Rice ‘Falsely Testified’ Today on Pre-War WMD Intel, Says Wexler

Video Shows Heated Exchange Between Congressman and Secretary of State During This Morning's Hearing on Iraq in the U.S. House…

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In an incredibly heated exchange today during a U.S. House hearing (see video at left) Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) grilled Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice on whether she ever saw pre-war intelligence that countered the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In a statement just released by his office, Wexler says she “falsely testified” in response to his questions…

Secretary Rice Falsely Testified She Never Saw Intelligence Disputing Administration Claims that Iraq Possessed WMDs

(Washington, DC) Today, in reponse to questioning by Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) , Chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe and a senior member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice falsely claimed she never saw intelligence casting doubt on Administration claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of destruction. Numerous sources including the 2006 Senate Intelligence Report, a January 2004 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, as well as former CIA agents including Tyler Drumheller have pointed out that there was contrary intelligence to the information provided to the Bush Administration in the lead up to the Iraq war.

Congressman Wexler further questioned Secretary Rice on the over 900 false statements made by White House officials leading up to the war as recently reported by the Center for Public Integrity.

UPDATE 10:49pm PT: In an item posted by Wexler at dKos, covering this video, he adds a few notable details concerning his continuing quest for accountability in Congress:

I have been aggressively lobbying Members of Congress to support a vote on contempt, and I am thrilled to report that Speaker Pelosi told me directly that she agrees it is well past time to vote on contempt. I am anticipating that the House will shortly vote on resolutions of both civil and criminal contempt for both Miers and Bolten.

…and [emphasis in the original]…

No one should be immune from accountability and the rule of law.

Not Harriet Miers or Josh Bolten.

And especially not Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.

It is time to defend the Constitution and our rights as a co-equal branch of government.

…and…

I will continue to take on the Bush Administration for their outrageous abuses just as I confronted Condoleezza Rice today and Attorney General Mukasey last week. (Click here to see my questioning of Mukasey.)

With your help we will hold these top Bush officials in contempt and continue our efforts to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney.

What say we start movements for Wexler to be the new House majority whip, and Feingold as Senate majority leader? Works for me.

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Rice ‘Falsely Testified’ Today on Pre-War WMD Intel, Says Wexler

22 Comments

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22 Responses

  1. 1)
    Brandon said on 2/13/2008 @ 4:14pm PT: [Permalink]

    She’s just as bad of a liar as Bush and the rest of them. Of course they will hide behind their positions and “stay the course” as long as we let them. The fact is there WAS conflicting evidence, and it was never presented to the American people. Just like with vote fraud, just like with the Sibel Edmonds case, just like with Ron Paul’s presidency, just like with the Israel spy ring.

    Just like everything that means anything. They will pummel us with coverage of Heath Ledger, Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton, local crime, and all sorts of useless crap. All of it is meant to keep our eyes off the ball.

  2. 4)
    gregory said on 2/13/2008 @ 7:49pm PT: [Permalink]

    learning to ignore government is a good life lesson

    yes, they can cause a lot of damage, but removing attention from them is akin to removing power from them

    and, clearly, they are not worthy people, so why pay attention to them?

  3. 5)
    Ingemar Smith said on 2/13/2008 @ 8:13pm PT: [Permalink]

    Rice is a better liar than the rest of them. She keeps talking and keeps talking. The rules of the game dictate that there is only a limited amount of time that a Congressperson has to question. So just keep talking about the same thing and you can get away.

    This kind of thing is why they had to get rid of Cynthia McKinney. This very reason. She was much better at this than Wexler. Hell, she was the best in DC at this.

  4. 7)
    Pokey Anderson said on 2/13/2008 @ 11:27pm PT: [Permalink]

    I’ve never thought Rice was a very good liar. Just a persistent one.

    Reminds me of a recent review of a book by convicted election thief Allen Raymond. He was hired in a Republican scheme to jam phones of Democratic and neutral offices on election day in New Hampshire in 2002, during a very close Senate race.

    Allen Raymond: Confessions of a Republican Smear Artist
    by Joseph A. Palermo
    Huffington Post
    February 11, 2008
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/j...n_b_86039.html

    EXCERPT:

    Raymond also engaged in libel against his Democratic opponents. He twisted a female Democratic candidate’s legislative record. She had voted in favor of a mainstream sex education program in the public schools and had voted against a provision in another law that the teachers’ unions opposed. Raymond produced a 30-second TV ad that accused her of voting in favor of “teaching first-graders about condoms,” and claimed she had “voted to permit the sale of pornographic videos to children.” The attack ad also accused her of voting “to allow convicted drug abusers to work in our public schools.” (p. 105) She sued the Republican Party for $10 million for libel but she lost the election. A few years later a Republican judge tossed out her libel case. “When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals — the Dems weren’t even junior varsity,” Raymond writes. (p. 68)

    Raymond admits that he didn’t realize his activities were anything more than a game or a kind of elaborate joke played on a gullible electorate. It was not until he found himself sitting in a federal prison cell when he realized that the elections he had helped rig actually had real world consequences that affected real people. In short, Raymond was a supreme douche bag during his many years with the GOP. At one point in the book, after lamenting the current state of our nation’s politics, Raymond asks rhetorically: “How did we get here? Because election operatives like myself and the kind of politicians who hire us have ensured that idealists can’t win elections. Only the cynics are making the laws.” (p. 239)

    Raymond describes how the Bush Justice Department essentially obstructed justice by blocking Democratic attempts to depose New Hampshire Republican Party officials about Raymond’s illegal phone-jamming system. The Department of Justice under Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped the deposition “on the grounds that it would interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation.” In the years since 2002, that tactic — claiming no investigation can be conducted because it might interfere with an ongoing investigation — has become a Bush staple in covering up crimes ranging from the illegal use of torture and warrantless surveillance, to the leaking of a CIA agent’s identity and the disappearance of White House phone and email logs. It’s all spin; the fabled “permanent campaign” in operation.

