LAT: (Rice) Testimony Paints Image of Passive Inner Circle

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess9apr09,1,5768789,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

In her much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice delivered a powerful rebuttal Thursday to critics who say President Bush brushed off warnings of a major terrorist attack inside the United States — warnings that poured into American intelligence agencies like a torrent in the summer of 2001.

But on the critical question of what the Bush White House did in response to those warnings, Rice's performance was markedly less effective. Repeatedly, she described a White House inner circle that spent its time on broad strategy and left it up to the bureaucracy to decide how to meet the escalating threat, with no real follow-up from the White House.

At one point, asked about a memo written to her by White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke warning that the parochial interests of the agencies would thwart action unless the White House kept the pressure on, Rice said she thought Clarke was just trying to "buck me up."

"The problem for Dr. Rice in her testimony," as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, put it, "is that the concept of bureaucracy she offers is essentially a passive, not an active concept."

The question is, Jamieson said: "Would it have made a difference if they had a different concept?"

SHE let the country down ...

Condi who was pushing the invasion of Iraq. I think that she was too weak and ineffective in the face of NeoCons that have taken control of the White House and are leading an uneducated and unworldly Bush around by the nose.

Condi is a figurehead just like Bush and Powell are. They are place holders and nothing else. Yet they are loyal to the PNAC crowd.