The Official Condoleeza Rice Thread

QueEx · Apr 23, 2006

Repbulicans: Fire Cheney - Hire Condi

<center>Dump Cheney for Condi, Bush urged</center>

The Sunday Times - London
Sarah Baxter, Washington
April 23, 20006

REPUBLICANS are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard magazine and author of Rebel in Chief, a sympathetic new biography of Bush, said: “There are going to have to be sweeping personnel changes if people are going to take a second look at the Bush presidency.”

Barnes, who is close to the White House, said he believed Cheney would be willing to stand down in order to help Bush. “It’s unlike Bush to dump somebody whom he likes and respects,” he cautioned. “But the president needs to do something shocking and dramatic such as putting in Condoleezza Rice.”

Cheney appeared to have beeen caught napping during a visit to the Oval Office by China’s president, Hu Jintao, on Friday, although he claimed he had been looking down at his notes. It has often been said that he would cite medical reasons should he ever resign.

The best scenario, Barnes added, would be for Bush to announce that “Dick Cheney will be around as an outside adviser and I can call him on the phone, but I’d like to anoint somebody who I think will be the next leader of the United States”.

Tom Edmonds, a leading Republican consultant, said the White House had failed to grasp that the party was in desperate straits. “I have never talked to so many disenchanted Republicans,” he said. “The president even stonewalled the minor changes he made by talking about how he was really perfectly happy with his team. He didn’t even give himself wiggle room.”

One Republican strategist, who did not want to be named, said: “If I were Bush I would think of changing Cheney. It is one of the few substantial things he can do to change the complexion of his administration. The rest is nibbling around the edges.”

Bush’s new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, quickly put his stamp on the inner workings of the White House last week by stripping Karl Rove, Bush’s most powerful adviser, of his policy-making role and ordering him to concentrate on his forte: winning elections.

Bolten also obtained the resignation of the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, who was nicknamed Piggy in a recent Vanity Fair article because of his resemblance to the hapless victim of the feral boys in Lord of the Flies.

Tony Snow, a Fox News broadcaster who is favoured to replace McClellan, has previously described the Bush administration as “listless” and in dire need of change.

But a new communicator cannot reinvent an old team. Edmonds believes Rumsfeld should go. “The president is loyal to a fault,” he said. “His loyalty shouldn’t be to Rumsfeld but to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need a new, strong face on the war, such as Senator John McCain or Joe Lieberman (the pro-war Democrat senator).”

Bob Schieffer, a CBS news television presenter, said Bush may yet drop Rumsfeld despite his strong declaration of support. “It was also this president who said, ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job’ and that was just before Brownie got canned,” Schieffer said, referring to Michael Brown, who directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s much-criticised response to Hurricane Katrina.

John Snow, the Treasury secretary, has been left twisting in the wind while replacements for him are openly discussed, and Rob Portman has been brought in to replace Bolten as budget director. Suggestions that Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House counsel who was dropped as his supreme court nominee, would be next to go were denied last week.

Supporters say Bush should live up to his bold claim that he is “the decider” — made while rejecting recent calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation from half a dozen senior generals — and start firing senior people rather than backroom staff.

“If the Democrats win either the House of Representatives or the Senate it will be death and torment. It will be horrible for Bush,” said Barnes. A Democrat win could lead to moves to impeach Bush for leading the country to war on allegedly false pretences, or at the very least, to bog down the president’s legislative programme until he leaves office in 2008.

Rove has been privately warning party activists to expect some losses in the mid-term elections. One insider said: “I’ve heard him say at several party gatherings that the president wasn’t supposed to win in 2000, but he did. We’ve increased our margins of victory time and again. We can’t just keep winning on top of winning so we’re bound to slip back, but we’re still doing better than you would historically expect.”

Only one two-term victor has been more unpopular than Bush at a similar six-year stage in his presidency — Richard Nixon in the months before he was impeached.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2148000,00.html

Greed · Apr 23, 2006

Re: Repbulicans: Fire Cheney - Hire Condi

cant really figure out why this is news. sounds more like a highy publicized wishlist.

plus, republicans want the black vote, so Dr. Rice isnt going to be the nominee.

VegasGuy · Apr 23, 2006

Re: Repbulicans: Fire Cheney - Hire Condi

Co-sign.

-VG

QueEx · Jun 4, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

<center>Rice Key to Reversal on Iran
Expected Failure of International Effort Led to U.S. Turnaround</center>

Washington Post
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page A17

At the end of March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Europe and had unusual, one-on-one conversations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. She also attended a meeting in Berlin on Iran at which the Russian and Chinese representatives denounced the idea of sanctions to halt Tehran's drive toward a nuclear weapon.

Rice returned to Washington with a sobering message: The international effort to derail Iran's programs was falling apart. Her conclusion spurred a secret discussion among Rice, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley: Should the United States finally agree to join the Europeans at the negotiations with Iran?

Though Bush administration officials had publicly always dismissed that possibility, officials at the highest levels -- including Cheney, frequently but inaccurately portrayed as an adamant foe of joining the talks -- realized that soon the administration would be forced to grapple with the question, five U.S. officials said in interviews last week. Otherwise, the options seemed to either be that Iran would get the bomb or the United States would be drawn into another war.

"We knew it was a card we had to play at some point," one senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, adding that the issue was at what time and under what conditions.

Last Wednesday, Rice made the announcement. The next day, in Vienna, she used the U.S. offer to secure an accord with Russia, China and the Europeans to present Iran with a choice of either inducements to return to negotiations or face action in the Security Council.

Iran has reacted warily, so the impact of the decision will not be clear for some time. But the administration's about-face, as recounted by U.S. officials, shows the dominant influence of Rice on the policymaking process. A year ago, she persuaded Bush to back the European talks with Iran. Conservatives were concerned but went along, thinking the European effort would fail. Now, Rice has moved the administration to a point unimaginable at the start of the second term.

"Condi felt the need to jump-start the talks and take control of the situation," a second official said.

