Rice rejects Clarke charges

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Xenu
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Postby Xenu » Sat Mar 27, 2004 12:27 pm

We're so fucked...is this what it was like during the LAST Bush administration? I was too young to remember.
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Postby Rspaight » Sat Mar 27, 2004 1:15 pm

This is worse, in my opinion. Bush I was evil (his policies arguably laid the groundwork for the current mess we're in), but there was at least the sense that grown-ups were in charge. (As opposed to Reagan, who was a lot like Bush II -- incompetent but widely-loved while his administration ran roughshod over the country.)

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Postby Ron » Sat Mar 27, 2004 8:33 pm

I think what distinguishes Bust The Younger from the others is the quality of those he chose for top spots, beginning with the vice president. This is one ideologically-driven bunch with Powell and Rice thrown into the mix to fool people into thinking that there is a degree of balance and reason when in fact there is none.

Now here's a scarey thought: what if, just for the sake of argument, Saddam opened the doors to weapons inspectors two years ago such that Iraq, as an issue, does not exist? One's got to wonder what other mischief the Bush team would be up do had they not been distracted by the war.
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Postby Rspaight » Sun Mar 28, 2004 8:50 pm

Rice on "60 Minutes" tonight:

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pi ... U&refer=us

Rice Says Administration Worked on Terrorism Fight From Start
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the administration was developing plans to fight terrorism "from the time that we came here'' with a "multi-year strategy'' to eliminate the terror group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Rice appeared on the CBS program "60 Minutes'' to counter charges by former presidential adviser Richard Clarke that the White House failed to make fighting terrorism an urgent priority prior to Sept. 11. Bush's administration also is under pressure to let Rice testify at an open hearing of an independent commission investigating the government's failure to detect plotting for the terrorist attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people in the U.S.

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify,'' Rice, 49, said in the interview, recorded this morning. ``But there's an important principle involved here'' of the separation of powers in the Constitution.

Clarke's criticisms and Rice's public responses have become an issue in the U.S. election campaign between Bush, 57, and Democrat John Kerry, 60, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts in his fourth term. Kerry said yesterday that if Rice can give an interview for the CBS program, "she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath.''

Rice said she was declining to testify to preserve a constitutional principle of separation of powers; the commission was appointed by Congress and Rice said presidential advisers must be able to give candid advice free of fear that they may one day have to repeat it in public hearings.

'Long-Standing Principle'

"It is a long-standing principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress,'' Rice said. "I'm not going to say anything in private that I wouldn't say in public.''


But it's not testifying before *Congress*, it's an independent commission created by Congressional legislation. IANAL, but many who are think there's a difference.

Rice testified in closed session before the commission and has given briefings and interviews defending the efforts of Bush's administration to combat terrorism. She also has criticized Clarke, and after he testified last week called his charges "scurrilous.''


But not much in the way of actually disputing the charges themselves -- just a lot of ad hominem attacks on Clarke.

Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said today the panel won't try to force Rice to testify in public by subpoena.

"We will accept any testimony from Dr. Rice that she has to offer,'' Kean said on the "Fox News Sunday'' program. "But we are still going to press, and still believe unanimously as a commission, that we should hear from her in public.''

'Political Blunder'

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to the commission on Thursday saying Rice would submit to an interview in a closed hearing.

Commission member John Lehman, a Republican who was Navy secretary in former President Ronald Reagan's administration, said on ABC's "This Week'' program that the White House refusal to let her publicly testify is "a political blunder of the first order.''

Rice said that the Bush administration was doing everything possible to fight terrorism.

"I don't know what a sense of urgency, any greater than the one we had, would have caused us to do differently,'' Rice said in the CBS interview. "We weren't going to invade Afghanistan in the first months of the Bush administration.''


Wow. That's quite a statement. So the only way she can envision fighting terrorism is to invade Afghanistan?

Al-Qaeda Emboldened

She said al-Qaeda had been emboldened in the dozen years before the Sept. 11 attacks after inflicting strikes on Americans in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, assaults on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole warship.

She said the Bush administration, after taking office in January 2001, was working to develop military contingencies for eliminating, rather than "rolling back,'' al-Qaeda, even as it tracked threats that suggested attacks were likely abroad.

Clarke, 53, told the Sept. 11 commission at a public hearing on Wednesday that "I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terror an important issue but not an urgent issue.''

He also has made his allegations in a book published last Monday, on "60 Minutes'' last week and in other interviews with news organizations.

Testimony

Clarke, who was an adviser on terrorism to former President Bill Clinton as well as Bush before leaving the White House last year, said on NBC's "Meet the Press'' today that as a result the administration is trying to damage him "both personally and professionally because I had the temerity to question the president's actions on terrorism.''

He called for public release of all of his testimony to a joint House-Senate intelligence committee investigation two years ago, along with Rice's interview with the Sept. 11 commission and all White House e-mails on the subject to address accusations from Bush's Republican allies in Congress that his statements have been inconsistent.

"Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony,'' he said on NBC.

Bush Rating Drops

Voter approval of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism fell by 8 percentage points after publication of Clarke's book and his testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, according to a poll for Newsweek magazine.

Bush's support on efforts to fight terror and improve homeland security dropped to 57 percent in a survey taken Thursday and Friday from 65 percent in a poll taken Feb. 19-20, Newsweek said. Bush's overall approval rating of 49 percent was statistically unchanged, and 65 percent of respondents said Clarke's testimony didn't affect their opinions of Bush.

The survey was conducted among 1,002 adults nationwide and has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.


Ryan
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Postby Ron » Sun Mar 28, 2004 11:16 pm

From what we've heard so far from the Bush team, it appears that they simply don't have any answers--which of course only gives more credence to Clarke's testimony. BTW, what reasons were given for the White House refusal to allow Rice to testify publicly? [But giving an interview on "60 Minutes" is OK. Ours is a very strange democracy.]

Richard Clark continues to say all the right things. Too bad about that damned book, however.

The poll numbers are confusing. Bush's approval rating remains unchanged but he dropped 8% on the Fighting Terrorism scale. I guess the election result will depend on the state of the economy after all.
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Postby Rspaight » Mon Mar 29, 2004 12:39 am

BTW, what reasons were given for the White House refusal to allow Rice to testify publicly?


That it would set a "bad precedent" for a sitting National Security Adviser to testify before a "Congressional" committee -- something about the separation of powers precluding the legislative branch from forcing testimony of a member of the executive branch not confirmed by Congress. (Rumsfeld and Powell were confirmed by Congress, which is why they testified. The position of NSA is not subject to Congressional approval.)

There are two basic issues as I see it:

1) The 9/11 committee is not a Congressional committee (no members are sitting Senators or Representatives), though it was created by an act of Congress.

2) Nothing is preventing Rice from testifying other than the fear of the precedent of a sitting NSA testifying to matters of policy. (Former NSAs in the Carter and Clinton administrations have testified while in office, but regarding various scandals, not matters of policy.) It's generally agreed that a presidential adviser cannot be compelled to testify, but nothing says they can't.

Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney

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Postby Patrick M » Thu Apr 01, 2004 5:41 pm

Rspaight wrote:
But Clarke must know that Iraq was involved in the Islamofascists' 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center.


In the Wolfowitz/PNAC crowds' dreams. In the real world, no such connection has been shown.


http://www.spiritoftruth.org/post_009.htm