Openly Gay Amb. Who Resigned Under Bush: State Dept. May Establish Same-Sex Benefits Within Weeks
Openly Gay Amb. Who Resigned Under Bush: State Dept. May Establish Same-Sex Benefits Within Weeks
Last week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) introduced the two-year Foreign Relations Authorization Act. One of the provisions he included was to end the workplace discrimination against gay State Department employees, whose partners are excluded from the benefits provided to spouses and children of officers serving abroad. Here is the language from the legislation (right).
However, yesterday, Berman dropped the provision. He explained that he struck it because he felt “confident that this would be taken care of by the Administration.” According to an e-mail sent by an LGBT community leader who was familiar with yesterday’s proceedings, Berman received a call from John Berry, head of the Office of Personnel Management, who promised that the benefits issue would be addressed through regulatory changes.
Another person who spoke with Berman before yesterday’s hearings was Amb. Michael Guest, the first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. ambassador and a strong advocate for expanding partner benefits — such as medical access and security training. In 2007, Guest resigned because he was frustrated by the State Department’s unwillingness to redress the discrimination against LGBT employees. Today, ThinkProgress spoke with Guest, who said that he believed there would be changes for LGBT employees at the State Department within weeks:
GUEST: So when I went to the hearing and he [Berman] asked me in advance to come back, he explained communications that he had had that led him to believe that there was every expectation that there will be movement. And I take him at his word and have to assume that he would not have been told the things that he’s been told without them being true. So I’m quite confident that there will be action and I simply hope that it will be very soon.
Q: Did you get a sense of the timeline at all? Would it be the next year, the next few months, weeks even?
GUEST: I think on the latter end. I think it will be more in the question of weeks, certainly not years. I mean, if it were a question of years, I would have pushed back because I feel for the gay and lesbian foreign service officers who are about to enter the transfer season.
Guest added that he never felt any discrimination while working at the State Department and believes that employees there would have no problem with benefits being extended to same-sex partners. Indeed, a poll earlier this year found that 71 percent of foreign service officers support “official recognition and benefits for same-sex domestic partners of Foreign Service members.”
Guest expressed frustration at former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s lack of willingness to do anything on this issue:
GUEST: [C]ertainly in terms of leadership skills, I found her lacking. She spoke very frequently about discrimination she witnessed as a child, and I don’t want to take away from that at all. [...]
But I don’t understand how she couldn’t see that this was also an issue of discrimination. She really was not attached to the building, she had a very small circle of people around her, and she served up the President. She didn’t act as the leader that the State Department needed for its workforce.
Guest also said that the Obama administration’s movements on LGBT issues so far has been “pretty sparse.” “That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working on say, economic stimulus and ending the war — those are important issues for all Americans,” said Guest. “But the President himself has said, ‘Hey, we can do more than one thing at once.’ And I don’t accept that we can’t move forward on this area.” Listen to portions of ThinkProgress’s interview with Guest here:
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Gonzales And Ashcroft Disagree With Rice: Just Because A President Says It Does Not Make It Legal
Gonzales And Ashcroft Disagree With Rice: Just Because A President Says It Does Not Make It Legal
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently tried to defend the Bush administration’s torture program in a discussion with a group of Stanford students on April 27. Channeling Richard Nixon, Rice said that “by definition,” once the president authorized “enhanced interrogations,” they were automatically legal:
Q: Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?
RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
Today, Dan Abrams released the transcript of a panel discussion he conducted with former attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales that same day. When Abrams asks them a question similar to the one posed to Rice, Ashcroft and Gonzales come to a very conclusion — Nixon is wrong:
ASHCROFT: When the President does it. If he has the authority to do it, it means it’s not a crime.
ABRAMS: Take away the caveat there. If has the authority to do it. What President Nixon was saying was “When the President does it, that means its not illegal.”
ASHCROFT: Well, no. Obviously the President does not have carte blanche to do things – [Applause] that are illegal. [...]
ABRAMS: Do you disagree with President Nixon as well? [...]
GONZALES: I think that’s its dangerous to say that the President would have that kind of authority.
Also in the interview, when asked how about the job President Obama is doing, Gonzales replied, “I tend to follow President Bush’s model in terms of saying less — as opposed to Vice President Cheney’s [Laughter]. I’m often asked the same question.”
Transcript: More »
4th grader presses Rice on waterboarding.
