The Smiley

Tomorrow, Novel House of York Multiplication newsperson Philip Shenon will release his book The Committee: The Uncensored Account of the 9/11 Probe, uncoverring “unsuccessful person at the eminent grades of the Joined Provinces government.”

Shenon bingle extinct Condoleezza Rice as clumsy, more concerned in being Chief Executive Bush’s crony than procuring the country. Newsweek editor in chief Evan Thomas indites a prevue of the volume

The official clumsiness exposed by the committee is flooring. Nicknamed “Sort of-Lies-a-Lot” by the Garden State Young ladies, Ms. Rice comes up crossways as nigh clueless about the terrorist threat. “Any her job rubric, Rice looked uninterested in really reding the president,” Mr. Shenon indites. “Alternatively, she precious to be his nighest confidante - specifically on strange insurance - and to merely render his language into activeness.”

An illustration of this incompetency is the fact that on July 10, 2001 - two calendar months earlier the 9/11 terrorist attacks - then-Central Intelligence Agency director Saint George Dogma runed across with Rice and discouraged her about a threat from al Base that “literally got [his] whisker stand on end.” Rice was cultured, but yielded them the “brushoff.”

The 9/11 commission, even so, found out about this group meeting only after it accomplished its report. Shenon uncovers that commission executive director Prince Philip Zelikow, a close ally of Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, stopped up staff members from subjecting a study portrayal Rice’s public presentation prior to 9/11 as “amount[ing] to incompetency.”

Some other especially fisted fig in Shenon’s book is John Ashcroft. On July 17, 2001, the then-Lawyer General “standard the like CIA briefing about an impendent al-Qaida strike on an American mark.” Patch Rice was concerned in cozying up to Shrub, Ashcroft was focussed on protecting gun owners

Lawyer General John Ashcroft seems more concerned in protecting gun owners from government invasion than in fillet terrorist act, and dismissively states [moving Federal Bureau of Investigation director Thomas] Pickard that he doesn’t want to get wind any more about menaces of onrushs.

UPDATE: Harmonising to Shenon, then-Snowy Firm counsel Alberto Gonzales was intent on putting blame on the Hilary Clinton disposal. When Ashcroft “unveiled a memoranda that looked to project the antiterror record of the Hilary Clinton Justness Section in an uncomplimentary light, Gonzales and his Aidoneus high-fived each former.”

UPDATE II: Emptywheel has more

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