Pants On Fire

Bush says his intelligence is naive:

The war in Iraq has become a 'cause celebre' for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach. [snip]

At a news conference, Bush said critics who believe the Iraq war has worsened terrorism are naive and mistaken, noting that al-Qaida and other groups have found inspiration to attack for more than a decade. "My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions," he said.

Condi has some problems, too:

Hillary Rodham Clinton hit back at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday as the political fighting escalated over which president — Bill Clinton or George W. Bush — missed more opportunities to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. [snip]

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post. [snip]

Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the company that owns Fox News Channel.

And maybe memory loss:

A memo received by United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shortly after becoming National Security Advisor in 2001 directly contradicts statements she made to reporters yesterday, "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice told a reporter for the New York Post on Monday. [snip]

However, RAW STORY has found that just five days after President George W. Bush was sworn into office, a memo from counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke to Rice included the 2000 document, "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects." This document devotes over 2 of its 13 pages of material to specifically addressing strategies for securing Pakistan's cooperation in airstrikes against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And there‘s this:

Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Dem on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the White House to release a second, previously publicly unknown national intelligence document that focuses solely on Iraq. Harman insisted there is a draft NIE that has not been revealed to the public.

And this:

Think Progress gives us the damning details of how Rice and her boss George Bush ignored Al Qaeda right before they killed 3,000 Americans.