Questions For Condi

I missed Wolf Blitzer's grilling but thought George S. on ABC did merely a so-so job of getting her off message and actually answering the many questions raised by the NYT article.

1. The ever-changing number of troops that are "trained" or "fully trained" or "kinda trained" is getting absurd. These people [Condi, Cheney, Bush]should be unable to walk out their doors without being hounded with questions about a definitive answer on this question and then immediately pounded with questions about why so many of them contradict each other and the Defense Department. To go from 200,000 to 130,000 to 100,000 when the DD is testifying to Congress that it's really about 50,000 and only 9,000 of those are fully trained (surely the only standard that matters if you're going to be asking them to wage a war) is ridiculous.

2. Condi was aware of the debate but not aware of its nature? Why the hell not?

3. More to the point: what debate? There was no debate. When every expert you speak to -- our top nuclear scientists, the State Department, commissions, all our overseas allies, etc. -- says the tubes are NOT useful for centrifuges and ONE LONE minor CIA guy says they are, that's not a debate. That's a CONSENSUS. There was NO debate. Everyone told them these tubes were for firing rockets. They ignored that, seized on the one person who would tell them what they wanted to hear and went to the American public and the world and stated flatly without caveat that this was our trump card -- tubes used only for nuclear bomb building. I remember Condi saying watch out for the mushroom cloud on national TV. And I took her seriously. And she lied.

4. If she didn't lie, she was misled. Who misled her, who has been fired and when will they be brought up on charges for endangering national security on lies?