Good name for a move-- kind of like "Hercules -- Unchained".
Posted on 04/09/2004 7:50:11 PM PDT by syriacus
Now that Condi Rice has averted the initial lynching, it might be time to look back at some of the evidence.
The 9-11 commission was out in full force Thursday as National Security Adviser Condi Rice took the stand to get grilled in public, but stuck to her guns.
What remains to be seen is how attacks in Iraq will play in Peoria, particularly when the politics of nation destruction is the history repeat this time around.
Democrats launched the "Ted Offensive," letting Sen. Kennedy out of the beach house to cross yet another bridge back towards the 20th Century faux paus.
Robert Byrd, the former Ku Klux Klan wiz who fellow Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd calls a man for all seasons, joined the "Ted Offensive" this week, calling Iraq another Vietnam.
The radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers have killed more than a dozen U.S. troops in the last week, has taken up the same argument. What's next -- ol' Kennedy and Byrd crossing the bridge over the Tigris and Euphrates to perhaps pose with Iraqi rebels and their rocket-propelled grenades, in repeat of Hanoi Jane's aid and comfort to the communist dictators of Vietnam?
Just listen to wording from some of the politically inspired (?questions? statements? theories? other?) Democrat appointee Richard Ben-Veniste used when he talked about al-Qaeda threats to blow up LAX, in Brooklyn and Boston. He turned the previous "we had thwarted" Osama bin Laden threats into "you (Rice) learned" about all the post-Clinton activity that the Bush administration had not done in a couple hundred days.
Rice noted through 20 years of terrorism through administrations of both parties, we were slow to react -- much as the Western democracies were to the rising threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The "peace in our time" led to more deaths when the threat had to be dealt with.
In 1940, Great Britain stood alone. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, gave a speech credited with rallying the free world.
"Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail," he said. "We shall go on to the end; we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ..."
They didn't. America helped. After Pearl Harbor the Allies joined to keep the world free.
Move forward some decades and another conflict is going on in Vietnam. In this case, the communist effort to take over South Vietnam is going down the tubes when Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap launches a last-ditch effort with surprise attacks at Khe Sanh, then other areas throughout the South in the Tet Offensive.
The prognosis 30 years afterward was that Tet was a military loss for the North Vietnamese, but a political dagger giving the "peace" crowd the chance to bring our boys back home, spit on them, curse them and call them baby killers. Move forward a couple score (in Lincoln's terms) and thousands of abortions later (lawyers are figuring how to tie the Vietnam vets to that in a class action suit) and now we face a terrorist threat.
We face ridicule from those who want peace in their vines while leaving us as a target, and from those who prefer political power to a safer world.
We've been lucky. A Customs agent (who wasn't even on high alert, Rice said) noticed a person who was bringing bomb-making materials into the country during the Ben-Veniste team's watch, so LAX continues to be the hub of airplanes and haircuts.
But during the Bush watch, all the careful planning that kept the U.S. safe during the first World Trade Center attack, the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, etc., all fell apart -- even though Rice said the administration kept all of the current Clinton policies going while working on a new plan to keep from just "swatting flies."
I haven't seen any reports linking the coup by Ted, Byrd and Tom Daschle in the Senate during that time, delaying Bush appointments already slowed by the continued 2000 election battle. Such power plays couldn't have helped but distract.
If you need other fly-by distractions, Rice noted there were other things like a U.S. plane crew forced to land in China and held after a mid-air collision.
Ben-Veniste's questioning focused on President Bush's daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001. Rice said the briefing came after reports of bin Laden's intent to attack outside the United States. She said Bush asked questions about what al-Qaeda was possibly going to do in the U.S.
Rice said, "There was nothing in this memo that suggested an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C. ..."
Rice noted that some administrations took the terrorist threat as a law-and-order investigation, which meant under U.S. law and customs about domestic surveillance things would slip past us (... like the 9-11 attack).