The troubled Iraq war also hangs over Iran diplomacy. Administration officials have little confidence in the intelligence on Iran's programs, while allies overseas view U.S. actions through the prism of Iraq. That concern has forced the administration to emphasize diplomacy to avoid the breach with its allies that characterizes the Iraq war.

On May 8, as Rice flew to New York to meet with foreign ministers from Europe, China and Russia on Iran, she started to bring her closest aides, such as Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, into the discussion. She pulled out a calendar, which she had marked up in multicolored pens to note key dates, such as a Group of Eight meeting in Russia in July.

She also focused on Iran's claim that by year's end it hoped to have a 3,000-centrifuge cascade for enriching uranium.

The meeting with the foreign ministers was acrimonious and lasted well into the night. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out at Burns because, at Rice's instruction, Burns had called repeatedly for Russia to stop selling arms to Iran. Despite the heated words, the meeting set in motion the talks that led to the Vienna announcement. The foreign ministers agreed to set aside any Security Council resolution against Iran and instead come up with a list of proposals that would sharpen the choice for Iran. "We needed to test the Iranians," a third official said.

Officials said there was essentially no dissent among Bush's top advisers on joining the talks. The Pentagon raised no objections, and the only cautionary tone came from Cheney, who said that the shift should not lead the administration down a "slippery slope," in which they end up retreating from their core red line: an end to enrichment and reprocessing -- the two paths toward fissile material. The group agreed to hold their red line.

Bush made it clear he did not want the United States to be seen as weak in making this move, officials added.

During the week of May 13, under strict secrecy, Rice assembled a small group of her closest aides to figure out how to structure and package the announcement. The group included Burns, Undersecretary for Arms Control Robert Joseph, counselor Philip Zelikow, senior adviser Jim Wilkinson, chief of staff Brian F. Gunderson and spokesman Sean McCormack. They were told to inform none of their aides and make no photocopies of documents. Meetings of the group in Rice's office were obscured on Rice's calendar by listing it under "security issues."

Joseph was assigned to write Rice's statement. Gunderson, a former Hill staffer, focused on selling the policy shift to key lawmakers while McCormack and Wilkinson developed a strategy on how to showcase the announcement. Officials wanted the Iranians to understand that this was a genuine offer, so it was decided that Rice would speak in the State Department's ornate Benjamin Franklin Room, giving the event a presidential aura.

The weekend before the announcement, Rice went to Camp David to make the final pitch to Bush. Her team had worked up answers to address questions from Bush about the wisdom of the move. Bush ultimately gave his final approval after speaking with key foreign leaders.

On Tuesday, the day before the announcement, Rice let U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton -- long a skeptic about dealing with Iran -- in on the secret. Bolton then joined Rice, Hadley and Joseph over dinner -- and was asked to call conservative commentators the next day to explain the decision.

Staff writer Dafna Linzer contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/03/AR2006060300237.html

BUMBAY DA DOGG · Jun 4, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

great info!

VegasGuy · Jun 4, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

She is one tenacious spirit. I find it amazing that we as a people have produced a Black woman with her skill and talent. As much as I don't agree with all she is tasked with doing from the Bush administration, she is handling her business.

-VG

muckraker10021 · Jun 5, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

I find it amazing that we as a people have produced a Black woman with her skill and talent.

Don’t be Amazed. Black women are then reason America even exist, much less lay claim to super power status. Black women raised Americas families, Black & white, Black women nursed & educated American children, Black & white. Black women satisfied the carnal urges of American men Black & white. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. You don’t have to go back many years to statistically see the effect of American Apartheid graphically manifested. In the year 1950, 50 percent of all employed Black women were maids!!! Think about that.

Now on to Condi Rice. Condi Rice has decided that it is in her own best

selfish interest, to use her education and associated talents to serve the interest of “White Supremacy”. That’s the path that she choose. There is not one instance in her entire career where she decided not to support or be a tool of “White Supremacy”. None! Whether she was the provost at Stanford University dealing with ‘affirmative action’, or on the board of directors of Chevron dealing with Nigeria and the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Hurricane Katrina, etc. she always decided to support or be a tool of “White Supremacy”. Do the research. 

If one wishes to see the antithesis, the alter-ego, the yin vs. yang, the diametric opposite of what Condi has turned out to be, we don’t have to stray to far from the ’Rice’ gene pool. Constance Rice, Condi’s cousin who she doesn’t talk to, represents the polar opposite of Condi, the sycophantic enabler for “White Supremacy”. It’s easy to understand why they have nothing to talk about. Condi's working to sustain "White Supremacy" while Constance is working for the people. 
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<img src="http://www.sfvic.org/VICEvents/Connie's Picsm.jpg" width="300" height="387">
<h2>Constance Rice</h2>
Constance Rice is Co-director of The Advancement Project, is known for her success in tackling problems of inequity and exclusion. She has received more than 50 major awards for her work in expanding opportunity and advancing multi-racial democracy.

Rice graduated from Harvard College in 1978. She won the Root Tilden Public Interest Scholarship to New York university School of Law, where she earned her law degree in 1984. After law school, she served as law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and worked at Morrison & Foerster as a litigation associate. In 1991, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and became co-director of LDF’s Los Angeles Office in 1996.

As a litigator, Rice has filed class action civil rights cases redressing police misconduct, race and sex discrimination and unfair public policy in transportation, probation and public housing. She filed a landmark case on behalf of low-income bus riders that resulted in a mandate that more than 2 billion dollars be spent to improve the bus system. And in 1999, Rice launched a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million for new school construction in Los Angeles - money previously slated for less crowded, more affluent suburban school districts. In these and other cases, Rice has led multi-racial coalitions of lawyers and clients to win more than $4 billion worth of injunctive relief and damages.

