Condoleezza Rice to testify or not?

[vonork]

The chairman and vice chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Monday that they would ask Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath in any future questioning because of discrepancies between her statements and those made in sworn testimony by President Bush's former counterterrorism chief.

Ms. Rice has granted one private interview to the 10-member, bipartisan commission and has requested another. But the White House has cited executive privilege in refusing to allow her to testify before the commission in public or under oath, even as she has granted numerous interviews about its investigation.

So what do you think, should she testifie publicly under oath or is it good enough if she testifies privatly under oath and if she testifies in private should there be records of what she says?

The times shes been infront of hte 911 commission she has testifed NOT under oath and no records has been keep except notes that the mebers takes.

 

[ShiplordAtvar]

She should testify, but the following should be the first words out of her mouth (from National Review):

This administration came into office to discover that al Qaeda had been allowed to grow into a full-blown menace. It lost six precious weeks to the Florida recount – and then weeks after Inauguration Day to the go-slow confirmation procedures of a 50-50 Senate. As late as the summer of 2001, pitifully few of Bush’s own people had taken their jobs at State, Defense, and the NSC. Then it was hit by 9/11. And now, now the same people who allowed al Qaeda to grow up, who delayed the staffing of the administration, who did nothing when it was their turn to act, who said nothing when they could have spoken in advance of the attack – these same people accuse George Bush of doing too little? There’s a long answer to give folks like that – and also a short one. And the short one is: How dare you?

 

[KaNick]

Of course she should testify, this is a Democracy last I checked. She won't testify though.

 

[slothman]

She should definately testify if Congress says so. It can probably be private, and no public records of course, though. Congress should then be able to release any records they deem necessary.

 

[Flak]

This is all pointless. Ofcourse nobody did 'enough' to prevent 9-11. DUH! Presidential administrations aren't staffed with a bunch fortune tellers the last I heard. What's the point? To give the families a bit more solace in some way I can't fathom? Will that really be accomplished, with some sort of convaluted witchhunt-wannabe?

In anycase, since the tax dollars are already being wasted, why shouldn't she testify? *shrug* I can't think anything useful whatsoever would come out of it. What's the big deal?

 

[The Yankee]

I would hope she does testidy under oath (those four hours in private have no legal bindings such as oaths). And I believe that should be the case for every key player (at least) involved, Democrat or Republican. However, Rice's talks of how she really, REALLY, wants to testify in public....but cannot....has made me upchuck. There's nothing stopping her from testifying. None of this BS about how it's in the Constitution and all that. And I would certainly hope those people calling everyone calling on Rice to testify as racists...well, I hope they would keep quiet quickly. I'm getting tired of hearing about that.

These hearings do serve a purpose. Hopefully, it will tell us how we failed in preventing the attack and give us information on how to better defend ourselves.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

I think she personally wants to testify but is being prevented by the Kleptocrats who control Bush.

 

[Little Raven]

Rice appears to have a problem with going under oath. She certainly doesn't mind talking about the incident; she's been hitting the talk shows all week. It's just that pesky oath that seems to trouble her.

But it's looking like she's running out of options. Fox News was mocking her on the front page yesterday. When Fox News is making fun of a right-wing pundit, the situation is grim. It's beginning to look like Rice WILL testify, whether she wants to or not. I doubt Rove wants her before the public under oath, but if things keep up the way they are, not having her there will be even worse. People tend to draw a certain conclusion about people who maintain they are telling the truth but refuse to testify.

Nevermind: The decision has already been made.

 

[Martacus]

Originally posted by Little Raven
Nevermind: The decision has already been made.

Huzzah! Score one for accountability! I just might watch, if it's televised.

 

[gorn]

Anyone honestly think there's a chance in hell this WON'T be televised? Please ...

 

[Martacus]

You never know; for some people in government, the fact that transcripts of a session/interview will be available eventually is enough to deem something "public".

 

[gorn]

Turn on your tv or radio - this is all over the place right now. There's just too much hype now for it NOT to be televised.

 

[RoddyVR]

Originally posted by Martacus
You never know; for some people in government, the fact that transcripts of a session/interview will be available eventually is enough to deem something "public".

ye, and there are side benefits.
1. it can come out AFTER teh elections. thereby it wont be used too much to criple bush.
2. a writen document (transcript) is much easier to edit then a televised interview.

 

[Little Raven]

Gorn is right - this will almost certainly be televised.

And it will be VERY interesting watching. Condi has been talking up a storm all week, basically saying the exact opposite of Clarke. But she hasn't been under oath. If she goes under oath and continues saying what she has been saying...then somebody is lying. And at that point, the committee is probably going to have to dig deeper.

Whoever has the most skeletons in the closet will lose.

