Condi admitted they did nothing about the Cole bombing?

[maggrwaggr]

I did hear that right. I just checked the transcript. All the right-wingers screaming for blood back then, and now they're admitting they did NADA about the Cole bombing, for fear a response would "embolden" the terrorists.

Well what about not responding at all? Perhaps THAT emboldened them.

WTF??? Is she admitting they did nothing because they needed a LIHOP situation to really do what they wanted?

Anybody else really bothered by this?

THOMPSON: The Cole _ why didn't the Bush administration respond to the Cole?

RICE: (snip) ..... just responding to another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably embolden the terrorists. They had been emboldened by everything else that had been done to them. And that the best course was to look ahead to a more aggressive strategy against them.

I still believe to this day that the Al Qaida were prepared for a response to the Cole and that, as some of the intelligence suggested, bin Laden was intending to show that he yet survived another one, and that it might have been counterproductive.

THOMPSON: (snip) What if, in March of 2001, under your administration, Al Qaida had blown up another U.S. destroyer? What would you have done and what _ would that have been tit-for-tat?

RICE: I don't know what we would have done, but I do think that we were moving to a different concept that said that you had to hold at risk what they cared about, not just try and punish them, not just try to go after bin Laden.

{WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE TALKING ABOUT HERE?}

I would like to think that we might have come to an effective response. I think that in the context of war, when you're at war with somebody, it's not an issue of every battle or every skirmish; it's an issue of, can you do strategic damage to this organization? And we were thinking much more along the lines of strategic damage.

THOMPSON: (snip) But blowing up our destroyers is an act of war against us, is it not? I mean, how long would that have to go on before we would respond with an act of war?

RICE: We'd had several acts of war committed against us. And I think we believed that responding kind of tit-for-tat, probably with inadequate military options because, for all the plans that might have been looked at by the Pentagon or on the shelf, they were not connected to a political policy that was going to change the circumstances of Al Qaida and the Taliban and therefore the relationship to Pakistan.

Look, it can be debated as to whether or not one should have responded to the Cole. I think that we really believed that an inadequate response was simply going to embolden them. And I think you've heard that from Secretary Rumsfeld as well, and I believe we felt very strongly that way.


{{{We felt very strongly that we should do NOTHING? THIS STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN FOLKS.

Rummy: Hm, let's do nothing about the Cole, and perhaps the NEXT attack will be on American soil and we can finally get that Iraq invasion off the ground.

Sorry folks, but I smell a BIG DIRTY RAT here.}}}