4th grader presses Rice on waterboarding.
Speaking to students at Stanford University last month, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, saying that they did not constitute torture and were legal “by definition” because President Bush authorized them. Rice was put on the defensive on the issue again today while visiting an elementary school in Washington, DC. During a Q & A session with students, a 4th grader named Misha Lerner asked Rice about “the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees”:
“Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country,” she said. “But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”
She added: “I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country.”
According to Misha’s mother, he originally planned to ask a tougher question — “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for torture?” — but he was asked to change it. “They wanted him to soften it and take out the word ‘torture.’ But the essence of it was the same,” Inna Lerner said.
Rice: Nazis were less of a threat to the U.S. than al Qaeda; SCOTUS wouldn’t let us try detainees.
Rice: Nazis were less of a threat to the U.S. than al Qaeda; SCOTUS wouldn’t let us try detainees.
Speaking with a group of Stanford students Monday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that al Qaeda is a greater threat to the United States than Nazi Germany was because Germany “never attacked the homeland of the United States.” In a defensive exchange with a student, she also insisted that the Bush administration had always wanted to hold trials for detainees, but the Supreme Court wouldn’t let them:
RICE: Now, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] also had access to Guantanamo. And they made no allegations about interrogations in Guantanamo. What they did say was that indefinite detention, where people didn’t know whether they’d come up for trial — which is why we tried under the military commissions system to let people come up for trial. Those trials were stayed by who? Who kept us from holding the trials?
STUDENT: I can’t answer that question.
RICE: Do your homework first. … It was the Supreme Court.
Watch it:
Of course, the Supreme Court “stayed” the Bush administration’s military commissions because they were woefully inadequate. The Court — three separate times — required the administration to come up with meaningful judicial review of suspects’ detentions. Indeed, last June the court held that military commissions “are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus” and thus “operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.”
Rice Channels Nixon: Since The President Authorized Torture, That Makes It Legal
Rice Channels Nixon: Since The President Authorized Torture, That Makes It Legal
Recently, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke with some students at Stanford University, where she is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute. When a student asked whether Rice had authorized torture, she refused to take responsibility, saying only that she “conveyed the authorization of the administration.” She added that, “by definition,” once the president authorized “enhanced interrogations,” they were automatically legal:
Q: Is waterboarding torture?
RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.
Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?
RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, who obtained the video, said Rice “absolutely pulls a Nixon” in her answer. Watch it (Rice’s answers come at 0:57):
Rice is attempting to hide her central role in approving torture, as the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week highlighted. She gave verbal authorization to then-director of the CIA George Tenet to waterboard Abu Zubaydah in July 2002 — one month before the Office of Legal Counsel gave the legal justification for such torture.
Rice’s opinion that a presidential authorization — “by definition” — grants something legality is deeply disturbing. In fact, the United States — and its president — are bound by U.S. statute and international treaties that ban the use of cruel, humiliating, degrading treatment, the infliction of suffering, and the attempt to extract coerced confessions.
Memo to Rice: Bush may have been “the Decider,” but he didn’t have the authority to make an illegal act magically legal.
Cheney planning to skip Bush administration reunion next week.
Cheney planning to skip Bush administration reunion next week.
The New York Times reports that roughly 20 Bush administration all-stars — including Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Dan Bartlett — are getting together next week for their first Bush administration reunion. “On tap is a dinner with the former president” and a brainstorming session for the George W. Bush Policy Institute. The man who largely crafted Bush’s presidency, however, will not be at the party:
Not coming to next week’s session is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who in the final days of the administration argued with Mr. Bush about his failure to pardon Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury and other counts for his role in the leak of Valerie Wilson’s employment with the Central Intelligence Agency.
Cheney also broke with the President on a same-sex marriage ban, firing Donald Rumsfeld, overturning Washington DC’s gun ban, and removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror.
(ThinkProgress has been keeping a close eye on developments with the Bush library, and we will continue to do so. Read our related posts here.)
Rice sides with Bush, rebuffs Cheney: ‘We owe’ Obama ‘our loyalty and our silence.’
Rice sides with Bush, rebuffs Cheney: ‘We owe’ Obama ‘our loyalty and our silence.’