In her non-litigation work in the 1990s, Rice served as counsel to the Watts gang truce and spearheaded a statewide campaign to save equal opportunity programs. Mayors Tom Bradley and Richard Riordan appointed Rice to the governing board of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power where she served as president and enacted contracting reforms and environmental advances. In 1998, Rice helped lead a successful campaign to place aggressive public school reformers on the governing board for Los Angeles’ public schools.

In 1998, the LOS ANGELES TIMES designated her one of 24 leaders considered the "most experienced, civic-minded and thoughtful people on the subject of Los Angeles." And in October 2000, CALIFORNIA LAWBUSINESS named her, along with Governor Gray Davis and Warren Christopher, as one of California’s top 10 most influential lawyers. In May 2003, Rice received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Occidental College.

Rice is a co-founder of The Advancement Project, a public policy and legal action group that supports organizations working to end community problems and address racial, class and other barriers to opportunity.

[rm]http://media.pbs.org/ramgen/media4/now/020405/105rice-hi.rm?start=2:49[/rm]
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ronmch20 · Jun 5, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

I just wish this was her stance before her advocacy of pre-emptive war on Iraq caused the death of so many thousands of innocents. She along with the rest of the Bushees have major blood their hands. Retribution is in store for her because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

QueEx · Jun 6, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

`

<center>How the war in Iraq has changed the US approach to Iran ...
In President Bush's second term, with Condoleezza Rice at
the helm in the State Department, pragmatism has made a comeback</center>

[frame]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5048136.stm[/frame]

QueEx · Jun 15, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

<center>U.S. Must Play Role In World, Rice Says
Religious Group Applauds Speech</center>

Washington Post
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 15, 2006; Page A06

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, addressing 12,000 evangelicals who represent the core of the Bush administration's political base, yesterday sought to counter the stirrings of isolationism in the nation, declaring that the "United States must remain engaged as a leader in events beyond our borders."

"Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the choice before our country, before us as Americans," Rice told the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Greensboro, N.C. "Will we lead in the world or will we withdraw? Will we rise to the challenges of our time or will we shrink from them?"

President Bush first raised concerns about isolationism in his State of the Union address this year. Since then, the outrage over the potential sale of U.S. port operations to a Dubai-based company and the drive to build a wall along the border with Mexico have added to the worries of administration officials. They fear that it could result in demands even from the president's strongest traditional supporters to pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The venue for Rice's speech -- a religious group meeting in a huge convention hall -- was unusual for a secretary of state. Generally, on domestic trips, the chief diplomat speaks to foreign policy associations or universities. Rice's speech included highly personal references to her faith and religious upbringing, and the crowd broke into a spontaneous singing of "God Bless America" after she spoke.

Rice, a Presbyterian who said she prays every day, noted that she "was born on a Sunday morning" and that for the first three years of her life her family "literally lived in the back of the church in two little rooms where my father preached" and which her grandfather had founded. Her speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause, including seven standing ovations.

Rice did not specifically refer to "isolationism," but her inference was clear as she tried to link Southern Baptist work overseas "digging wells and building dams and strengthening communities" with the administration's goal of promoting democracy overseas. She said the nation could not ignore tyranny and persecution overseas or else it will come back to haunt Americans.

"These are tragedies, but they are also threats in the making," Rice said. "For in today's world, we have learned that whenever freedom and tolerance are on the march, we are secure. But when those ideals are in retreat, we are vulnerable."

Appealing to the evangelicals, Rice asked rhetorically: "If not for America," would issues such as religious liberty, human trafficking, HIV/AIDS prevention and violence in Sudan even be addressed?

Evangelical groups have played a major role in shaping the administration's agenda in many of these issues, such as promoting the "ABC" approach to AIDS prevention, which stands for "Abstain from sex; Be faithful; as a last resort, use a Condom." The administration has targeted prostitution as a key factor in the trade in human beings, and it has launched a diplomatic effort to resolve the conflict in Sudan in part because of Christians living in the south of that country.

Rice said that Bush has made religious liberty a key factor in whether the United States has good relations with another country. "We're mindful that too many people of faith can only whisper to God in the silent sanctuaries of their conscience," she said, citing China as an example of where "you cannot help but marvel at their faith and courage."

Addressing Iraq, Rice conceded the difficulties the administration has faced in prosecuting the war there, but she said "the goal of democracy in Iraq is worth the cost and worth the sacrifice."

"The mission has been extremely difficult," Rice said. "I know it's been far more difficult than many of us imagined it would be. And I realize how hard it can be to remain hopeful when we hear of death squads and beheadings and sectarian strife."

In an interview with the Greensboro News & Record before her speech, Rice ducked a question about her views on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage -- which Southern Baptists strongly support -- but urged that the debate be respectful.

"When we get into difficult debates about social policy, we get into difficult debates that touch people's lives, the only thing that I ask is that Americans do it with a kind of sensitivity that real individuals and real human beings are involved here," Rice said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6061402159.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

BRUCE LEROY · Jun 15, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

Thanks for the info. Although I do not agree with her position on most issues, I cannot deny the lady is sharp. She has risen to the top of her game and operates in the white dominated, corridors of power. One has to at least respect that. Even though she is Republican, she is not opposed to affirmative action...just quotas (her words).

QueEx · Aug 2, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

<center>If Condi Rice is Incompetent as Secretary of State,
It’s Not Why Most Folks Think</center>

Date: Sunday, July 30, 2006
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Deborah Mathis is a nationally syndicated
columnist and former White House corres-
pondent for the Gannett News Service.
She is the author of two books, Yet A
Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don't
Feel at Home and Sole Sister: The Joys
and Pain of Single Black Women.

It was bound to happen that Condoleezza Rice’s magic would fade. She had a long honeymoon, but it may be over. Last week, Republicans -- that’s right, Republicans -- began whispering that the secretary of state was in over her head in dealing with the sticky, maddening, always impetuous Middle East. Some even tossed around the “I” word -- incompetence.

