http://www.ofrankenfactor.com/
CONDI RICE AND THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING TASK FORCE by Ben Wikler and Tim Bradley
4/8/2004 at 20:05
In her testimony before the 9/11 Commission today, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice defended the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 record by referring, on two occasions, to a task force headed by Vice President Cheney that was to review all of the recommendations for domestic preparedness in the event of an attack on the US. She said:
The vice president was, a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by the president to put together a group to look at all of the recommendations that had been made about domestic preparedness and all of the questions associated with that; to take the Gilmore report and the Hart-Rudman report and so forth and to try to make recommendations about what might have been done.
And again, Cheney’s comprehensive task force:
Now, the vice president was asked by the president, and that was tasked in May, to put all of this together and to see if he could put together, from all of the recommendations, a program for protection of the homeland against WMD, what else needed to be done.
Ms. Rice is correct about Cheney’s mission. President Bush announced the Cheney-led homeland-security task force on May 8, 2001. Moreover, Bush announced that "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Cheney would run the task force, and Bush would review its conclusions.
One thing that Rice left out, though: the task force never met.
As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in 2002:
“Neither Cheney’s review nor Bush’s took place.”
Michael Elliott of Time Magazine reported the same thing:
“MAY 8: Bush creates a new Office of National Preparedness for terrorism and promises a government review, led by Dick Cheney, into the consequences of a domestic attack. It never happens.”
Rice was testifying under oath. She didn’t claim that it met, so she did not technically perjure herself—but she was being dishonest. And it’s clear that she knew what she was doing: saying that Cheney was "tasked by the president" without mentioning that Cheney didn’t follow through is an artful way of giving the false impression of focus and activity.
The 9/11 commissioners should have called her on it. But they shouldn’t have had to. Rice’s testimony was another deliberate attempt to mislead the public and cover up the Bush administration’s miserable record in fighting terror before the 9/11 attacks.
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Tom Beck
my LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/tomfodw/
"I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I'd see the last." - Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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