Fray Poster Pegs Condoleeza

Subject: "Rice is Tasked to Fall on Her Sword"
Re: "Condi Lousy: Why Rice is a bad national security adviser."
From: BeverlyMann
Date: Fri Apr 9 1229h

One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.

Actually, what is clear to me now—after watching Rice's testimony and then reading some of the more astonishing quotes from it last evening in various news reports—is that Rice isn't a national security adviser at all. That is, her job—unlike that of all the others, such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John Poindexter, Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger—was, and is, not to give the president national security advice but instead to carry out orders given by those who actually were devising national security policy: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith.

Rice was simply a glorified supervisory bureaucrat. Her job was to take and carry out orders—or, as she repeatedly put it, to be "tasked"—to carry out this or that bureaucratic aspect of the national security policy set by Cheney and Rumsfeld with the input of Wolfowitz and Feith. Rice was almost as much out of the loop as was Richard Clarke; she was present at these principals' meetings, but only to receive her marching orders.

Rice didn't get Clarke a meeting with the principals because Rice couldn't get Clarke a meeting with the principals. Rice didn't order the FBI director to "shake the trees" of that agency—nor even to notify the field offices of the stunningly clear indications from al Qaeda intercepts about a very, very, very, very big and imminent terrorist attack possibly within this country, or even inquire whether the field offices that were tracking al Qaeda cells within this country had any information that, viewed in light of the intercepted messages, might help pinpoint any such plot within the U.S.—because Rice lacked the authority to do so on her own.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

http://slate.msn.com/id/2098718/

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Couldn't have said it better myself

Damn! I mean, DAMN! Can we all just wake up from this bad dream, please? I may just have to learn the words to "Oh Canada!" if I wake up in November and these incompetents are still in power.

Or is it malevolence?