Buck Stops With CIA, Not Administration - Helen Thomas

[Khephra]

Buck Stops With CIA, Not Administration
Agency Outraged At David Kay's Recent 'Premature' Assessment

POSTED: 6:37 p.m. EST January 30, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The nation's capital is still reeling from the firestorm set off by retired weapons inspector David A. Kay after he fingered faulty U.S. intelligence for the now-discredited White House claim that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

His targeted culprit, the CIA, is outraged over the Kay attack.

President Bush told reporters that he wants to know "the facts" about intelligence failures concerning Saddam's alleged arsenal but he's not curious enough to endorse an independent commission inquiry that Kay recommended. Instead, Bush said he wants the weapons hunters to keep looking.

Condoleeza Rice, the president's national security adviser, wants us to move on. It doesn't matter if there were no weapons, she says.

more....................

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/2807748/detail.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. It doesn't matter? It doesn't matter?

Dr. Rice is full of it. The whole point of going to war was the WMDs. The fact that she now says it doesn't matter just proves the point that they were merely an excuse for the neocons to do what they wanted to do.

[salin]

2. are her comments ludicrous - or what?

from the Thomas piece:
In a damage-control move, national security affairs adviser Rice made the rounds of the television networks in an effort to blunt Kay's electrifying charges. Rice has invented a way to push the missing WMD aside. She says it doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein had those weapons.

Instead, she argues that Bush "had no choice but to deal with that gathering threat to American interests and to the interests of our friends abroad."

Okay - the weapons didn't matter... but saddam was a gathering threat... er without the weapons... without an act of aggression since putting down the US inspired rebellion just after the GulfWar I... with no connection to alqeada... if it wasn't the touted wmds.. what was the "gathering threat"?