I, for one, never believed Rice deserved to be the nation’s top diplomat, but not because she doesn’t possess the intelligence and experience for the job; I think she does. Rice is no Harriet Myers, who may well have lacked the chops to sit on the highest court in the land, especially considering she had never so much as presided over traffic court. It’s just as well that she slithered back to the White House counsel’s office to affirm more bum decisions by the client-in-chief.

Rice has the portfolio. Her academic credentials are strong and impressive. She certainly has the charm thing down. And she was, after all, national security adviser. The woman knows her stuff, no doubt.

What makes her unfit as secretary of state is not that she doesn’t know what to do to make things better for global relationships, but rather that she doesn’t do it. The man who got her gig prefers dictation over diplomacy and lording over listening. It’s his way or the highway, and Condi Rice is his parrot.

As a black woman -- that incident of nature that she reminds us of from time to time even when her hair is behaving -- Rice has to know about feeling neglected, marginalized, unwanted, excluded, punished for being an “other.” She apparently lived a rather sheltered life in segregated Alabama, but the reality was all around her, so there’s no doubt she can relate.

Yet, she identifies with the white might that shaped her into a world-renown figure and shuts out those desperate voices that Hezbollah, though devilishly, adopted as its own.

And because she has repeatedly covered for George W. Bush’s ineptitude and arrogance, at least half of the parties to the current conflict have no faith in what she says and worry about being seen talking to her. In short, she has no street cred on the Arab street where many of the world’s troubles are now headquartered.

Actually, Ms. Rice is the second secretary of state to succumb to Bush’s intimidation. Her predecessor, the once prestigious Colin Powell, was a striking figure on the world stage too. Until he was tossed aside by the Bush cabal because he wouldn’t play along.

They wouldn’t dare get rid of Condoleezza Rice, would they? Aren’t her blackness, her womanhood and her reputation insurance enough? Then again, what transgressions have Bush and his boys paid for? If past is prologue, they’d get away with that too.

I suppose, then, the woman has no choice. Either she goes along to get along, or she hits the bricks, fading into the dark night as a newly minted nutcase -- the fable the Bush folks tend to spin on all insiders who jump ship.

But this is precisely why she does not belong in that storied chair. Politics is one thing. Professional survival is one thing. But public service is another.

Bush may hold her future in her hands, but ultimately Rice is beholden not to the man who gave her the job, but to the country that gave him his.

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/mathis731

QueEx · Aug 2, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

Is Debra Mathis envious ???

QueEx · Sep 14, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

<center>Rice keeps her cool as papers play matchmaker</center>

The Times (London)
From Tim Reid in Washington
September 14, 2006

IN private moments, Condoleezza Rice concedes that being the world’s most famous diplomat can be exasperating.

There is a war on terror to fight, a volatile Middle East, an Iran with nuclear ambitions, sectarian strife in Iraq — not to mention endless speculation about her love life.

In the latest demonstration of the perils of being an attractive, articulate, female — and single — Dr Rice, the US Secretary of State, returned from an official visit to Canada yesterday with the North American press obsessed with one issue. It was not the number of Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

After spending two days in the company of Peter MacKay, Canada’s handsome, athletic — and single — foreign minister, Dr Rice’s aides were, not for the first time, dismissing fevered speculation about her relationship with a diplomatic counterpart.

“No, there were no candles,” Sean McCormick, a State Department spokesman replied with tired resignation when reporters asked about a working dinner that Dr Rice and Mr MacKay shared on Monday night. “It was a well-lighted [sic] dinner, with electricity-based lighting.”

He added that it was hardly an intimate affair, as 14 aides and six security guards also attended.

But such disclaimers did little to end the gossip, especially after Dr Rice admitted during a press conference that she had been introduced to Mr MacKay’s family when she visited his hometown of Stellerton, Nova Scotia. “Family means a great deal to me,” Dr Rice, 51, said. “They remind you of the things that you do when you were five years old.”

Mr MacKay, 11 years her junior and a member of Stephen Harper’s conservative Government, then chipped in: “Something else I’ve learnt about Secretary Rice is she loves the cool Atlantic breezes here in Nova Scotia, and she left the window open last night.” He had previously declared himself a “fan” of Dr Rice and said that the two share a “chemistry”.

As the collected reporters giggled, Dr Rice added: “The view, the air — I slept so well. This really is a lovely place.” Later she added: “This has been a lovely trip, Peter.” Mr MacKay was recently dumped by his girlfriend, the Canadian politician Belinda Stronach, who had been linked to Bill Clinton, the former US President. In April rumours swirled about Dr Rice and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary. They, too, enjoyed a genuinely warm and platonic relationship after it emerged that he accepted her offer of the only bed on her official aircraft. Mr Straw and Dr Rice also visited each other’s home towns, Blackpool, and Birmingham, Alabama.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2356904,00.html

QueEx · Sep 14, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

<center>When `stars' collide
Media go gaga over meeting of single and similarly
`sophisticated' political counterparts</center>

Toronto Star
Sep. 14, 2006. 01:00 AM
HELENE COOPER
NEW YORK TIMES

STELLARTON, N.S.—There are perils to being unattached in the stodgy world of diplomacy. Sometimes it has seemed that all Condoleezza Rice needs to do is show up in public with a man, and people start talking.

The single, sophisticated U.S. secretary of state once drew notice for wearing black stiletto knee-high boots with an above-the-knee black skirt while reviewing U.S. troops in Germany, so she is bound to attract gossip. That is particularly true on the dry, acronym-ridden diplomatic circuit of NATO meetings, APEC forums and ASEAN conclaves, where much imagination has focused on possible romantic links between Rice and her counterparts.

Until now, Rice's rumoured matches have been, shall we say, unlikely ever to appear on the cover of GQ magazine. In July, Italy's normally staid Corriere della Sera raised its eyebrows over a joint appearance in Rome by Italy's similarly staid foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, and Rice; in April, a headline in The Boston Globe promised a tale of "Jack and Condi: A Love Story," after Rice gave the pullout bed aboard her plane to former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, during a trip to Baghdad from Blackpool, England, where she was visiting Straw's hometown.

