Monday, March 22, 2004

Mendacity

There's a lot in Condi the Liar's defense that deserves to be criticized. I'm not sure if there's a true word in it, including 'a' and 'the,' but I was struck by this part:

Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to free U.S.-held terrorists.




This echoes her previous statement about this:

I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people…would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.


They may not have had specific intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack using airplanes as missiles. But, she switches mid-sentence between "evidence" and "speculation," implying that no analysts had even "speculated" that hijacked planes could be used as weapons, which is of course completely false. Bob Somerby reminds us:

WOODWARD AND EGGEN: But a 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, warned that terrorists associated with bin Laden might hijack an airplane and crash it into the Pentagon, White House or CIA headquarters.
The report recounts well-known case studies of similar plots, including a 1995 plan by al Qaeda operatives to hijack and crash a dozen U.S. airliners in the South Pacific and pilot a light aircraft into Langley.

“Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House,” the September 1999 report said.