Preview of the 9/11 Commission Public Hearings: Where's Dr. Rice?
by CA Pol Junkie
by CA Pol Junkie
The 9/11 Commission is holding its 8th round of public hearings, with high profile officials in attendance:
Tuesday, 3/23
Morning: Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell
Afternoon: William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld
Wednesday, 3/24
Morning: George Tenet and Sandy Berger
Afternoon: Richard Clarke and Richard Armitage
Tuesday should provide contrasts between the Clinton and Bush cabinet members. The Secretaries of State and Defense aren't quite the crux of what happened before 9/11, but the duplicity and doublespeak from the current administration will be readily apparent compared to the Clinton cabinet members, who don't have anyone to protect. Wednesday is when it should get interesting, when Tenet, Berger, and Clarke testify.
Note the obvious omission of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice from the schedule. She has refused to testify and for good (political) reason: she is a lousy liar. Josh Marshall has noted the contradiction between Richard Clarke's 60 Minutes account of an administration relatively unconcerned about al-Qaeda and Condoleeza Rice's column defending the Bush administration in the Washington Post. Who's more likely to be the one telling the truth: the one testifying for two and a half hours in front of the world, or the one who refuses to testify?
Rice, of course, has a history of lying about 9/11:
I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,
and the classic for which Rice earned Slate's Whopper of the Week,
The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas.
in spite of the title of the August 6th Memo reading, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
Let the commission play nice with the Bush administration for now, so they can at least ask Bush and Cheney tough questions in private. When that is done, however, the 9/11 Commission needs to subpoena Rice to make her testify in public. She is the link between the intelligence community and the political realm of Bush and Cheney. She is at the heart of what went wrong prior to 9/11, and she knows the truth, whatever that may be.