Earlier this month, former Vice President Dick Cheney attacked President Obama, saying his policies “raise the risk” of another terror attack in the U.S. However, last week, former President Bush rebuked his former VP. “I love my country a lot more than I love politics…I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him,” he said. “He deserves my silence.” Last night during her appearance on the Tonight Show, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sided with Bush:
RICE: My view is, we got to do our way. We did our best. We did some things well, some things not so well. Now they get their chance. And I agree with the president; we owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it. [...] These are quality people. I know them. They love the country and they won’t make the same decisions, perhaps, that we did. But I believe they’ll do what they think is best for the country.
Watch it:
President Obama hit back at Cheney on 60 Minutes last Sunday and The Hill reported this week that congressional Republicans are urging him “to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.”
Rice: ‘No One Was Arguing That Saddam Hussein Somehow Had Something To Do With 9/11′
Rice: ‘No One Was Arguing That Saddam Hussein Somehow Had Something To Do With 9/11′
On PBS’s Charlie Rose yesterday — six years after the eve of the Iraq invasion — former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice discussed the decision to invade Iraq. Rice said she has had no “second thoughts” about striking the country, and when pressed by Rose on whether Saddam Hussein had connections to 9/11, Rice blankly said that “no one” believed in such a link:
ROSE: But you didn’t believe it had anything to do with 9/11.
RICE: No. No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.
ROSE: No one.
RICE: I was certainly not. The President was certainly not. … That’s right. We were not arguing that.
Rose also tried to press Rice on whether Cheney pushed the link, but she didn’t answer. Watch it:
Of course, there was no link between Saddam and 9/11. But these supposed ties formed the basis of the administration’s causus belli. A letter from the White House to the House Speaker on March 18, 2003, read:
“(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
In his book, Bush At War, Bob Woodward noted that Bush said after 9/11, “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now.” Rice was no exception either. On Sept. 15, 2002, she said that Saddam had “links to terrorism [that] would include al-Qaeda.” As late as September 2006, she remarked, “there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade.” Cheney still believes there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
In recent weeks, former Bush administration officials have continued to push the link. Bush maintains that he was right to make a false link between Iraq and 9/11. Former press secretary Ari Fleischer said last week, “But after September 11th, having been being hit once, how could we take a chance that Saddam Hussein might not strike again?”
State Department staffers compare Rice to Wicked Witch of the West.
State Department staffers compare Rice to Wicked Witch of the West.
Reporting on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s introductory speech at the State Department this morning, Harper’s Scott Horton notes that last week several career State Department staffers compared former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz:
I met last week with a number of career State Department employees and was surprised when one said she was looking forward to the “Glinda Party” next week. I asked her: if Hillary was Glinda, the Good Witch of the South from the Wizard of Oz, did that make Condoleezza Rice the Wicked Witch of the West?
“You’re on to it,” she said. Another person pointed out to me that after Rice’s arrival in 2005 the tone of official State Department publications changed; they began to praise and glorify Rice. “No prior secretary,” said the twenty-year veteran, “did anything like this.”
Clinton was given what the LA Times dubbed a “celebrity welcome” this morning at the State Department.
The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever
The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever
This item originally published in yesterday’s Progress Report. To receive The Progress Report in your email inbox everyday, click here.
Next week, “change is coming to America,” as President George W. Bush wraps up his tenure as one of the worst American presidents ever. He wasn’t able to accomplish such an ignominious feat all by himself, however; he had a great deal of help along the way. The ThinkProgress team heralds the conclusion of the Bush 43 presidency by bringing you our list of the top 43 worst Bush appointees. Did we miss anyone? Who should have been ranked higher? Let us know what you think.
1. Dick Cheney — The worst Dick since Nixon. The man who shot his friend while in office. The “most powerful and controversial vice president.” Until he got the job, people used to actually think it was a bad thing that the vice presidency has historically been a do-nothing position. Asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer about why people hate him, Cheney rejected the premise, saying, “I don’t buy that.” His top placement in our survey says otherwise.
2. Karl Rove — There wasn’t a scandal in the Bush administration that Rove didn’t have his fingerprints all over — see Plame, Iraq war deception, Gov. Don Siegelman, U.S. Attorney firings, missing e-mails, and more. As senior political adviser and later as deputy chief of staff, “The Architect” was responsible for politicizing nearly every agency of the federal government.
