Every time she opens her mouth lies come out. Now Rice disputes what Clinton said.
"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try; they did not try."
Rice disputed his assessment.
"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false -and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.
Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.
Let's check shall we (from an long, detailed article from Time)?
...One such [transition meeting between Clinton and Bush officials] meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
Berger attended only one of the briefings—the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is."
This story is from 2002. Here was how Rice responded:
...Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present..
Of course she didn't. Anyway, let's get to the heart of her deception.
Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that [Richard] Clarke ["the White House's point man on terrorism"] had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble—Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen—would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime....
I guess what Rice meant by 'comprehesive' was Bin Laden's actual address. So did the Bushies do nothing? Of course not. They did plenty, most importantly they wasted time.
...And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11—that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know—the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries—were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat...
The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear....
At least they dedicated some of their time to important, realistic foreign policy objectives - like the boondoggle of missile defense.
The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team—including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell—whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about [al-Qaeda] and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy.' But doing so meant delay...
Kinda like how Bush had to learn where Pakistan was. And more time wasted...
Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death...
By the spring of 2001, when many top US terrorism officials were increasingly worried by the volume of 'chatter' coming from terrorist cells, the Bush administration was ready to act. Ok, not really act, but to get a plan.
Rice came back to the NSC and said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one....
After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive [to deal with the terrorist threat] on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan—the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.
Oh yes, they were on top on the threat alright. After nine months in office they just about had a plan ready. Pretty impressive. And from the Center for American Progress (see the link for the documents backing their claims up)
The Bush Administration actually reversed the Clinton Administration's strong emphasis on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ's anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ's mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force and anti-drug force. These changes in mission were just as critical as the budget changes, with Ashcroft, in effect, guiding the day to day decisions made by field officers and agents. And all of this while the Administration was receiving repeated warnings about potential terrorist attacks.
Go away Condi. Just go away.
Note: The detailed response, easily located with google, came from Time magazine ... you know of CNN Time/Warner. Why do so-called journalists believe it their to job simply to report lies and not verify? Aren't they paid for that kind of thing?
(ha ha, that last line was a joke)
Update of the serial liar (Raw story via Hullabaloo):
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice told a reporter for the New York Post on Monday. "Big pieces were missing," Rice added, "like an approach to Pakistan that might work, because without Pakistan you weren't going to get Afghanistan."...
just five days after President George W. Bush was sworn into office, a memo from counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke to Rice included the 2000 document, "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects." This document devotes over 2 of its 13 pages of material to specifically addressing strategies for securing Pakistan's cooperation in airstrikes against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan...
The strategy document includes "three levers" that the United States had started applying to Pakistan as far back as 1990. Sanctions, political and economic methods of persuasion are all offered as having been somewhat successful.
Other portions of the passages relating to Pakistan – marked as "operational details" – have been redacted from the declassified memo at the CIA's request.
The document also explores broader strategic approaches, such as a "need to keep in mind that Pakistan has been most willing to cooperate with us on terrorism when its role is invisible or at least plausibly deniable to the powerful Islamist right wing." ....
As Tristero says, "Truly pathetic, Dr. Rice."
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