The Associated Press Promotes 9/11 Perjury Witness As Presidential Candidate
Condoleezza Rice’s star rising
Secretary of state most popular member of Bush administration
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10602793/from/RS.2/
(Gold9472: "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile." Really Condi?
The FAA warned in 1998 that Al-Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark."
Two years before 9/11, a federal report was released by the Federal Research Division entitled, "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" In that document, it stated, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House."
Granted, these warnings were issued during the Clinton Administration's reign, however, the Bush transition team, which was chaired by Dick Cheney, received warnings about Al-Qaeda from the Clinton Administration. They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 to Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Philip Zelikow. The purpose of a transition team is to educate the incoming Administration with EVERYTHING the previous administration knew. If Clinton was given those warnings, Bush was given those warnings as well.
The military routinely practiced exercises that had to do with, "hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties." Two of the targets imagined were the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon.
In November 2000, the Pentagon performed drills specifically having to do with a plane hitting the Pentagon.
In the spring of 2001, after receiving SEVERAL warnings about Al-Qaeda, the FAA knew that, "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable."
So when Condi said, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile", she committed perjury.
Do you think she was telling the truth? Watch this, and decide for yourself.)
Updated: 1:43 p.m. ET Dec. 25, 2005
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become the most popular member of the Bush administration and a potential candidate to succeed her boss in the White House, even as Americans lose confidence in the president she serves and patience with the Iraq war she helped launch.
Entering her second year as the country’s senior diplomat and foreign policy spokeswoman, Rice has improbably shed much of her image as the hawkish “warrior princess” at President Bush’s side. The nickname was reportedly bestowed by her staff at the White House National Security Council, where Rice was an intimate member of Bush’s first-term war council.
Rice resolutely defends the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism and the expansive executive powers that Bush claims came with it. She has lately sounded more optimistic than Bush about the progress of the Iraq war and the future for that country.
Yet, it unusual to hear anyone talk about Rice as an architect of either of those two defining undertakings of the Bush presidency.
By a mix of charm, luck and physical distance from the White House, Rice has managed to escape the fate of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who saw their public approval ratings fall to historic lows before rebounding slightly recently.
Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, credits Rice’s heavy travel schedule, an approach to diplomacy that is more pragmatic than other Bush advisers, and a measure of personal pluck.
“She appears to have sort of skated away” from controversies over U.S. intelligence failures and aggressive U.S. tactics in the hunt for terrorists, Campbell said, and from the perception that the United States is “slogging” along in Iraq.
‘A very hard thing to pull off’
“She appears at once to be close to the president but separate and detached from some of the foibles of the administration, and that’s a very hard thing to pull off,” he said.
Rice was as strong a public voice as any for going to war in Iraq. She once famously warned of Saddam Hussein’s presumed weapons of mass destruction: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Although Rice’s first-term record on Iraq, terrorism and other subjects made for a contentious Senate confirmation hearing last January, most Americans apparently do not hold her personally responsible.
A Pew Research survey in October found that 60 percent of respondents held either a very favorable or mostly favorable view of Rice, while 25 percent had a very or mostly unfavorable view — numbers others in the Bush administration can only envy.
Two years after ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured, 64 percent of respondents said the Iraq war was the right thing to do. An AP-Ipsos poll this month showed that only 42 percent now say it was the right decision, and support has also dropped for staying in Iraq until the country is stabilized.
As for Bush, 42 percent said in this month’s AP poll that they approve of his job performance, while 57 percent disapproved. That was up from a 37 percent approval rating in November, but well below his stratospheric numbers after Sept. 11.
Rice still has a long way to go to convince skeptics overseas that the United States is not pursuing a misadventure in Iraq, and she will always be the public face abroad of an administration that many in Europe and the Arab world distrust, said Nathan Brown, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
‘A slightly friendlier image’
“She may present a slightly softer image, a slightly friendlier image, one that is not knee-jerk defensive” on issues like the mistreatment of terrorism detainees, Brown said. “But there are limits to what she can do so long as the policy is unpopular.”
There is a glamour factor to Rice’s appeal, and curiosity about the first black woman to hold the nation’s top diplomatic post.
Rice, 51, grew up in the segregated South. She tries to soften the brash image the United States often projects abroad by telling audiences the discrimination she faced is proof that America isn’t perfect.
Rice has never married. She works long hours and keeps fit with a rigorous daily exercise regimen. A clotheshorse, Rice has posed for Vogue magazine in a couture ball gown.
She is fiercely loyal to Bush, and tries to downplay her own rising stock and his public slide. Although mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2008, Rice says she has never wanted to run for elected office.
“I’ve got my hands full and I know what my skills, I think, are,” Rice said in an Associated Press interview this month.
She declined to point to any specific accomplishments for which she takes personal credit, although she said she is pleased by developments including warmer US-European relations after a chill over the Iraq invasion.
“I’m a historian,” Rice said in the interview. “I tend to see things in the big sweep of history and hope that at some point somebody is going to look back and say, oh, something that she did then mattered.”
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Gold9472 Speak Before Checking Edit
I think I might have screwed up on this. Condoleeza Rice originally said outside of the hearings, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile".
Here is what happened at the hearing.
KEAN: I've got a question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me by a number of members of the families.
Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9/11 that talked about using planes as bombs?
RICE: Let me address this question because it has been on the table.
I think that concern about what I might have known or we might have known was provoked by some statements that I made in a press conference. I was in a press conference to try and describe the August 6 memo, which I've talked about here in my opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session.
And I said, at one point, that this was a historical memo, that it was -- it was not based on new threat information. And I said, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile."
As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, "I could not have imagined," because within two days, people started to come to me and say, "Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999. The intelligence community did look at information about this."
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.
So the title of this piece should be, "The Associated Press Is Promoting Someone Who Lied About 9/11 As A Presidential Candidate".
Sorry... my bad.