But when there is an opportunity to get information ... commentators praise the 9-11 commission for wanting to get Rice's input but ignore talk radio reports that only 5 of 10 commissioners found Rice's private session important enough to attend.
Others give misleading information for various reasons. Book-seller Richard Clarke obviously overreached when he said Rice looked like she didn't know what al-Qaeda was, since she had talked extensively about it in a WJR radio interview a couple of years before -- already noting the woes of not sharing international and domestic intelligence.
Now the powers-that-wannabe will focus on the word "urgent" used by President Bush with Bob Woodward. Rice tried to put the word into context, noting that Bush's use of it was to note that anyone would feel more urgent after the tragedy of 9-11.
Yet some Americans would rather attack our defenders than those who attack us. The result for the Vietnamese people was mass executions, "re-education" and more atrocities.
Look back at history to another last-gap attack, the Battle of the Bulge. American troops stood their ground despite being vastly outnumbered, thwarting Nazis until reinforcements arrived. Hitler's view was the U.S. would break, and sue for peace, after his Panzers drove to the ocean.
We must now decide if we will fight terror in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on the land, on the sea, and in the investigating halls ... or if "we" will wait for it to return to our homes.
I especially liked this comment:
I haven't seen any reports linking the coup by Ted, Byrd and Tom Daschle in the Senate during that time, delaying Bush appointments already slowed by the continued 2000 election battle. Such power plays couldn't have helped but distract.
Edward Muckhead Teddy Kennedy would put his current squeeze in the back seat and drive right off the bridge. And then run away to try to formulate an alibi.
'Sheets' Byrd would try to move the bridge to West Virginia at taxpayer expense.
Neither of them is worth a plugged nickle.
I'm trying to dispute a foolish friend of mines assertion that the reason there were so few commission members present was because of a request by the White House.
Does anyone have a link handy that would help me out? Who were the no-shows?
Good name for a move-- kind of like "Hercules -- Unchained".
"It was a free commercial emphasizing the competence and leadership of the Bush administration," said one unnamed Democrat House member. "We demand equal time."
Here is one explanation, from the Washington Post
I don't know how it compares with other explanations.
Just five or six of the 10 commission members attended Rice's first session; commissioners said that was because she insisted on holding the session on a Saturday, in the White House complex.I guess that questioning Rice wasn't important enough to some of them to give up their Saturday.
It has been reported that the Commission failed to record National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's private testimony on February 7, 2004. The failure of the 9/11 Commission to record Dr. Rice's testimony further calls into question this Commission's methods in conducting its investigation.
http://www.911independentcommission.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3721582,00.html
Condoleezza Rice met with the commission privately for four hours Saturday at the White House to discuss what the administration could have done to prevent the attacks.``It was a very useful interview and I personally found Doctor Rice to be candid and forthcoming,'' said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor. ``I think it would be useful for the public to hear from Doctor Rice.''
``I thought the tone and level of cooperation of the exchange was productive,'' said Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.
Here is more info on the February 7th testimony.
It looks like the Administration requested, last November, that only three commissioners would meet privately with Rice.
However the commission did not agree to limiting the number of commissioners who could be present.
All of the commissionerscould have attended the February 7th Q & A, but, because it was a Saturday, some of them chose not to attend.
White House criticism disputed, By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
Felzenberg said the commission never agreed to the terms in the November letter, which said that for a meeting with an assistant to the president, either the chairman or vice chairman of the commission must show up with no more than two other commissioners.But the commission did agree to meet with Rice at her convenience, and the date and time she chose — a Saturday afternoon — limited the number of commissioners who could attend because several live far from Washington.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-06-white-house-criticism_x.htm
I would think that given the importance of her job in what is a daily developing situation she would be justified in choosing the time of her testimony.
I agree with your observation that the commissioners absenteeism during testimony that they deemed critical is very telling.
The quote in post#16 from Ben-Veniste compared to his behavior toward Dr. Rice during the open-door session indicates to me that he is a weasel.
If I find any additional information I'll give you a ping. Thanks again.
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