the loop” for not knowing Clarke was “out of the loop”?
    And if Clarke was “out of the loop” and Condi didn’t know he was “out of the loop”, effectively meaning she was “out of the loop”, just who was in Dick Cheney’s “loop”?

  128. “I think a better answer as regards the Cole would be that they’d put the US Armed services on a heightened alert. If that were the case; I’d be shocked if it weren’t.”
    They did, Slarti, and majorly changed doctrine on force protection/threat protection. See here and the change to “FPCOn” (“Terrorist Force Protection Condition””) here.

  129. I kinda knew that already, Gary, but thanks for the links. It’s exactly the sort of response one would expect if we were attempting to prevent a recurrence of a Cole-style attack on a military asset.
    I’d have thought Condi could have responded to this fairly easily.

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