Feinstein Takes A Dive For Rice

[MSgt213]

Here's one good reason why grassroots Democrats get fed up with their supposed leaders in Washington: Senator Diane Feinstein.

All Democrats expect George W. Bush to ignore the WMD scandal and refuse to acknowledge that he misled the nation and the world regarding those (nonexistent) WMDs in Iraq. They expect his aides to do the same. They expect the rightwing media to protect Bush and peddle whatever spin they can so Bush and they face no consequences for their false prewar assertions. Democrats also have become accustomed to the fact that many in the mainstream press will not push this issue. But to see a prominent Democrat in Washington give Bush and his crew a total pass for having rigged the case for war--now that should be hard for beyond-the-Beltway Democrats to swallow.

That's precisely what Feinstein did at the confirmation hearings of Condoleezza Rice, Bush's pick to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state. This is an appointment the Democrats should rip into. As national security adviser, Rice shared responsibility for crafting the administration's phony argument for war in Iraq. As we know now, practically everything the Bushies--including Rice--said about Iraq's WMDs before the war was wrong. For example, Rice claimed that Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes to use in a program to develop a nuclear bomb. That was not true. And at the time, analysts in the State Department and Energy Department argued that the skimpy evidence did not support this conclusion. Yet Rice refused to admit there were doubts and claimed the case was rock-solid. She also made statements that created the impression that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda. (The independent 9/11 commission and the CIA say there is no evidence of such an alliance.) Rice, too, was at the center of Nigergate. And the White House conceded she had not bothered to read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq--the intelligence community's summation of the available evidence. Rice also failed to make sure that the Bush White House engaged in adequate planning for the economic, security, political and social challenges the United States would face in Iraq after the invasion. She misled the public about the intelligence briefing on al Qaeda that Bush received on August 8, 2001. She dismissed the briefing as merely an "analytic report," when it warned that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the United States. By the way, according to former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, she paid insufficient attention to his warnings about al Qaeda prior to September 11.

This is not a stellar record. And the Bush administration's brazen distortion of the prewar WMD intelligence has been (somewhat) in the news of late since the Washington Post last week revealed that the administration quietly shut down the WMD hunt shortly before Christmas. But it was as if Feinstein has been on a different planet these past few years.

http://www.davidcorn.com/

[xchrom]

1. she's my senator -- and she is so frustrating!

what can you do -- she is so tied into ''big money'' -- she is immune to the criticism from small folks.

she has causes -- i.e. choice and the environment that give her cover -- but on issues like these, she sells out completely.