… in disgrace — for lying and using the CIA, The British, and the FBI as her scapegoats
Nov. 27, 2006 — GENEVA (apj.us) — As this piece was about to go to press, the wire services reported that Philip Zelikow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's most senior adviser on Iraq, is tendering his resignation.
It's a pity that his boss is not doing the same. It's overdue — long overdue.
One wonders how former National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State Rice manages to keep her lies straight.
In fact, she does not — and now it truly is time that she resigns, with all due shame and humiliation — and perhaps hightail back Stanford where she might find use for her talent as a piano player, or back to Chevron Oil which could use her talented deceit now more than ever.
Let me make this clear enough for any Neoconservative moron to understand: Condoleezza Rice — along with Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft — is guilty of the crime called "misprision of a felony," which is allowing a felony to be committed with knowledge.
The crimes in question were the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
They are also guilty of murder at least in the second degree, and most likely in the first.
I hold Rice, her colleagues, and her staff absolutely culpable for killing three thousand of our soldiers and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, who have not seen one hour of peace since our ill-advised, based-in-lies invasion of that former dictatorship turned failed democracy.
Face the stark fact: the Iraqi people were far better off under the rule of the ruthless Saddam Hussein than they are now. All one need to do is ask the families — perhaps a million of them — who have been directly scarred by this crime, this war in Iraq which had nothing to do with the felony Miss Rice and her kind committed in July and August of 2001: ignoring George Tenet's CIA and instead going along with Cheney and the rest of these scum while they beat the honor out of Colin Powell and convinced our idiot-savant President that the war(s) were on and that we would cloak ourselves in some lunatic ideology that it was our job to police the earth and to build capitalistic democracies in all nations, especially those who dared to question our own motives.
Are we not ashamed of ourselves for allowing this cadre of liars to sucker us into believing what we are doing is the "American way"?
Have we no graciousness at all?
One always suspected that Condoleezza Rice was an obsessive, infatuated-with-the-White-House quasi-academic who came to Washington and sold out Colin Powell – and, in an even shoddier move, helped others do Powell in. But the latest revelations – not really news to any of us, but not better put into focus – recaptures our mistrust, and suspicious of Ms. Rice and her ilk; suspicions so terrible, so appalling that she has lost her ability to be taken even slightly seriously, on the national let alone the international diplomatic stage.
It is now clear that CIA Director Tenet warned Rice that American would be attacked directly after months of increased information from both the CIA and the FBI. Tenet went so far as to arrange an emergency meeting with Rice and others at the White House on July 10th, 2001 — sixty-two days before the catastrophe at the World Trade Center.
Not only was Rice informed — then, and before — that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations could use aircraft to crash into buildings, but so was Attorney General Ashcroft, aware through his stewardship of the FBI.
According to Philip Shenon of the New York Times, the 9/11 Commission was also told of this meeting, but it appears that the Chair, with or without cooperation from others, decided that revealing this at the time of their report would incite Americans to turn on the Bush Administration.
Why did the Commission hide these facts? Why were the Democrats on the Commission participant in this deceit?
Someone should press Mr. Richard Ben Veniste on this question.
It is not important whether George Tenet believed or did not believe that Ms. Rice ignored the warnings he issued on that day, July 10th, 2001 — although some Republicans are now rushing to say that even Tenet has never claimed this. Of course he wouldn't; he was still the head of the CIA and couldn't very well accuse the National Security Director of what amounts to a crime.
The fact is that Rice did nothing about it, and that fact is bolstered not only by her failure to act but also by the White House chief terrorist official, Richard Clarke, who also found deaf ears turned toward his warnings of impending disaster.
Rice claims that she did act, by requesting Director Tenet to present the facts to Donald Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, then the Attorney General. Ashcroft, no example of truth-telling himself, claims that Tenet never gave him such a briefing. This may or may not be true of the week following July 10th — but if not, it is perhaps because Tenet did not trust Ashcroft after he watched the circus Ashcroft produced to get Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas confirmed, including tales of then-Senator Ashcroft praying on a Senate men's room floor during the Thomas hearing during which the candidate was accused of sexual harassment by a trustworthy source. Ashcroft was at least partially deceitful here, because federal investigations since have revealed that he was definitely briefed by the CIA before September 11, 2001 yet he fails to mention this today.
Tenet and his tale of woe provide another proof that Rice is a pathological liar.
Recall her testifying that the CIA Director never told the White House not to tell the "Big Lie” that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them.
In fact, Mr. Tenet had told the White House to take the lies about nuclear weapons out of the president's October, 2001 speech in Cincinnati.
And then, there is of course the 2002 State of the Union address from a few months later, which contained language guaranteed to frighten and unify American voters against Saddam Hussein. There is more — much more, contained in the transcripts of Rice's frequent, sometimes stammering appearances before the press, sometimes in a news conference setting but more often in Washington's primary vehicle for dissemination of dissemblage, the DC bureau studios of network and cable news television.
Over the next few days, APJ will be posting excerpts from the transcripts of Rice's appearances, along with my comments documenting dishonesty that rises to a level that is breathtaking in its callousness and arrogance.
Her inaction — and her incessant dishonesty — are grounds for her resignation, and the sooner the better. Barring that, they may well prove grounds for Congressional sanction and, one could hope, perhaps even legal and criminal action.
Rice simply must go.
JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."