3. Alberto Gonzales — Fundamentally dishonest and woefully incompetent, Gonzales was involved in a series of scandals, first as White House counsel and then as Attorney General. Some of the most notable: pressuring a “feeble” and “barely articulate” Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled its aftermath. Rumsfeld is also responsible for authorizing the use of torture against terror detainees in U.S. custody; according to a bipartisan Senate report, Rumsfeld “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”
5. Michael Brown — This former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was appointed by Bush to head FEMA in 2003. After Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Brownie promptly did a “heck of a job” bungling the government’s relief efforts, and was sent back to Washington a few days later. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter.
6. Paul Wolfowitz — As Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, Wolfowitz was one of the primary architects of the
Iraq war, arguing for the invasion as early as Sept. 15, 2001. Testifying before Congress in February 2003, Wolfowitz said that it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-SaddamIraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Wolfowitz eventually admitted that “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” as a justification for war, “because it was the one reason everyone [in the administration] could agree on.”7. David Addington — “Cheney’s Cheney” was the “most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” As the leader of Bush’s legal team and Cheney’s chief of staff, Addington was the biggest proponent of some of Bush’s most notorious legal abuses, such as torture and warrantless surveillance, and is a loyal follower of the so-called unitary executive theory.
8. Stephen Johnson — The “Alberto Gonzales of the environment,” EPA Administrator Johnson subverted the agency’s mission at the behest of the White House and corporate interests, suppressing staff recommendations on pesticides, mercury, lead paint, smog, and global warming.9. Douglas Feith — Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005, Feith headed up the notorious Office of Special Plans, an in-house Pentagon intelligence shop devised by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to produce intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. A subsequent investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found the OSP’s work produced “conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
10. John Bolton — As Undersecretary of State, Bolton offered a strong voice in favor of invading Iraq and pushed for the U.S. to disengage from the International Criminal Court and key international arms control agreements. A recess appointment landed Bolton the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, despite his stringent animosity toward the world body. Today, he spends his time calling for war with Iran.
Olmert stands by his story on Rice’s Gaza vote.
Olmert stands by his story on Rice’s Gaza vote.
The Bush administration has been on a full-court press to push back on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s widely-circulated statements that he got the U.S. to abstain from voting on the U.N.’s Gaza ceasefire resolution. But Olmert aides say today that he “stands by his claim” and that he “told the story as it happened.” U.N. Dispatch notes these comments from U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad:
He said that Rice spent an “unprecedented” three days working on the resolution, and that the United States drafted a big portion of the resolution, which he described as “very reasonable.”
Mark Leon Goldberg asks, “What’s curious to me, at least, is why the United States would not vote in favor of a resolution that its ambassador considered ‘very reasonable’ and its Secretary of State worked so hard on drafting?”
Bush: ‘I Don’t Give A Darn’ What Americans Think Of Me
Bush: ‘I Don’t Give A Darn’ What Americans Think Of Me
The Bush administration has acquired a well-deserved reputation for ignoring the public’s will. Last March, for example, Vice President Cheney famously told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he doesn’t care about the public’s views on the Iraq war.
In part because of this disregard for the public, President Bush leaves office with the lowest approval ratings in modern history — 34 percent. In an exit interview yesterday with Larry King, Bush made clear that he is quite happy ignoring the public, saying that he doesn’t “give a darn” that Americans simply disdain him:
KING: How do you feel personally when you — you see the ratings and the polls that — and have you at 25, 30 percent…
BUSH: I don’t give a darn. I feel the same way as when they had me at 90 plus.
KING: The same?
BUSH: Yes, look it — these opinion polls are nothing but a, you know, a shot of yesterday’s news.
Watch it:
Yesterday, in an interview with Bloomberg, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went a step further, arguing that the she doesn’t “care about perceptions” of the U.S. abroad:
Q: Why do you think we don’t get enough credit – you don’t get enough, he doesn’t get enough credit then? Because the perception is is that the U.S. has not smartly exercised its power around the world.
RICE: Oh, I don’t care about perceptions, Mike. I’ve learned in –
Q: But can you not (inaudible)?
RICE: No, of course, you can – you don’t – you shouldn’t.
According to Pew, “positive views of the United States declined in 26 of the 33 countries where the question was posed in both 2002 and 2007.” Curiously, in his recent press conference, Bush remarked, “I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged.”
