Define combatants, and give a cite.
There’s a difference between someone trying to kick in the door, and a person armed with a fire axe.
-Joe
Actually I agree with you. But I also thought there was at least one answer by Dr. Rice that deserved three minutes of a guy wrestling a bear.
She lost Howard Fineman’s confidence, surprisingly:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098499/
A similar view, and I agree on the basic point here: Rice is clearly a very intelligent analyst and academic. But that’s exactly the problem: she speaks of security problems within the government that she had identified prior to 9/11 as if she were an outside consultant. But she takes no responsibility for actually being the person in charge of trying to fix these known problems. Incredibly, when asked why she didn’t do things, she gave responses like this: “[If] I needed to do anything,” she said, “I would have been asked to do it. I was not asked to do it.” or “There was no recommendation that we do anything”
WHAT? Her JOB is not to wait to be asked to do things by people lower on the ladder. Her job is to TELL other people what to do: to take an active hand in overcoming obstacles and fixing problems. Her job is to make recommendations to the President, not just wait around for people to tell her that something is a good idea.
Cockpit doors were designed with latches “to keep your friends out”. Not someone intent on doing harm. They have been redesigned since 911
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/TechTV/TechTV_cockpitdoor011003.html
And I note with extreme irony that while Rice gave her testimony publicly after much anger and many accusations of inappropriate secrecy from the Democrats and the liberals here at the SDMB, Clinton was been permitted to give his privately and none of them seems to have a single little problem with that. Huh.
Don’t be too concerned, I’m certain those same folks will be making the same accusations of improper secrecy against Clinton soon.
Wait, did I just say Clinton? I meant Bush.
Well OK, I suppose you have a point.
I think Bob Kerry needed a few dozen less cups of coffee before taking testimony.
I was watching/listening to the testimony over the 'puter at work and could barely take him. Wouldn’t let her finish a sentence. And then he started in with the Dr. Clarke stuff. dude…
Rice’s counterpart in the Clinton administration testified publicly under oath just as she did. Bush will testify privately just as Clinton did. He’s even getting help from Cheney. Where’s the irony?
Whoops I almost forgot this little gem:
:eek:
Oh by all means, let’s go forward with this. You are quite correct. No one should be able to testify in private. Please, pretty please, I beg of you, get the boy king to testify under oath in public, alone. The left will gladly put Clinton forward under the same constraints. Just as a side benefit, can we open up the questioning of Bush to include his entire life from drug use to sexual dalliances in his “youth”, whether or not they have anything to do with 9-11? Not a deal breaker, but it sure would be a nice gesture of fair play.
Here Here, Uncle Beer
What a great idea. As a liberal it’s my wish that Clinton and Gore will eventually testify publicly under oath. They’ve got exactly nothing to hide. Hell, Clinton might even apologize for not taking care of al Qaeda before Bush took over.
The entire commission requested that Rice testify publicly. Do you have a citation that the same was requested of Clinton and that he refused?
I too would love to hear Clinton and Gore testify publicly, under oath, and separately. It would be much harder after that for the Bushites to blame it all on them, as Rice was valiantly trying to do.
But that’ll happen right after Bush and Cheney step forward and do the same thing, won’t it, Unc? Sheesh.
Considering that all accounts of Clinton’s meeting with the 9/11 had him praised for being “cooperative,” “forthcoming,” and “supportive,” I don’t think UncleBeer really wants to draw too many parallels between his meeting and Condi’;s meeting.
“(Clinton) made some recommendations he thought might be helpful to the country. He was generous with his time and thoughts. He held back on nothing.”
– Thomas Kean
“He answered all our questions, and he answered questions we didn’t ask.”
–Slade Gorton
Me too. I would LOVE to see Clinton testify. I am sick to death of this “blame Clinton” crap. As Jon Stewart said last night, “Does the buck stop ANYWHERE NEAR YOU?”
But he better lay off the “meaning of is” stuff. 
Nailed it in one, Desmo.
