Well, well, well, the girl who ignored the flashing red light from Osama bin Laden right (PDB) before 9/11 is now oh so proud that Bush invaded Iraq. Here she is with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg.
Rice: Yes, it’s been very, very tough. But I know that great historical events go through difficult phases and often emerge with the world left for the better. And I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. I am proud of the liberation of 25 million…
Citing Bush administration officials, The New York Times reported Sunday that Iraq tried to buy thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes, Rice said, “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”
Here’s here on MTP reminding us all about Saddam back on May 22nd, 2006:
RICE: I understand that Americans see on their screens violence. They continue to see Americans killed, and we mourn every death. These are very hard things to do. But I would ask that people remember why we are there. We are there because we are trying to-having overthrown a brutal dictator who was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, we’re trying to help the Iraqis create a stable foundation for democracy and a stable foundation for peace.”
C&L covered this segment from last Friday’s Countdown, but I thought an emphasis on Richard Clarke’s scathing remarks about the lack of, and the need for, accountability from the Bush administration for the countless lies they told their country and the world about pre-Iraq invasion intelligence, was well deserved.
I have been telling anyone who will listen, that we must watch out for these bad pennies when their names start to creep back into the political arena - names like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who both worked in the Nixon administration. Looking back, we find ourselves wondering how we didn’t see this disaster coming, or why more people didn’t speak out at the time. I fully agree with Richard Clarke’s statements; we must not allow these thugs back into civilized society — they should not be rewarded for perpetrating so many horrific and destructive crimes against their own people, and other places around the globe.
Clarke: “Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.”
“Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.”
You can rest assured, the day that names like Karl Rove, Tom Delay, Condoleeza Rice or those of anyone who served in the Bush administration creep into the public or political sphere, we, and the rest of the blogosphere, will sound the alarm to make sure none of these people are able to damage our country ever again. More from Think Progress.
Karl Rove’s role in building, running and ruining the most corrupt, inept and politically polarizing presidential administration in U.S. history, is the stuff of legends. The below excerpts from Paul Alexander’s new book, “Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise And Fall Of Karl Rove“, gives a stunning picture of how Rove, within hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall, put his political machine to work protecting George Bush, his administration and their Republican allies in the Gulf Coast region, by smearing both New Orlenas Mayor, Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor, Kathleen Blanco.
With Karl Rove neutered and disgraced, Alexander found that people (politicians) directly involved in the disaster were finally willing to speak openly about the immoral, disgraceful and unforgivably political nature of the Bush Administration’s handling of one the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States — and was widely viewed as a seminal moment in the downward spiral of George Bush, Karl Rove and the Republican party, from which they never recovered. Excerpts from Salon:
On Monday, August 29, 2005, at about 6:00 a.m., Hurricane Katrina slammed into the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A category 5 hurricane until just before landfall, it was one of the worst storms ever to hit the Gulf Coast. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, had been briefed extensively about what to expect when the storm hit, which was why, on the Friday night before the storm reached the coast, she signed papers declaring Louisiana to be in a state of emergency. Based on what she had been told by her advisers and what she knew from being a native Louisianan, she understood that Katrina, creeping gradually toward land with sustained winds of a strength rarely seen in a hurricane, could prove to be catastrophic for Louisiana, and particularly for New Orleans.
If Bush had not seen what was taking place by Tuesday, Karl Rove had. The first evidence of Rove’s involvement in the Katrina disaster occurred on Tuesday afternoon. “Rove understood what a nightmare this was for the president,” Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana says, “so he went into high gear on the spin thing they’re so good at in the White House. Rove had David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana. I was at a press conference and David Vitter walked up to the mike and said, ‘I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.’ I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, ‘Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?’ I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man.”
“I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I’ve been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life.” Read on…
LOS ANGELES - An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months.
Emad al-Janabi’s federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003.
Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as “Big Steve.” The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics.
At one point after passing out, al-Janabi said, he was told by an L-3 translator “welcome to Guantanamo.” He said he even asked a cellmate whether he could see the ocean from a window. Read on…
Senator John McCain may look the other way when it comes to torture, but we won’t. These atrocities were committed in our name. I hope “Big Steve” and all the rest of these war criminals are punished to the fullest extent — but we live in Bushworld and it is unlikely any of these thugs will ever be held accountable. Senator Barack Obama has said that if elected he will investigate crimes committed by the Bush regime…we intend to hold him to that.
Sitting bravely behind concrete walls while visiting Iraq this weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose to channel her boss (circa 2003) by responding to Muqtada al-Sadr’s latest threat with an official “taunt” from the U.S. government:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers. …(read on)
VetVoice’s’ Brandon Friedman goes on to explain that this “actually provides a huge piece of propaganda for Sadr, who can now use it as a rallying point for his followers who will view this as a challenge to their honor,” and just when the surge was beginning to work so well.
