Iraq Flap Shakes Rice's Image (washingtonpost.com): "remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.
Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt.
'If Condi didn't know the exact state of intel on Saddam's nuclear programs . . . she wasn't doing her job,' said Brookings Institution foreign policy specialist Michael E. O'Hanlon. 'This was foreign policy priority number one for the administration last summer, so the claim that someone else should have done her homework for her is unconvincing.'"

She won't resign and Bush won't ask her to. What's that about? Bush has been embarrased in front of the whole world, and she is clearly a party to it. So why doesn't she take responsibility for her failure? I suspect it is because she did exactly what Bush asked her to do. If that is so, then he's covering up for her, just as she is covering up for him. What a lousy can of worms of a government.
- posted by geoff @ #