POST SCRIPTS

How right you were section9…but we didn’t have to wait for the hearings. As reported today in the AP story “Tenet Faces Backlash Over Memoir” by Katherine Shrader, Secretary Rice had quite a few things to say on the subject:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday disputed Tenet's claim that the Bush administration, before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, never had a serious debate about whether Iraq posed an imminent threat or whether to tighten existing sanctions.practically on the day that he took power about how to enhance sanctions against Iraq,” she said. “You may remember that in his first press conference, he said the sanctions had become Swiss cheese.” **** Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser in his first term, said the administration reviewed the sanctions, went to the United Nations to strengthen them and tried to tighten the no-fly zone in northern Iraq to better police Saddam Hussein's forces. **** She also said the question about the imminence of the threat was not ``if somebody is going to strike tomorrow.'' **** “It's whether you believe you're in a stronger position today to deal with the threat, or whether you're going to be in a stronger position tomorrow,” she said. “And it was the president's assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse.”