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Slipped her mind Condi on the Hot SeatBy Rick Horowitz
He can tell she's in trouble. He's a Sunday-morning news-show junkie; his weekends feel empty unless he's spent a couple of hours watching the latest gaggle of newsmakers and spinmeisters tiptoeing their way through the media minefield. So he tunes in, and listens hard to the questions -- and even harder to the answers. But he also keeps an eye out for the atmospherics. Which is how he knows she's in trouble: Condi's on with Tim, and they're not talking football. When Condi's on with Tim and things are fine, they often spend the last minute or two in gridiron chatter. Condi has said -- he's heard her say it -- that she'd love to be commissioner of the NFL someday. And Tim's got his beloved Buffalo Bills. So they'll talk football; Tim will have her scope out the day's action, or predict which teams will make it to the Super Bowl, or -- But not this week. Tim is all business this week. (He notices these things.) He could point to other signs if he wanted to. Plenty of other signs. There's that report due out any day on the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; Condi and her bunch have been touting it for weeks. The word now, though, is that it'll say we still haven't come up with any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That's getting harder for anyone, even Condi, to explain. There's also the letter from Capitol Hill, from the top-ranking Republican and the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, criticizing our intelligence agencies for using fragmentary and outdated information to build the case for war with Iraq in the first place. Then there's the mystery of who leaked the name of that undercover CIA officer. The officer's husband, a former ambassador, had looked into Iraq's efforts to acquire nuclear materials from Africa, and had then told the administration -- months before the president's notorious State of the Union speech -- that the evidence was highly suspect. He's been a thorn in their side ever since. Intimidation? Revenge? Revealing an undercover officer's name can be dangerous to her health, and to her contacts. It can also be a crime. Condi's bunch have seemed remarkably nonchalant about getting to the bottom of things, and now they've got a little firestorm on their hands. Then there's all the congressional sniping, from both sides of the aisle, over the administration's request for another $87 billion to get Iraq back on its feet. And that's even before the stories broke about this new Washington consulting firm filled with former Bush insiders, pitching their "skills and experience" (which is to say, "connections and access"), and ready -- for a fee, of course -- to help other companies grab a piece of the reconstruction action. Why should Halliburton and Bechtel be the only ones with an inside track? Meanwhile -- he can hardly overlook this, can he? -- Iraq's electricity is still chancy and our soldiers keep dying and nobody's found Saddam Hussein yet, let alone Osama bin Laden. So maybe it's not a football kind of mood. But that's not the only way he can tell Condi's in trouble. Here's the other way: She's come down with a case of the forgetfuls. Tim asks her how the yellow-cake-from-Niger claim, removed from an earlier presidential speech after CIA director George Tenet personally intervened, somehow got back into the State of the Union speech. "It's not a matter of getting back in," she tells him. "It's a matter, Tim, that three-plus months later, people didn't remember that George Tenet had asked that it be taken out of the Cincinnati speech and then it was cleared by the agency. I didn't remember. Steve Hadley didn't remember. We are trying to put now in place methods so you don't have to be dependent on people's memories for something like that." Iraq. Nuclear materials. It's the sort of subject that would certainly stick in his mind. But she says she didn't remember. What about the memos?, Tim asks her. Steve Hadley, her top deputy, has said he received two CIA memos late last year casting doubt on the yellow cake stories, and that one of the memos was also sent to her. "Did you ever read the memo?" Tim wants to know. "I don't remember the memo," Condi says. It came, she explains, after the yellow cake reference had already been pulled from the earlier speech, "so it's quite possible that I didn't." He liked it better when Condi and Tim could talk football. Posted 9/30/03. Get
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Rick Horowitz