But it took a two-hour flight to Halifax this week, followed by a 90-minute motorcade north up Highway 102 to Pictou County, for Rice to find herself linked to someone with similar star appeal: Peter MacKay of Canada, the single, sophisticated foreign affairs minister, routinely named Canada's sexiest MP by The Hill Times in Ottawa, and the closest thing to eye candy on the diplomatic circuit. Tall, athletic, young, blond and dumped 16 months ago by his girlfriend — fellow MP Belinda Stronach, who split when she switched from the Conservatives to the Liberals — MacKay does not look like your usual foreign minister.

MacKay has a tan and the build of someone who spends time on the rugby field, not holed up reading G-8 communiqués. Sure, at 40 he's younger than Rice, 51, but that didn't stop gossips from engaging in baseless speculating.

Even the protestors who routinely show up wherever Rice goes got in on the act. "Pete, Condi, Make Love Not War," read one sign, carried by a grinning demonstrator who'd roused himself to take a position early Tuesday morning in front of the Museum of Industry in Stellarton, where the two appeared to talk to local leaders and the media. Okay, there needs to be a disclaimer right here. Foreign ministers rarely have a lot of alone time together. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest Rice and MacKay are linked by anything more than their shared status as singletons.

The U.S. State Department has been quick to dump cold water over MacKay-Rice innuendoes. "No, there were no candles," spokesman Sean McCormack said in exasperation when reporters asked for further details about a working dinner on Monday when the two sat side by side at the Pictou Lodge Resort. McCormack pointed out the dinner was not even intimate: 14 aides and six security guards were present. "It was a well-lighted dinner, with electricity-based lighting," McCormack said.

But reporters tend to get bored pretty fast — there is only so much ink anyone can devote to softwood lumber trade spats and overfishing in the North Atlantic. And a bored reporter is a gossipy reporter, as demonstrated by the chatter last year after U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took a dinner cruise up a Norwegian fjord and sipped wine with his counterpart, the attractive Norwegian Defence Minister Kristin Krohn Devold. (She gave him a sweater; he gave her a designer bag.)

If you believe the blogs, MacKay has been sweet on Rice since their first meeting in Washington last year. "Peter McKay has a crush," said a headline on the website NowPublic, atop a giant photo of Rice, "on Condoleezza Rice. Well, they are both single after all."

The two do keep offering up tantalizing tidbits and comments to take out of context and misconstrue. For instance, after the Rome meeting in July, Rice gave MacKay a ride aboard her plane to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a conference with Southeast Asian countries. Okay, the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, got a lift too, but he looks like, well, a diplomat.

On Tuesday morning, Rice and MacKay strolled up to their side-by-side dais to talk to the folks here. "I am just delighted to have Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, here in my hometown," gushed a beaming MacKay.

He switched to bad French, even to American ears, and said something about Longfellow's poem, "Evangeline." He mentioned Nova Scotia's rich black history, citing the "black Loyalist community, Canada's oldest community of African heritage." Then, he said, "Something else I've learned about Secretary Rice is she loves the cool Atlantic breezes here in Nova Scotia and she left the window open last night." The audience tittered. At the end of his speech, he took off his glasses, turned to Rice and said, "Please come back again."

Rice, clad in a yellow jacket, black pencil skirt and black stilettos, also offered plenty of fodder. She repeatedly called MacKay "Peter" (he called her "Secretary Rice" or "Miss Rice''), confirmed the sleeping-with-the-window-open bit, and then told the assembled local leaders that MacKay had introduced her to his family, including his father and stepmother, the night before.

Family is important, she said, with a sly smile, because "they remind you of the things you did when you were 5 years old." Beside her, MacKay grinned and blushed.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...325&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724

Makkonnen · Sep 14, 2006

Re: The Condoleeza Doctrine

the bitch is a criminal like the rest of the white house personnel

African Herbsman · Oct 2, 2006

Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory

We don't believe you

Rice: No memory of CIA warning of attack

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer1 hour, 19 minutes ago

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

Rice was President Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and the CIA's top counterterror officer.

"I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," Rice said.

Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, Rice said she met with Tenet daily at that point, and has no memory of the wake-up call from Tenet described in the book.

"It kind of doesn't ring true that you have to shock me into something I was very involved in," Rice said.

There was near constant discussion of possible attacks overseas, and high alarm, Rice said.

The meeting between Tenet, Rice and Cofer Black of the CIA was not mentioned in the reports from several investigations of the Sept. 11 attacks, but Woodward wrote that it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

Tenet asked for the meeting after receiving a disturbing briefing from Black, according to the book.

But though Tenet and Black warned Rice in the starkest terms of the prospects for attack, she brushed them off, Woodward reiterated Monday. He told NBC's "Today" show that Black told him the two men were so emphatic, it amounted to "holding a gun to her head" and doing everything except pulling the trigger.

Black reportedly laid out secret intercepts and other data "showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaida would soon attack the United States." Tenet was so worried that he called Rice from his car and asked to see her right away, the book said.

"Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice," Woodward wrote of the session. "She was polite, but they felt the brush-off."

Rice referred to the session as "the supposed meeting" and noted that it is not part of the independent Sept. 11 Commission's report.

"I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that," Rice told reporters. "We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous."

Rice, who was promoted to secretary of state in Bush's second term, also said she never argued that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should be fired. The book's suggestion that Rumsfeld would not take her calls is "ludicrous," Rice said.

Rumsfeld and Rice are not close, and he is often considered her rival in administration decision making. Woodward wrote that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card twice tried to get Bush to sack Rumsfeld and replace him with Bush family counselor James A. Baker III, and that both then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice backed the plan.

Woodward interviewed Rice for his new book.

Rice's latest Middle East trip is focused on strengthening support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other moderate Arab leaders after a series of setbacks for democratic and moderate forces in the region.

Her trip includes visits to allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt and a meeting of other friendly nations that ring the Persian Gulf, before visits to Israel and the West Bank.

