Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Read Rice's non-denial.

Believability

I already have information on Woodward's credibility. Too bad you missed the Left's furious attacks on him when he wasn't toeing the party line on Plame.

As for the rest, the media is unleashing a barrage that is coming from all directions, often containing odd contradictions. From the link I gave above:

In interviews Saturday and Sunday, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

"None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. "I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious."

Another Democratic commissioner, the former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting "was never mentioned to us."

"This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about," he said, referring to the meeting. "We asked broad questions which should have elicited this information."

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed "very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch" about terrorist threats before Sept. 11.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now counselor to the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House or described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said it was "entirely plausible" that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

"If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing," Mr. Zelikow said. "Repeatedly, Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings."


Now, this, from a later story:

A former intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Sept. 11 Commission and an earlier joint congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks were both informed of Tenet's and Black's meeting with Rice, when Tenet warned Rice that a significant attack was coming.

In a closed, classified session at CIA headquarters, Tenet told Sept. 11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, the commission's executive director Phil Zelikow and other commission staff about Rice's meeting with Tenet and Black, the official said.

The former intelligence official said the commission kept a transcript of that Jan. 28, 2004, session. A second official familiar with the document, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed its existence.


See my problem? Somebody's full of shit, here. The commissioners? The ever-popular "anonymous official?" What's your call?

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