Larry King asked Bush, “Don’t you want to be liked?” “Kind of,” admitted Bush, adding that “you really want to be liked on the day that really matters, when you are running for president, election day.” Apparently, on the other days, Bush can be as reckless as he wants.
Rice cites Iraq declaring Christmas a national holiday as a sign of success.
Rice cites Iraq declaring Christmas a national holiday as a sign of success.
The Washington Post reports on its recent interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
In a conversation that stretched to 75 minutes — and which Rice seemed reluctant to end — the secretary of state said she was counting the hours until Jan. 20. But she yielded little ground in defense of her record or the administration’s performance over the past eight years. After being peppered with questions about regrets, she joked, “Aren’t you going to say, ‘Aren’t you thrilled that . . .?’ ” [...]
Arguing that Iraq shows signs of becoming an inclusive state — it even “declared Christmas a national holiday” — Rice said that if the country eventually emerges as a democratic, multiethnic state that has friendly ties with the United States, “that will be more important than what anybody thought in 2002 or 2003.”
For the record, the United States has declared only Christian holidays as national holidays.
After Receiving Phone Call From Olmert, Bush Ordered Rice To Abstain On Gaza Ceasefire Resolution
After Receiving Phone Call From Olmert, Bush Ordered Rice To Abstain On Gaza Ceasefire Resolution
Last week, the U.S. curiously abstained from a voting on a United Nations Gaza ceasefire resolution, “an apparent reversal of earlier promises to Arab states.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, despite voicing support for the resolution, raised concerns about “Egyptian mediation efforts” in explaining the abstention.
But in reality, Rice was essentially ready to support the resolution — until a last-minute intervention from President Bush. In a speech in Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged that he called Bush at the last minute, urging that the U.S. not vote to support the resolution. Bush acquiesced to Olmert’s demands:
“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour,” Olmert said.
“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.”I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour.”
Rice had worked extensively on the resolution with Arab, British, and French foreign ministers. “She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour,” Olmert said.
In a briefing Friday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack maintained that “we fully support the text, the objectives, and the goals of that resolution” and boasted that the “resolution never would have come into being as it was without the efforts of Condoleezza Rice up there.” But he struggled to explain how the Department could both abstain and support the resolution:
Q: So we — so when the secretary comes out and you come out and you say, We support this resolution, we support the language in it, we support the goals, why — what message does it send when you don’t vote for it? I mean, it’s just, it’s completely inconsistent, no?
McCORMACK: Well, you’re — you’re certainly welcome to your interpretation.
“Look, it’s a nuanced argument,” McCormack said. The simple reality, however, is that Bush overrode Rice at the behest of Olmert. Ironically, asked whether he thought Bush had ordered Rice to abstain at the eleventh hour, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said, “I don’t know.”
Rice: Much Of Bush’s Foreign Policy Agenda Deserves An ‘A+’
Rice: Much Of Bush’s Foreign Policy Agenda Deserves An ‘A+’
This morning on CBS, Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver interviewed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In a portion of the interview that does not appear to have aired, Braver noted the results of the recent Pew Global Attitudes survey which found that “the U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere.” Braver prompted Rice saying, “It has to be more than just a perception problem.” Rice dismissed the poll’s results, claiming that the Bush administration has “left a lot of good foundations”:
Q: Looking at the big picture of what’s the whole foreign policy of this Administration – you come out of the academic tradition so I think it’s fair to ask, what kind of grade do you give yourself and this Administration on foreign policy?
RICE: Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the subject. I’m sure that there are some that deserve an A-plus and some that deserve a lot less. … We’ve left a lot of good foundations.
Q: You know, you say that, but the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a new report very recently. On the very first page it says, “The U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere.” … It has to be more than just a perception problem.
RICE: No. Rita, first of all, it depends on where you’re talking about. In two of the most populous countries, China and India, the United States is not just well regarded for its policies, but well regarded.
When pressed further, Rice responded by saying, “It’s not a popularity contest.”
While the U.S. is indeed well-regarded in India, Rice’s claim that the U.S. is “well regarded” in China is puzzling. The Pew Survey that Braver noted found that in China, the U.S. is viewed favorably by just 41 percent of the country. Similarly, just 30 percent of China has confidence in the Bush administration. A BBC poll from April of this year found similar results for many other nations around the world.
