Condoleezza Rice on 'Meet the Press' yesterday: "But the fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done and we would try to defend ourselves.

Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East. And there is no one who could have imagined a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power."


Oops. Did she mean to tell the truth on 'Meet the Press', or did it just slip out? I think reporters from every corner of the country should be pressing Bush 24/7 to respond to this comment. There is no mention above of WMDs, there is no mention of an "immanent threat" - because there never was WMDs, there never was an immanent threat. And no one in the white house or the CIA ever thought for a second there actually was.


Condi again on 01/10/03: "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Ari Fleisher on 4/10/03: "But make no mistake -- as I said earlier -- we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found."