Does anyone hear where she said "go to hell"? (VIDEO BELOW) Now now, Condi.
Over 5,000 soldiers' lives, countless Iraqis (we don't count them) and $5 trillion of your tax money later, Condi still has the nerve to get up in front of a classroom and lecture on human rights. Still waiting for the media to pick up on the biggest lie of all, only discovered when someone in the White House accidentally sent author Vincent Bugliosi the classified version of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the unclassified version of which Bush gave to Congress to convince them we had to go to war in Iraq. Bugliosi started comparing the classified and unclassified versions side by side, and he says his jaw dropped.
The famed prosecutor who put Charles Manson away Bugliosi writes:
According to the October 1, 2002 NIE, “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war.” The report concluded that Hussein was not planning to use any weapons of mass destruction; further, Hussein would only use weapons of mass destruction he was believed to have if he were first attacked, that is, he would only use them in self-defense.
That's the part the Bush White House cut out in the version he gave to Congress. No, Congress was not "looking at the same intelligence," a favorite Bush apologist talking point. Bugliosi is still looking for a DA anywhere in the country who will convene a grand jury so he can prosecute George Bush for murder. Bugliosi swears once he is in the courtroom making his case, Bush is toast.
For more fun here is a partial transcript of recent exchange with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell:
O’DONNELL: Now, about the mushroom cloud that you were completely wrong about, would you say that was possibly the single worst misstatement by a national security adviser publicly?
RICE: I said that we could not afford to have it be a mushroom cloud that told us --
O’DONNELL: Where did you think that mushroom cloud would be?
RICE: Lawrence, you have a bad habit with your guests. You never let them answer a question.
O’DONNELL: Go ahead. Where would the mushroom cloud be?
RICE: Thank you. The question was had Saddam Hussein actually reconstituted his nuclear weapons or was he trying to? And if you look at the intelligence reporting at the time, it said that he could possibly reconstitute that nuclear capability within a year with foreign assistance, and that he was trying to do it. What I said --
O’DONNELL: But all that was wrong. He couldn’t have reconstituted anything in a year. We know -- why recite things that we know were wrong and have been proven wrong?
RICE: Because what you know today can affect what you do tomorrow. But what you know today cannot affect what you did yesterday. So at the time, we didn’t know that he had not reconstituted. The intelligence said that he was reconstituting, that he was reconstituting his nuclear program.
He had reconstituted his biological and chemical program. He was shooting at our aircraft. He was a threat to international peace and security. He had been sanctioned by the U.N. 17 times on that course. He was a threat.
O’DONNELL: The aluminum tubes that you said were used exclusively -- exclusively for nuclear weapons obviously were not. They were the kind of tubes that were used for rockets. That kind of -- when you say that intelligence indicated that, your White house was using intelligence incorrectly. You were misstating what the intelligence actually was.
RICE: Lawrence, we can do this one way or another, OK? You can let me answer your questions, or you can make rhetorical statements.
O’DONNELL: Let’s talk about the aluminum tubes that you were so wrong about. That’s one of the things you like to use as an indication of what the intelligence was telling you. But the White House was misinterpreting the intelligence.
RICE: No, no, no. This was not the White House misinterpreting anything. The director of the CIA briefed the Congress that those aluminum tubes were most likely for nuclear capability.
O’DONNELL: You said exclusively.
RICE: We believed that the nuclear -- that the tubes, given Saddam Hussein’s history, given the long trail of what he was trying to acquire, were for nuclear weapons.
Now, you’re right. The intelligence turned out to have been wrong. But, you know, you don’t get to get up in the morning and say, you know, my intelligence might be wrong. You have to act on the intelligence that you have. And that’s the intelligence that we had at the time.
O’DONNELL: When you look at what we now are calling the Arab spring and you look at these uprisings against the dictators in the region, would have been better now -- knowing what we all know now, would it have been better to have waited and let history catch up with Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Do you think we might have a similar uprising in Iraq today?
RICE: Saddam Hussein was a threat, and we dealt with the threat. We didn’t go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than dealing with Adolph Hitler was to bring democracy to Germany. But once there, we felt that we had to help the Iraqi people to get to democracy.
$5 trillion for the Iraq War alone is around $50,000 for every American family. What would you be doing with that money right now?