Rice is looking for new ways to improve Abbas' standing in his standoff with Hamas radicals trounced Abbas' secular Fatah Party in Palestinian elections in January. Abbas was elected separately and retains his position, but he has been hamstrung by the divided government and a cutoff of Western aid.

The Bush administration and Israel are increasingly convinced Hamas will crumble, and look to Abbas to capitalize. Rice may ask other countries to do more to bolster Abbas' security forces, and she hopes to breathe life into stalled agreements and talks that would help Palestinians move more freely across their borders with Israel.

Iran's nuclear ambitions will also be part of Rice's discussions, as an unofficial deadline passes this week for Iran to heed a U.N. Security Council demand to shelve disputed nuclear activities.

Rice said Sunday she may close her trip Friday with a meeting of world powers in Europe to look at what to do next. The United States wants to press for U.N. Security Council sanctions, but it is not clear she has full support from other permanent members of the council.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061002...ckRlLaWwvIE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

QueEx · Oct 3, 2006

Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory

<center>Tenet Recalled Warning Rice
Former CIA Chief Told 9/11 Commission of Disputed Meeting</center>

Washington POst
By Dan Eggen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; Page A03

Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there.

Tenet's statements to the commission in January 2004 confirm the outlines of an event in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that has been disputed by some Bush administration officials. But the testimony also is at odds with Woodward's depiction of Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black as being frustrated that "they were not getting through to Rice" after the July 10, 2001, meeting.

Rice angrily rejected those assertions yesterday, saying that it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence from senior CIA officials and that she received no warning at the meeting of an attack within the United States.

Rice acknowledged that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during that period, but said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan.

"What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told -- as this account apparently says -- that there was about to be an attack in the United States," Rice said. "The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

The meeting has become the focus of a fierce and often confusing round of finger-pointing involving Rice, the White House and the 9/11 Commission, all of whom dispatched staffers to the National Archives and other locations yesterday in attempts to sort out what had occurred.

Members of the commission -- an independent, bipartisan panel created by Congress to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks -- have said for days that they were not told about the July 10 meeting and were angry at being left out. As recently as yesterday afternoon, both commission chairman Thomas H. Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said they believed the panel had not been told about the July 10 meeting.

But it turns out that the panel was, in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet. The meeting was not identified by the July 10 date in the commission's best-selling report.

Rice added to the confusion yesterday by strongly suggesting that the meeting may never have occurred at all -- even though administration officials had conceded for several days that it had. A State Department spokesman said later that while the meeting definitely happened, Rice and Tenet disputed Woodward's characterization of her response.

"The briefing was a summary of the threat reporting from the previous weeks," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters traveling with Rice in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. "There was nothing new."

Despite this, McCormack said, Rice asked that Tenet provide the same briefing to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. The two men received it by July 17, he said. McCormack was unable to explain why Rice felt the briefing should be repeated if it did not include new material.

Ashcroft said in an interview yesterday that he was never briefed by Tenet or Black about an imminent domestic threat.

"I didn't get called on by Black or Tenet if they were going around doing such briefings," Ashcroft said. "If in fact they were making visits to emphasize the severity of the domestic threat, I'm a little disappointed they didn't bring that information to my attention."

Neither Black nor Tenet has made any public comments about the assertions in Woodward's book. Woodward declined yesterday to comment in detail, saying only that he stood by his reporting.

Tenet gave testimony about the July 2001 meeting with Rice at his Langley headquarters office on Jan. 28, 2004, occasionally referring to charts and slides. Philip Zelikow, who at the time was the commission's executive director and now works for Rice, was present along with other commission staff members, according to Ben-Veniste and to a portion of the transcript, which was read to The Washington Post by an official with access to it.

At one point in the lengthy session, Tenet recalled a briefing he was given on July 10 by Black and his staff, according to the transcript. He said the information was so important that he quickly called for a car and telephoned Rice to arrange for a White House meeting to share what he had just learned, according to the transcript and Ben-Veniste.

According to the transcript, Tenet told Rice there were signs that there could be an al-Qaeda attack in weeks or perhaps months, that there would be multiple, simultaneous attacks causing major human casualties, and that the focus would be U.S. targets, facilities or interests. But the intelligence reporting focused almost entirely on the attacks occurring overseas, Tenet told the commission.

It was at this session that Tenet said "the system was blinking red," which became a chapter title in the commission report, according to the official who saw the transcript.

According to three people present at the session, including Ben-Veniste, Tenet believed that Rice responded seriously to what she had been told. "We particularly questioned him about whether he had the sense that Dr. Rice and the others on the White House side understood the gravity of what he was telling them," said Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. "He said that they believed that they did. . . . We asked him further whether Dr. Rice just shrugged this off, and he said he did not have such an impression."

Ben-Veniste's comments seem to contradict his own remarks over the weekend to the New York Times, in which he said that "the meeting was never mentioned to us." Ben-Veniste said yesterday that there was confusion between two different meetings and that the meeting described by Tenet is different in character from the one portrayed by Woodward.

Zelikow, who now works as one of Rice's closest aides as a State Department counselor, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. He told the New York Times that none of the commission's witnesses had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting or had outlined the type of confrontation with Rice described by Woodward.

In comments to reporters, Rice also denied that she had endorsed ousting Rumsfeld at the end of Bush's first term, although she said she did tell President Bush that he might want to consider changing his entire foreign policy team.

"I did tell the president at one point that I thought maybe all of us should go, because we had fought two wars and had the largest terrorist attack in American history," Rice said. "When he asked me to be secretary of state, I said I think maybe you need new people. I don't know if that was somehow interpreted, but what I was actually talking about was me."

Wright reported from Shannon, Ireland, and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100200187.html

QueEx · Oct 3, 2006

Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory

<center>State Dept. Confirms Rice-Tenet Meeting</center>

Washington Post
By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; 11:58 AM

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.

In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting _ on July 10, 2001 _ that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.

A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.

Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.

"We can confirm that a meeting took place on or around July 10, 2001," McCormack said late Monday.

"The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks," he added.

Woodward's book "State of Denial" recounts the meeting among then-CIA Director George Tenet, Rice and the CIA's top counterterror officer. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

McCormack said that after the meting, Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Materials from this meeting were made available to the independent Sept. 11 Commission, and Tenet was asked about the session when interviewed by the commission, McCormack said.

The meeting is not part of the commission report, but was referred to obliquely in a report by the commission's predecessor, a joint congressional panel that investigated the 9/11 attacks. That report said that "senior U.S. government officials were advised by the intelligence community on June 28 and July 10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to 'have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties' and that 'attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'"

Meanwhile, Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Ashcroft said. He said both Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after bin Laden and his followers in the United States and should have briefed him as well. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.

According to the Sept. 11 Commission, Ashcroft was briefed on July 5, 2001, "warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent." The report noted that the briefing addressed only threats outside the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100300410.html

muckraker10021 · Oct 4, 2006

Re: Rice Was Warned


Rice More Sordid Than Foley

How can someone who can remember an entire piano
concerto not remember a critical briefing?

by Robert Scheer

Oct 3, 2006

They are such liars. And no, I am not speaking only of the dissembling GOP House leaders led by Speaker Dennis Hastert who, out of naked political calculation, covered up for one of their own in the sordid teen stalking case of Rep. Mark Foley.

Call me old school, but I am still more concerned with the Republicans molesting Lady Liberty while pretending to be guarding the nation's security, an assignment which they have totally botched.
The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation.

On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, "State of Denial."

"I don't remember a so-called emergency meeting," Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission. The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent. Surely lying under oath in what was arguably the most important official investigation in the nation's history should be treated more seriously than the evasiveness in the Paula Jones case that got President Bill Clinton impeached. Nor is it just Rice who should be challenged, for Tenet seems to have provided Woodward with details concerning the administration's indifference to the terrorist threat that he did not share with the 9/11 Commission.
<div align="left">
<img src="http://quest.cjonline.com/images/121800/rice.jpg" align="left" width="290" height="226" border="5">
</div>
In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against Al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.

"Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away," Woodward reports. "He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action." A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.

Now, if Rice truly does not remember that now-confirmed meeting--which was apparently first reported in the Aug. 4, 2002, Time magazine in an article titled "Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?"--wouldn't that indicate she didn't take it that seriously? Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports at a time the Bush administration was already fixated on "regime change" in Iraq.

Rice is famously sharp and has an awesome memory. Considering the trauma of 9/11 and its effects, it is inconceivable that Rice would not recall such an ominous and prescient briefing by Tenet and Black, especially after the 9/11 Commission forced her to document and review her actions in those crucial months.

It is, however, as she stated Monday, "incomprehensible" that she, then the national security advisor to the president and the person most clearly charged with sounding the alarm, would have ignored the threat. But ignore it the administration did, and then later tried to lay the blame on the Clinton administration, which, Rice claimed at the 9/11 Commission hearings, lied when it said it had given the incoming White House team an action plan for fighting Al Qaeda.

"We were not presented with a plan," Rice infamously argued under questioning from then-Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), but instead were given a memo with "a series of actionable items" describing how to tackle Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Such weaseling would be funny if the topic were not so serious. But there is no way Rice can squirm out of this one, despite her impressive track record of calculated distortion on everything from Iraq's nonexistent WMDs to the trumped-up ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Can there be any better case for turning over control of at least one branch of Congress to the opposition party so that we might finally have hearings to learn the truth of this matter, which is far more important, and sordid, than the Foley affair?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/200601003_robert_scheer_liars/

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>

Condi's Conundrum 
Is she lying about her pre-9/11 briefing warning of a terrorist attack? 