Jon Stewart takes the administration to task for, well, there’s no delicate way to put this, deciding the intimate details of how we would torture people. It pains me to type those words.
You gotta wonder, how could these administration officials be so confident that we don’t torture? Well, there’s only two options, really. One, the administration reminded all military and intelligence agencies of the moral commitment that civilized nations have to remain humane, even in times of peril. Or…. They sat in a room and meticulously crafted an interrogation regimen in the lawyer-created space between cruelty and torture. Hmmm….I wonder which way they went.
UPDATE: John Amato: It’s good to see TDS pick up on our push with the ACLU to get this information out there. C&L will not let up on this issue and the blogoshere has responded in kind. Thanks. And Condi Rice should be forced to resign over this issue.
60 Minutes on Sunday explored the rampant corruption going on throughout the Iraqi government, and how much of the up to $18 billion missing or unaccounted for has been finding its way into the hands of militias that have been responsible for attacks on coalition forces. What’s more, they detail how Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was able to immunize all current and former Iraqi officials, including himself and his family, from any further investigation or prosecution, the State Dept’s refusal to cooperate with any investigation, the ostracism and apparent abandonment of the one Iraqi official who braved death threats, and the murder of dozens of his staff, to successfully prosecute corrupt officials before PM Malaki effectively shut him down, and how one such former official, Aiham Alsammarae, who had already been convicted and was set to face even more charges for billions of missing funds while he was the Minister of Electricity, brazenly escaped a Green Zone jail with the help of U.S. contractors (twice) and is currently living large in a Chicago suburb.
Full 13 minute report and transcript here. A look at some of the events, documents and key players after the jump. (Read the rest of this story…)
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is actively courting the vice presidential nomination, according to Republican strategists.
ABC News in the U.S. reported that Republican strategist Dan Senor said Ms Rice had been actively campaigning for the vice presidency.
Mr Senor was reported as saying on the This Week with George Stephanopoulos program that she “has been cozying up to the Republican elite”.
“There’s this ritual in Washington: The Americans for Tax Reform . . . holds a weekly meeting of conservative leaders - about 100, 150 people,” Mr Senor told the program. “They all typically get briefings from political conservative leaders.
“Ten days ago, they had an interesting visit - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - the first time a secretary of state has visited the Wednesday meeting.”
Mr Senor said Ms Rice’s history in public office would make her a prime candidate.
It’s a great ad for Democrats: “9/11 and the clusterf#@k in Iraq happened under my watch and now you should make me one very old heartbeat away from being president!” It’s interesting, it has parallel overtones to the story that John McCain actively sought the vice presidency with John Kerry. And it certainly will offset the conventional wisdom that John McCain (and the GOP in general) is lacking diversity. But RawStory says “not so fast…”
The big story over night was that three State Department contractors took an inappropriate peek at Barack Obama’s passport file. Officials apologized, fired the contractors in question, and announced that an investigation would be forthcoming.
But this afternoon we learned that the State Department’s problem is an even bigger mess.
Just hours after firing two contract employees and disciplining a third for inappropriately examining the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that her passport file was also breached in 2007.
NBC News also learned Friday that Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate for president, had his file breached — this time by one of the same individuals who had examined Obama’s records.
If one is inclined to believe the innocuous explanation — a handful of contractors were motivated by “imprudent curiosity” — the news about Clinton and McCain doesn’t change anything. Some staffers wondered about several high-profile figures, so they took a peek. It need not have been related to the campaign at all.
If one is inclined to believe a more sinister explanation, today’s news doesn’t help. That State Department staffers sought out confidential information about the major presidential candidates starts to look more like opposition research, and less like innocent prying. Given the Bush administration’s history of politicizing non-partisan government agencies, including the State Department, there’s no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt.
John Amato: And Condi certainly never seems to get much info does she? “Not to my knowledge.“
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified about the proposed fiscal year 2009 budget for foreign operations. The topics included foreign aid, foreign services personnel, increasing energy prices, Russia, and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, it only took one sign behind her shoulder to get past all the spin.
It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence. Read on…
This article by Nir Rosen is a long read, but it’s well worth it. Rosen describes in detail how the situation on the ground in Iraq is tenuous at best, a powder keg ready to ignite at any given moment. We haven’t been getting much honest or detailed reporting from Iraq in quite some time and this article unveils much of what many of us have assumed for some time. The successes of the surge amount to trapping people in run down neighborhoods turned to rubble, imprisoning thousands and creating millions of refugees. Freedom is on the march…
”At this significant moment in Cuba’s history,” Rice said, “we reaffirm our belief that the Cuban people have an inalienable right to participate in an open and comprehensive dialogue about their country’s future, free of fear and repression, and to choose their leaders in democratic elections.”
I have no problem with that, but I guess she forgot that our Supreme Court stepped in and decided the 2000 election for the very free and fair people of America.
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Jon Stewart takes the administration to task for, well, there’s no delicate way to put this, 
