You gotta wonder sometimes why the Bush administration decides to lie about stuff that they just don’t need to lie about. Two particular stories in the news today highlight the risks of becoming Guy Focker (though the Bush admin hasn’t had to pay any consequences…). First, it looks like Richard Clarke was 100% honest when he went in front of the 9/11 Commission. Unsurprisingly, Condoleezza Rice lied. A declassified memo was released today. Written by Clarke on January 25, 2001, he lays out the case for going after al Qaeda directly and in a multi-regional strategy. The memo itself is available at the National Security Archive at GWU. You can follow the first link above to get the background and excerpts from the relevant testimony.

Second, it turns out that she lied again when she said no one had considered people flying planes into buildings. In fact, people had.

In both of these cases, the lies themselves are only part of the point. The underlying issue is why lie about these things? I can’t for the life of me understand why the administration had to lie about these issues. No blame would’ve been directed at the administration for 9/11. None. At worst, the administration had perspectives inside that contained different viewpoints that disagreed about the threat of domestic attacks. It’s just nuts to me.

The only think I can think of is that the administration didn’t want to appear as if they missed anything and wanted to further the idea that the Clinton administration did nothing, and as such left the Bush administration with no foundation to start from… something that is patently false, as the memos begin to show. Could both administrations have done more or done more differently? Sure. Hindsight is great that way. It’s also unfair, and I think most everyone recognizes that.