Overall, the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda has seen few successes. U.S. influence abroad is predicted to decline over the next 20 years. The U.S. military is weaker now than it was five years ago, while the State Department is suffering from staffing shortages and low morale. The recent violence in Israel dramatically highlights the fact that Bush largely ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No matter how many times Rice repeats herself, the fact that the world does not look kindly on the Bush administration’s foreign policy record will not change.
Also during the interview, Rice would soon “start to thank this president for what he’s done.”
Report: Gonzales Appears To Have Lied To Congress For Rice About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims
Report: Gonzales Appears To Have Lied To Congress For Rice About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims
In his January 2003 State of the Union address, as part of his effort to make the case for invading Iraq, President Bush infamously declared that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The White House was later forced to repudiate the statement after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson blew the whistle on the claim.
As part of an investigation into pre-war intelligence claims, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked the White House to provide examples of times that the CIA had cleared such uranium references for use in speeches. On January 6, 2004, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) on behalf of Condoleezza Rice that claimed the CIA had “orally cleared” the uranium claim for two of Bush’s speeches.
But in a new memo, House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that he has found evidence contradicting Gonzales’ assertions:
The information the Oversight Committee has received casts serious doubt on the veracity of the representations that Mr. Gonzales made on behalf of Dr. Rice. Contrary to Mr. Gonzales’s assertions, the Committee has received evidence that the CIA objected to the uranium claim in both speeches, resulting in its deletion from the President’s remarks.
When White House speechwriters tried to put the uranium claim into Bush’s Sept. 12, 2002 speech to UN, the CIA rejected it because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech”:
During an interview with the Committee, John Gibson, who served as Director of Speechwriting for Foreign Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), stated that he tried to insert the uranium claim into this speech at the request of Michael Gerson, chief White House speechwriter, and Robert Joseph, the Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense at the NSC. According to Mr. Gibson, the CIA rejected the uranium claim because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech.” Mr. Gibson stated that the CIA “didn’t give that blessing,” the “CIA was not willing to clear that language,” and “[a]t the end of the day, they did not clear it.”
When National Security Council staff refused to take the uranium claim out of Bush’s Sept. 26, 2002 speech, Jami Miscik, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA, called Rice personally to request it be removed:
According to Ms. Miscik, the CIA’s reasons for rejecting the uranium claim “had been conveyed to the NSC counterparts” before the call, and Dr. Rice was “getting on the phone call with that information.” Ms. Miscik told Dr. Rice personally that the CIA was “recommending that it be taken out.” She also said “[i]t turned out to be a relatively short phone call” because “we both knew what the issues were and therefore were able to get to a very easy resolution of it.”
According to Waxman, Rice refused to testify to the Committee about the pre-war claims, so he is unable to say “how she would explain the seeming contradictions between her statements and those of Mr. Gonzales on her behalf and the statements made to the Committee bv senior CIA and NSC officials.”
Rice: As A ‘Political Scientist,’ ‘I Absolutely Am So Proud’ Of Invading Iraq
Rice: As A ‘Political Scientist,’ ‘I Absolutely Am So Proud’ Of Invading Iraq
This morning, CNN aired an exit interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the interview, reporter Zain Verjee asked Rice if she “regretted her role in the Iraq war.” Rice responded by saying that she had no regrets about the war and is “absolutely so proud” of invading Iraq:
QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war?
SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq.
QUESTION: Really?
SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Watch it:
Rice’s pride is misplaced. Indeed, leaving aside the fact that the war was predicated on false intelligence, Rice cannot credibly argue as a “political scientist” that invading Iraq was in the interest of the U.S. “geostrategically.”
Indeed, Iraq posed no military threat to the United States in 2003. As Rice herself explained in July of 2001, Saddam Hussein had been unable to reconstitute himself militarily following the 1991 Gulf War. More importantly, the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region and empowered Iran politically and militarily. And contrary to neo-conservative predictions, Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Contrary to Rice’s assessment of the strategic value of the war in Iraq, a group of the some of the nation’s most celebrated political scientists argued in a paid advertisement in the New York Times on the eve of the Iraq war that the invasion was not in America’s strategic interests and predicted several of the negative effects of the war:
View the full ad here.
Despite her pride, Rice was — and remains — wrong about invading Iraq.
State Department panel recommends dumping Blackwater in Iraq.
State Department panel recommends dumping Blackwater in Iraq.
