Reply #88: Here's My LTTE

[TexasLawyer]

They ran the same editorial in the Houston Chronicle.

Re: In Boxer-Rice Smackdown, Democrats Got the Black Eye
By Michael Goodwin, Houston, Chronicle, Jan. 19, 2005

Contrary to Mr. Goodwin’s editorial, Barbara Boxer’s tough questioning of Condoleeza Rice during Dr. Rice’s confirmation hearings was neither childish nor embarrassing. If anything, the other senators should be faulted for blithely giving Dr. Rice a pass on her disastrous performance as national security advisor.

Dr. Rice was one of the primary administration cheerleaders for this country’s preemptive attack on Iraq. Her warning that the “smoking gun” proving that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD “might be a mushroom cloud” was a scare tactic intentionally used to hype the Iraq War and to counter critics who correctly pointed out that Saddam posed no real danger to the U.S. Dr. Rice knew full well that intercepted aluminum tubes, which she cited on CNN as “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” had non-nuclear uses, and that a large amount of countervailing evidence showed that Iraq had no current nuclear capabilities. She was also well aware that Iraq had not threatened any neighboring country for over a decade. Even worse, despite knowing full well that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 World Trade Tower tragedy, Dr. Rice nonetheless fed the public’s misperception that there was indeed a connection.


Thanks in large part to Dr. Rice’s crisis-mongering, this country is now mired in a war that is, and always has been, based on lies and half-truths. Not a good track record for Dr. Rice to lay before the Senate. It is peculiar, then, for Mr. Goodwin to criticize Senator Boxer, whose job it is to examine Dr. Rice’s fitness for the new post of Secretary of State, for daring to hold Dr. Rice accountable for her grievous failures as national security advisor. But then again, considering that George “slam dunk” Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom despite his rendering of fatally flawed WMD intelligence, these are peculiar times.