It's Condi-tional
Two comments on Rice's testimony worth noting: Brad DeLong excerpts the passage in which our national security adviser declares that a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States" did "not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States." This is the memo that the Bush administration has steadfastly refused to declassify.
And Gary Wolf dives into the thicket of Rice's multiple-passive-voiced, conditional-subjunctive avoidance mechanisms to try to untangle her evasions.What Rice said: "If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something... I would have been expected to be asked to do it." What emerges from Wolf's "Double Whammer Grammer Jammer": "If I needed to do something, somebody would have asked."
As Wolf says: "After this reformulation, no further clarifications are possible without altering the meaning. The passivity of the statement is no longer an artifact of awkward grammar, but an expression of Dr. Rice's state of mind. She did not take action because she was not asked. This is exactly the passivity that Richard Clark complains of in his book."
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