 

[vonork]

and Bush and Cheney will appear before the full panel (not only two members as it was said before), but not under oath and in private. The same will prob be for Clinton and Gore too.

What's with the feer of being under oath?

 

[Little Raven]

Originally posted by vonork
What's with the feer of being under oath?

Presidents who have gone under oath before Congress have historically felt nothing but pain as a result. You can't really blame them for not jumping at the opportunity...

 

[Desmond Hawkins]

Of course she should testify. Any democracy loving American should agree with this Canuck.

 

[ICBM]

This whole thing is a sham. I just wish the American people weren't so trusting of a corporate government and a corportate media.

 

[Hygro]

Unless she's done something wrong she has nothing to hide. It aught to be shown on C-Span at least.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

This is a BIG setback for the 9-11 commission. NO MORE public under-oath testimonies from Bush administration officials? In return for a 60-minute under-oath public interview with Rice? What were they thinking?

Bill Clinton and other figures from the Clinton Admin. have promised to testify. Where's Bush? Where's Perle? Rumsfeld? Wolfowitz?

Rice was a "set-up-and-push-over". Even FOX was pressuring her to testify. FOX, for crying out loud! Dr. Rice was just the mama bird pretending to be wounded and an easy target... drawing away the predatory Fourth Estate from the REAL targets... no reporter now thinks of asking the REAL people in charge about what went wrong. The new fallback line: "Rice testified! After this whole controversy about whether or not she should! We made it into a big deal! Isn't that enough? What, you want a top Bush official to testify?" The damage control unit is up and ready.

But on the upside, Clarke the Brave has already made public knowledge what has been confined to the literary left for years. It's not just the avid blog-reader, politics-watcher, etc, who knows these things. Joe American is now informed! About what? National security! George Bush's self-described best suit has been torn apart completely by 911C.

1. Both Rumsfeld AND Bush [we didn't know about the latter until the 911C!] had talks in their respective administrations to see if 9-11 was a good enough excuse to attack Iraq. In Rumsfeld's case this was the DAY OF the attacks - even though he was being told simultaneously that OBL was the culprit without a doubt.

2. The Administration ignored the warnings of Clinton-era holdovers [and not just Clinton - Clarke was in government by the second Reagan term!]. Not to mention the people whose jobs were being handed over to newly installed Bush officials [their respective predecessors, who also warned about AQ]. Not to mention the pretty specific threats from within the CIA, etc, just months or days before the attacks - the Phoenix Memo, for instance.

3. The Administration continues to claim that it had "a plan" to not only "rollback" but "eliminate" AQ. There was no such talk of a plan before 9-11. The Admin. has yet to reveal the plan or even the groundwork citing national security.

4. Finally, the various people and orgs involved - Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, the FBI, the CIA, the NSC, etc, etc, etc - have been scrambling to execute a terribly obvious coverup. Every day a new contradiction in testimony is uncovered. I posted a sample on the other Rice thread:

"Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before 9/11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban; the CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats; and Rice's assertion this week that Bush told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.
Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies."

Meanwhile, what about this entire LIST of lies JUST from Condi Rice?

Pre-9/11 Intelligence

CLAIM: "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." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]
CLAIM: In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the Administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]
FACT: According to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]
CLAIM: "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high…we were at battle stations." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'" Meanwhile, the Bush Administration decided to terminate "a highly classified program to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04; Newsweek, 3/21/04]
CLAIM: "The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"]
CLAIM: "Our [pre-9/11 NSPD] plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: 9/11 Commissioner Gorelick: "There is nothing in the NSPD that came out that we could find that had an invasion plan, a military plan." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: "Right." Gorelick: "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" Armitage: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11." [Source: 9/11 Commission testimony, 3/24/04]
Condi Rice on Pre-9/11 Counterterrorism Funding

CLAIM: "The president increased counterterrorism funding several-fold" before 9/11. – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/24/04
FACT: According to internal government documents, the first full Bush budget for FY2003 "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the Administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism." [Source: New York Times, 2/28/04; Newsweek, 5/27/02]
Richard Clarke's Concerns

CLAIM: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11. [Source: CBS 60 Minutes, 3/24/04; White House Press Release, 3/21/04
CLAIM: "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "On January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice." – 9/11 Commission staff report, 3/24/04
Response to 9/11

CLAIM: "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04]
9/11 and Iraq Invasion Plans

CLAIM: "Not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." [Source: Washington Post, 1/12/03. CBS News, 9/4/02]
Iraq and WMD

CLAIM: "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/18/04
FACT: The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04]
9/11-al Qaeda-Iraq Link

CLAIM: "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "we don't know" if there is a connection. [Source: BBC, 9/14/03]