Sordid lying

Let me call your attention to an article entitled "Rice More Sordid Than Foley". Take a look:

They are such liars. And no, I am not speaking only of the dissembling GOP House leaders led by Speaker Dennis Hastert who, out of naked political calculation, covered up for one of their own in the sordid teen stalking case of Rep. Mark Foley.

Call me old school, but I am still more concerned with the Republicans molesting Lady Liberty while pretending to be guarding the nation’s security, an assignment which they have totally botched. The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation.

On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, “State of Denial.”

“I don’t remember a so-called emergency meeting,” Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission. The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent.

And now here's something about the nature of that meeting:

In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against Al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.

“Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away,” Woodward reports. “He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.” A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.

Condi Rice is a liar but she is not stupid. Why didn't she take the meeting seriously? Did her response mirror official policy?

Just remember who has really benefited from 9/11: the Bush administration.