The AP reports that a panel commissioned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after Blackwater’s infamous September 2007 Baghdad shootout has called for the security firm’s contract not to be renewed next year. Since the shootings, the Bush administration has repeatedly defended the firm, renewing its contract in May. Last October, the State Department granted Blackwater guards immunity after the shootings.
Rice: Under Bush, The U.S. Has Embraced The U.N. ‘Maybe’ More Than Any Other Administration
Rice: Under Bush, The U.S. Has Embraced The U.N. ‘Maybe’ More Than Any Other Administration
During a press conference yesterday in New York, a reporter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “look philosophically” at the state of diplomacy after eight years of the Bush administration and to think of “lessons we can draw out.” Rice then took the opportunity to polish up her boss’s record with the United Nations:
RICE: I think that the United States, under President Bush, has actually used the mechanisms and the councils of the United Nations more than they’ve been used maybe ever, whether it is insisting that Security Council resolutions that have been passed be respected, [or] whether it is seeking to deal with human rights and tyranny cases like Zimbabwe or Burma.
Indeed, the Bush White House has been spending a lot of time lately trying to rewrite the history of the last eight years, mainly due to the fact that President Bush’s failed policies have made him one of the most unpopular outgoing U.S. presidents in modern history.
But Rice has been playing along as well and this latest attempt at legacy building has no basis in reality. The Bush administration’s complete disregard of the U.N.’s will during the run-up to the Iraq war is the obvious example. The administration completely ignored the work of the U.N.’s weapons inspectors (UNMOVIC) at that time and instead attacked Iraq on false WMD pretenses before they could finish the job. Moreover, in 2004, then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the U.S.-led invasion illegal and “not in conformity with the U.N. charter.”
In 2004, the Bush administration also tried (and failed) to remove Mohamed El-Baradei as head of the IAEA — the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog — for being too soft on Iran.
But to top it all off, in 2005, President Bush installed U.N. hater and fervent war hawk John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the world body. Bush wanted Bolton so badly, he “resorted to the 17-month recess appointment to circumvent” opposition to Bolton in the Senate. Bolton famously said “there is no such thing as the United Nations” and if the U.N. building in New York “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Bush even found space to criticize the U.N. in his final address to the general assembly, saying the organization “only pass[es] resolutions decrying terrorist attacks after they occur” instead of doing something to prevent them “in the first place.”
In 2006, Annan’s deputy, Mark Malloch Brown noted that “[i]n recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage” between the U.S. and the U.N. Indeed, new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he looks forward to “a new era of partnership” with Obama.
Rice: No ‘American Money’ In Iraq Was Lost To Corruption
Rice: No ‘American Money’ In Iraq Was Lost To Corruption
In an AP interview yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke highly of U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq, stating, “We’ve done a lot of work to get these [reconstruction] structures right, and I think they finally are” — a day after a scathing government report detailed massive waste and poor planning in U.S. reconstruction efforts. When asked about the abuse, Rice claimed that U.S. dollars have emerged unscathed:
Q: But the cost in terms of lives and in terms of the money and the abuse of money – (inaudible) was money wasted, there was money that was siphoned off, corruption and that kind of thing, you’re —
RICE: Not of American money. Not American money. I don’t think that you will find that anybody is arguing that there was corruption in the American programs.
Throughout the U.S. occupation of Iraq, billions in tax dollars have been lost due to corruption and incompetence. Some of the most egregious losses have been via “American programs”:
– The Coalition Provisional Authority delivered 363 tons of cash on an airplane, totaling $12 billion, to Iraq “without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for.”
– The State Dept spent $36.4 million dollars on weapons and equipment that could not be accounted for because “invoices were vague and there was no backup documentation“.
– Top contractor KBR came under fire last year from government investigators for overpricing its contract by $2 billion, which, for example, included overstating labor costs by 51 percent.
– State Dept. employees testified in May 2008 that the U.S. “allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government,” resulting in the loss of billions in U.S. tax dollars.
The use of private contractors, a major source of the corruption, has skyrocketed under Bush. The government has spent $85 billion on contracts in Iraq and other countries in the first four years of the war. “Taxpayers have been bled dry with massive misuse of public dollars,” observed Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who has spearheaded investigations into waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq.
Thus far, some $50 billion in taxpayer dollars have been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, which anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International listed as the third-most corrupt nation in the world.
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