"USS Cole commander: 'Following that attack, there was no response' to al-Qaida"MS. RICE: Yes, the Cole had happened. We received, I think, on January 25th the same assessment or roughly the same assessment of who was responsible for the Cole that Sandy Berger talked to you about. It was preliminary. It was not clear. But that was not the reason that we felt that we did not want to, quote, "respond to the Cole. …We simply believed that the best approach was to put in place a plan that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond to it, tit-for-tat."
The USS Cole happened three weeks before the 2000 election and as the historical record clearly shows; Bush came into office and he and his severely incompetent National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, just didn't want to be bothered by the threat of al-Qaida.
Those history books have been written.
"In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them."
Wow, she was our National Security Advisor and she needed Dick Clarke to draw her a picture. She'd make a great VP for the Etch A Sketch Boy. She could shore up his alarmingly weak foreign policy experience.
