Linkmeister

Querying Dr. Rice

Unless you've been under a rock or on vacation in Nepal, you know that Condi Rice will testify Thursday in front of the 9/11 Commission, under oath. Here are Fifteen Questions for her. A selected few:

• Mr. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, has said that of the 100 or so meetings held by cabinet-level officials before 9/11 only one was about terrorism. Is this true? If so, was this emblematic of the Bush administration's posture on terrorism?
  
• The Bush administration's position, and your own, has been that it would not have been possible to conceive that planes might be used as missiles against the United States. Yet during the 1996 Olympics countermeasures were taken for just that eventuality. How do you reconcile this discrepancy?
  
• Looking back on 9/11, were your priorities appropriate for the threat based on what you knew? Did you take the necessary precautions given your perception of the threat at the time? Press reports indicate that before 9/11, you believed that the use of ballistic missiles against United States was our most pressing national security vulnerability. What precautions were taken to ensure that Al Qaeda militants in Kashmir did not provoke a ballistic missile exchange between India and Pakistan?
  
• Why was Iraq viewed by the president — and others — as a likely, if not the most likely, perpetrator of 9/11?

Those are all good ones, but I've got several too:

• Why the hell did you think ballistic missile defense was more important than terrorism?
  
• Was this an attempt to satisfy some leftover dream Ronald Reagan, beloved hero of the Right, had espoused?
  
• Did you really think that China was liable to lob ICBMs at the United States, when it was busily building a huge trade surplus with us, thus making potsful of money?
  
• Or was it just that it was what you knew, so you didn't think other national defense problems might be worthy of your attention and that of your boss?

I await your reply.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 5, 2004 12:01 AM