    Although Raymond remains a staunch Republican, he admits that he didn’t learn until he was well over 40 that being a lying, rotten, unethical hatchet man might not be all that great. Surveying the members of the Bush Administration with whom he worked, Raymond concludes: “They lie when they’re in trouble, they lie when they’re safe; they lie when threatened, they lie when they are threatening; they lie about lies, they lie about lying about lies. And if they should happen upon some harmless, well-meaning little truth lying around, they beat it about the face and head until it looks like a lie, and wants to be a lie, and finally does become a lie. And people say there are no men of vision in Washington.” (pp. 225-226)

  5. 9)
    Russ Michaels said on 2/14/2008 @ 4:45am PT: [Permalink]

    Russ Michaels here, director of the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy”. I applaud Congressman Wexler and it’s important to remember the power of filmed testimony. Condolezza Rice certainly knows that she and others in the Bush administration suppressed crucial intelligence that contradicted their marketing of the Iraq war.

    Tyler Drumheller, one of the CIA’s chief officers in Europe finally spoke out against the White House in 2006 revealing that the CIA tried to bring intelligence from a Saddam Govt. insider who knew Iraq had no weapons program, but the Bush administration refused to allow this information. See Mr. Drumheller’s filmed testimony on ’60 Minutes’ here…

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/...n1527749.shtml

    (Drumheller interviewed by Ed Bradley of CBS)…

    Drumheller was the CIA’s top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn’t: ….”The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other,” says Drumheller. ….

    …. Meanwhile, the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.

    “This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about,” Drumheller says.

    “You knew you could trust this guy?” Bradley asked.

    “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” Drumheller replied.

    According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.

    At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”

    What did this high-level source tell him?

    “He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.

    “So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Bradley asked.

    “Yes,” Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.

    “It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us,” Bradley remarked.

    “The policy was set,” Drumheller says. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

  6. 10)
    Dredd said on 2/14/2008 @ 6:43am PT: [Permalink]

    It can be put many ways, but I would put it this way “If her lips are moving she is lying”.

    One journalist puts it this way in a nicer form but with the same meaning:

    Whadda you mean “we,” Mr. TV Pundit? When you say “we” are doing better in Iraq or, even more absurd, that “we” were right to invade that country in the first place, are you putting Joe Blow American in the same bag as the top officers of Exxon, which made $40.6 billion in profit last year thanks to the turmoil in the energy markets? That royal “we” is good for the royals who control our government, but its persistent use embodies a pernicious lie that betrays the core ideal of representative democracy.

    (Aboard The Condolezza, an oil tanker).

  7. 13)
    Karen said on 2/14/2008 @ 10:22am PT: [Permalink]

    She kept repeating the term “as a whole” she isn’t really saying that every intelligence agent or expert agreed with her assessment?

    I guess she is. Am I losing my memory or weren’t their times when the administration sited and attempted to debunk opposing views?

    There were so many and some experts resigned from the Bush administration in protest, surely she remembers.

    Here is one from the NY Times published 3/23/03.

    http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fu...50C0A9659C8B63

  8. 16)
    Craig R. Lane said on 2/14/2008 @ 12:55pm PT: [Permalink]

    This LYING b!#ch should look forward to being executed along with her co-horts at her War-crimes AND Treason trials. She is a liar and not smart enough to even be believable. “No one would have ever imagined someone taking an airplane and hitting a building with it”…”better that than the smoking gun being in the form of a mushroom cloud”. Yeah, I fully believe that Jane Harman can lick my ass when I say that Condi, George, Dick, John, Don, Paul, Richard, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Bremer, COLIN POWELL and Jane Harman as well, should ALL be tried and executed for treason, AT GUANTANAMO!~!!!

  9. 17)
    chabuka said on 2/14/2008 @ 2:48pm PT: [Permalink]

    She is an accomplished liar…I watched her lie to the 9/11 commission…wouldn’t answer direct question..went off on some sort of arrogant tirade about her “integrity” of which she has none, remember when she said they “didn’t have any idea that Al Queda would attack the U.S., a complete surprise” and then at the end she finally admitted that the PDB of August 2001, was the subject line “Al Queda determined to strike inside the United States”….

  10. 20)
    Ileen said on 2/14/2008 @ 5:50pm PT: [Permalink]

    A millionaire Dem with a grudge against Wexler is trying to unseat him and has loads of money for ads. Wexler is my rep and he truly represents me. Please contribute to his re-election so we can keep guys like him asking the questions and who don’t believe impeachment should be off the f’in table!!!!

  11. 21)
    Tom said on 2/16/2008 @ 1:04am PT: [Permalink]

    VIDEO: Condoleezza Rice: Liar, Secretary of State, War Criminal Part 1

    Wexler asks Rice, isn’t it true that you had intelligence that cast doubt on your repeated claims that Iraq did have WMD. It is worse than even how Wexler characterizes it. SEE PROOF, that the Bush Administration was committing fraud in order to fool the public into thinking Iraq had WMD. Spread the word. Send this link to others:
    http://representativepress.goog.../RiceLies.html

  12. 22)
    JJ said on 3/4/2008 @ 3:01pm PT: [Permalink]

    Did anyone notice that when Congress had the Oil Industry Executives before them, they refused to and were not sworn to tell the truth.

    But the baseball players were under oath?

    Does Madame Secretary have to swear to tell the truth also? Or can she dissemble to her hearts content?

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