- Last July, the Washington Post devoted much of its front-page
to a well-reported story indicting National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice for her role in misleading Congress and the public in the run- up
to the Iraq war. The bottom line: Rice was either incompetent or a liar.
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- Even sources described as "generally sympathetic"
to the NSC adviser questioned her many shifting and contradictory statements
regarding Iraq's alleged uranium purchase and the WMD (non)threat. But
Rice's dogged loyalty to Bush served her well, and she stayed put.
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- In August, barely noticed during the campaign, former
chief weapons inspector David Kay went before Congress and in impassioned
testimony spent most of his time faulting Rice for botching intelligence
information before the war. Kay's remarks reflected a widespread view among
intelligence specialists that Rice and the NSC have never been held sufficiently
accountable for intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks and the invasion
of Iraq.
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- Bush's nomination of Rice to replace Colin Powell as
Secretary of State today is just another sign of how this Administration
continues to define failure down. As even the Washington Post's lead editorial
this morning acknowledged: "...It is a measure of the stunning absence
of accountability under Mr. Bush that it is Mr. Powell who leaves, while
the architects of the failed and even disastrous policies [Powell] opposed,
from postwar Iraq to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, remain in office."
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