What really shows the failure of Rice’s approach, if you can even call it an approach, is the timeline of 9/11 itself. It appears that nobody’s expecting the Span…er, any sort of terrorist attack involving the hijacking of airplanes, even though the PDB, the Presidential Daily Briefing, warned about exactly that on August 6, even though the ‘chatter’ about a potential attack has been high all summer, even though the G-8 summit in July guarded against a terrorist attack by plane.
NORAD knew we had three hijacked planes by 8:43 a.m. on September 11, three minutes before the first plane flew into the North Tower. Excuse me, but even absent any warning, that should have rung the highest alarm bells; I don’t think we’d ever had two planes hijacked at the same time in US airspace, let alone three. But if the word had gone down that we were on high alert for an attack involving terrorist hijackings, I would presume that word of the hijackings would go to the top immediately - to the commander of NORAD, and from there to the Joint Chiefs, the National Security Advisor, and from there to the President.
Yet when the President finally did find out - not about the triple hijacking, but about the plane hitting the North Tower - while on the motorcade to Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, he seems to have thought it was an accident, not an attack. (This was about 8:50-8:55a.m.)
What’s clear is that Rice has not been laying the groundwork. NORAD doesn’t think “terrorists”, nor does the President. The President goes on with his classroom bit, emerging around 9:16 a.m. He may not be the most knowledgeable person in terms of dealing with such a threat, but he’s the one imbued with the power to make the key decisions: it isn’t clear, but it may well be that he’s the only one who, under Posse Comitatus (sp?), can authorize the military to shoot down a hijacked aircraft in US airspace. Flight 77 doesn’t crash into the Pentagon until 9:38 am.
While it’s iffy that anything could have been done once NORAD was aware of multiple hijackings, there was certainly the possibility of shooting down Flight 77 if the President, the National Security Advisor, and the CIA Director had gotten on a conference call within a few minutes of when NORAD got word of the third hijacking. A critical half-hour was lost because the threat awareness was low. Not only did nobody shake the trees in response to the terrorist threat; those who could have shook them seemingly were unaware of the threat.
She showed she’s an academic, an analyst and thinker, but not a doer. She has a staffer’s mentality, not the executive’s kind needed for the job. We already knew that. But Bush, as CEO, should have known better than to put someone with the wrong mentality in the job. Fred Kaplan artfully tears her a new one along those lines, but it still isn’t mainly her fault that she got put into an inappropriate position.
Everything she said Thursday about how urgent a priority she saw terrorism to be, and how she acted on that basis, is belied by the policy speech she had prepared for 9/11 - it got passing mention only so it could be dismissed, while the *North Korean missile threat * got her attention. That’s how this administration, run by Cold Warriors who couldn’t adjust their worldviews to the end of the Cold War, thought - in terms of identifying a single nation-state enemy, or “axis” of them, who the masses could be aroused against. We discussed that thoroughly last election season, too.
They’re still trying to fight “terrorism” as if it’s a country and a government. They still don’t get it, because they are constitutionally incapable of getting it. Good people, people better than they are, are going to keep getting killed as long as they’re in power.
What evidence is there that Bush is even a competant CEO? Everything we’re hearing from multiple source suggests that he’s so hands off as to raise the question of what he’s been doing with most of his time. He seems to have passed off a lot of duties to various people but then never checked up to find out if anyone was actually doing anything about them. And this pattern continues well after 9/11.
It’s only in hindsight that we know that likely nothing could have been done.
If someone threatens to shoot a woman if I don’t give them my wallet, and I don’t give them my wallet, it doesn’t excuse me to later find out that the gun wasn’t loaded if I had no reason to originally think that. The point is not whether or not we now know they could have done something useful: the point is whether or not their actions were reasonable and responsible.
This does not seem to have been an administration set up to handle crisis. They were used to having everything either be done for them, or for them to set the agenda and expect everyone else to follow along.
Well the same was said in regards to Dr. Rice’s private testimony. That didn’t bar anything.
So I say, lets put them ALL on public display. Bring in the TV cameras, the applauding, the dancing bears, the politicians, the trained monkeys, the over-zealous inquisitors - bring 'em all. If Clinton and Gore truly have nothing to hide and have already cooperated fully in private, well crap, they shouldn’t have any problem with doing that. No?