Rice says she doesn't recall CIA warning of al-Qaida

[sonny10305]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

With all the lies and incompetence coming from the Bush team, do you believe her?

 

[ryankeith]

Here is a link to an article about it: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15102882/

Its amazing how she can never recall anything prior to 9/11 that may put her in bad light.

 

[sonny10305]

ICO7, Thank you for that very informative post, I did not realise how bad it was untill now.
Can we believe anything said by the people in the Bush administration?
What a disgrace! The terrifing fact is we have them for another two years.

 

[smelter]

I'd like to echo Sonny's sentiment ..... Thanks ICO7! I guess I'm left with the question as to why this kind of information has not been getting headlines and airtime. If seems that Alfie's assessment of Condi Rice's abilitites or lack of them is 100% correct. Either she is not very smart (streetwise) or she is not competent to hold the position she has within this administration. Sure, we've not had an attack here at home since 9/11 and maybe they are due some credit for that, but it doesn't excuse their failings prior to it.

 

[Txgoodoldboy]

I couldn't believe it when I read it, this morning. It sounds like something, someone would say, if they were worried about a criminal investigation.

"I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that," Rice told reporters. "We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous."

nebulous = hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused

This just seemed like a strange way to word it.

 

[BoSoxFanVa]

Rice has the highest approval ratings of any official in the Bush administration. I don't get it. What has happened to our press? Why doesn't a reporter, armed with ICO7's fact sheet, press her on all these issues? Whenever I see her on a talking heads show, she never answers a question directly. The reporter's never press her, so she gets away with it.

I'd like to see Chris Mathews of Hardball interview Rice. He seems the only reporter out there that will keep asking the same question after he gets all the BS spin. At least he tries.

 

[iman]

It probably doesn't matter what she says. She and Powell were always window dressing in this administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the players. Bush has no confidence in diplomacy and no use for the State Department. Neither does the Bush base, diplomacy is "French" and feminine, action is American and macho.

 

[Rand]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aG2D.J.6m9rM&refer=home

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The State Department confirmed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet about the threat posed by al-Qaeda two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack disputed the characterization of the meeting in the book ``State of Denial'' by journalist Bob Woodward, saying the information Rice got ``was not new'' and didn't amount to an urgent warning.

``Rather, it was a good summary from the threat-reporting from the previous several weeks,'' McCormack said in a statement from Saudi Arabia where Rice is traveling.

Rice, who was President George W. Bush's national security adviser at the time, asked that the information be forwarded to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to McCormack.

In a briefing with reporters on her way to Saudi Arabia Rice said that she didn't recall the specific meeting and that it was ``incomprehensible'' that she would have ignored warnings about an imminent threat. After her aides researched the matter, McCormack said they found that ``a meeting took place on or around July 10.''

According to the account in Woodward's book, Tenet and Cofer Black, the Central Intelligence Agency's top counter- terrorism officer, warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that ``al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself.'' Black emphasized that the threat was serious enough to warrant an ``overall plan and strategy,'' according to Woodward.

``I don't know that this meeting took place,'' Rice said last night. ``What I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond.''

Frequent Meetings

Rice said she met frequently with Tenet and that there was nothing in the briefings that she recalled ``related to an attack in the United States.''

At Rice's request, the State Department's legal adviser, John Bellinger, researched the 2001 meeting today at the National Security Council archive while Rice aide Philip Zelikow researched the National Archives, McCormack's statement said.

McCormack said the information from the July 2001 meeting was made available to a commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Zelikow was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission.

Rice also told reporters that she offered to resign as Bush's National Security Adviser as part of a broader house- cleaning following the president's reelection in 2004.

``I did tell the president at one point that I thought maybe all of us should go, because we had fought two wars and we had the largest terrorist attack in American history,'' Rice said, according to a State Department transcript.

 

[MadeUpName27]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -
"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,"

"Incomprehensible" is the best way to descibe that statement.
Sounds like Legalese for "I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies"...