Condi Rice the next under the WMD scandal microscope

The Washington Post has an interesting article on National Secuity advisor Condoleezza Rice. She's being asked the same question we've wondered about President Bush in recent months: Is Condi Rice incompent or a liar?

She's long claimed not to have seen the CIA warnings about the authenticity of the claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Yet it was her job to know everything about Iraq's nuclear aspirations and the CIA doubts were sent along to her White House office. They were even included in some blunt footnotes in an official report. It's hard to believe that Rice overlooked all this and that she wouldn't have had her aides confirm the Niger intelligence before passing it along to the President. She's too smart for that.

Last week one of her advisors Stephen J. Hadley claimed responsibility for the Niger scandal but like the former responsibility claim of the CIA's George Tenet, it felt wrong. The CIA did warn the White House and Hadley wasn't the one ultimately responsible for knowing the intelligence.

The question of "Who knew what and when" keeps going up the chain of command. Condi Rice is the next administration official to go under the microscope. Colin Powell and Dick Cheney are next. And soon enough it will be the President himself. It's almost certain that he was the one who gave the orders to fudge intelligence to implicate Iraq.