by Justin Raimondo

October 4, 2006

 The <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282.html?nav=rss_print/asection">revelation</a> in Bob Woodward's new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/State-Denial-Bush-War-Part/dp/0743272234/antiwarbookstore">State of Denial</a>, that Condoleezza Rice (then national security adviser to the president) brushed off CIA chief George Tenet when he came to her a few months before 9/11 with dire warnings of an imminent terrorist attack, is blasting this administration's credibility out of the water – and seriously undercutting the "official" 9/11 narrative.
 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/State-Denial-Bush-War-Part/dp/0743272234/antiwarbookstore"><img src="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/state-of-denial.jpg" alt="letter" width="150" height="229" hspace="15" vspace="7" border="0" align="right" /></a>That narrative, as <a href="http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html">approved</a> by the 9/11 Commission and certified by all the most "responsible" pundits, goes something like this: for at least five years, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizers_of_the_September_11,_2001_attacks#List_of_the_hijackers">19 al-Qaeda operatives</a> traveled to and fro within the United States, taking <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5295397">flying lessons</a>, and going completely undetected, until, one bright autumn day, they hijacked four airliners and managed to ram two into the <a href="http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/fig1.gif">World Trade Center</a> and another into <a href="http://www.wtv-zone.com/AttackonAmerica/AoA/Graphics/pentagon.jpg">the Pentagon</a>. The biggest terrorist attack in our history was carried out – according to the conspiracy-theory-free version of the event – with <a href="http://www.rcfp.org/moussaoui/pdf/DX-0941.pdf">no state support</a> [.pdf], and no warning. This administration <a href="http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0503c.asp">never saw it coming</a> – that has been the "defense" proffered by the Bush regime and its few remaining apologists as questions about their competence and culpability are raised.
<div align="left"><table border="5" width="374" id="table1" cellspacing="1" height="278" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000" align="left"><tr><td><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10023/rice_bush_failure.png" border="5"></td></tr></table></div>
 An odd apologia indeed: We're clueless, therefore blameless. If such <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j021302.html">Bizarro World</a> "logic" evades your understanding, that's just because you're a member of the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_based_community">reality-based community</a>" – a special interest group whose lobby doesn't wield <a href="http://www.cs.umass.edu/%7Eimmerman/play/opinion05/WithoutADoubt.html">much</a> clout in Washington.
 As it turns out, however, there <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/05/16/spin/index.html">were</a> warnings – and plenty of them – from <a href="http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=essaytheytriedtowarnus">foreign intelligence agencies</a> and from within <a href="http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0205/intelligence.timeline/content.8c.html">our</a> <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/printer_2469.shtml">own</a> <a href="http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/moussaoui/zmsamit.html">government</a>, including one from <a href="http://************/ol46o">the head of the CIA</a>, who was accompanied at his July 2001 meeting with Rice by another top CIA official, <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602black.html">Cofer Black</a>, cited by Woodward as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282_pf.html">saying</a>: "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
 Rice, it seems to me, is the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2098499/">weak link</a> in the chain of deception that holds the official narrative together: you'll remember her <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/29/i_ins.00.html">extreme reluctance</a> to testify at the 9/11 Commission hearing, and her subsequent revelation, when <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ackerman033004">finally</a> shamed into making an appearance, of a presidential daily briefing headlined "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/">Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S.</a>" And now <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100300410.html">this</a>.
 The Bush administration just wasn't focused on the possibility of a terrorist attack, as Woodward relates:
 "Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place."
 That place was Iraq. In the summer of 2001, as the propaganda campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq began to take off, the Bush administration was embroiled in an <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/floyd/floyd31.html">internecine struggle</a> pitting <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html">the neoconservatives</a> against the remnants of the "<a href="http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_20/feature.html">realists</a>" left over from the days of Bush I. As Joshua Micah Marshall <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0206.marshall.html">chronicles</a> it:
 "The hawks came in wanting to put regime change at or near the top of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda. What they didn't figure on was how much of a hurdle Colin Powell, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, would present. … In bureaucratic battles over the summer of 2001, Powell and Armitage made sure that 'regime change,' though nominally administration policy, lacked teeth. 
 "All of that changed after September 11…."
 Rice has always played the role of a neocon-facilitator. In the run-up to war, her office – in the person of her chief adviser, Stephen J. Hadley – gave a pass to every tall tale that came out of the neocons' Pentagon policy shop, including the <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5412317/site/newsweek">Mohammed Atta-in-Prague story</a> and the <a href="http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10506">Niger uranium forgeries</a>, and assiduously blocked any reports – including those from <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2172">Richard Clarke</a>, former counter-terrorism chief – indicating that the alleged Iraq-9/11 connection was <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14824384/site/newsweek/">bogus</a>.
 Clarke's report, which concluded that Iraq had <a href="http://************/hb9mk">nothing whatsoever</a> to do with the events of 9/11, had the joint imprimatur of the CIA and the FBI. It got no further than Condi Rice's office, where it elicited a brief but sharp rebuke from "the national security adviser or deputy" – "Wrong answer," went the note at the top of the Clarke report. "Do it again."
 Condi certainly gave Tenet and Black the wrong answer when asked to take immediate action against al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001: unfortunately, this administration can't "do it again." But before Democrats seek to take partisan advantage of this, they need to be reminded that the Clinton administration – for all the brouhaha over the much-vaunted terrorist threat, and the billions spent on supposedly preventing it – also proved supremely indifferent to the danger posed by bin Laden & Co.
 As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer">Michael Scheuer</a>, the head of the CIA's al-Qaeda unit until 1999, <a href="http://newsbusters.org/node/7438">relates</a>, the Clinton administration had plenty of opportunities to move against bin Laden, and there was actionable intelligence as to his whereabouts. A plan had been drawn up to go after him in his family compound in Afghanistan, and was all set to go – but was called off at the last minute by Clinton administration officials for the fear of inflicting civilian casualties, as there were several women and children reportedly in the encampment.
 That all of this is coming up around election time is hardly coincidental: both parties want to use 9/11 for their own political purposes. The <a href="http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/100406/ricebrief.html">Democrats</a> want to show that a Republican administration was <a href="http://x6f.xanga.com/f1bb4af34673044084243/z29835429.jpg">asleep at the wheel</a> and largely disinclined to pay attention to its own intelligence, and the Republicans underscore the haplessness of the Clintonites, who were too busy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade">bombing</a> some of the oldest <a href="http://www.kosovo.net/natobomb.html">cities</a> in Europe to pay attention to the deadly threat posed by bin Laden. We have come to a unique moment in the world of Washington politics when we can say that both parties are right. Yet this hardly gets to the heart of the matter, and is, at best, of limited help in preventing future terrorist attacks on American soil.
 If we look at the organizational history of <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ladin.htm">al-Qaeda</a>, it is clear that it was created, in large part, by the U.S. during the war of "liberation" (version 1.0) against the Soviet occupiers. The Americans <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-Extraordinary-Operation/dp/0871138549/antiwarbookstore">facilitated</a>, <a href="http://************/qfsvb">encouraged</a>, and <a href="http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200212/05/eng20021205_107994.shtml">otherwise collaborated</a> with bin Laden until he <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/edicts.html">turned against them</a>. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were "<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson">blowback</a>" of singular ferocity, the unintended consequence of a foreign policy founded on the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-Peace-Harry-Elmer-Barnes/dp/0939484013">principle</a> that no country is too distant or too obscure to escape our ministrations. The principle of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4187361.stm">global interventionism</a> informs and directs the policymaking apparatus no matter which party is in power – and that is the problem.
 This is the larger context of the 9/11 attacks, but there is much to be learned from a close-up look at what was going on in the months and weeks leading up to that fatal day. There was all that "chatter" that set Tenet, Black, and Richard Clarke on their futile mission to alert the president and his top advisers to the imminence of the threat. And, it turns out, there was a lot of static in the intelligence pipeline – including a series of attempted penetrations of secure U.S. government facilities by <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index_np.html">mysterious Israeli "art students,"</a> which at least one intelligence official describes as a "diversion."
 The 9/11 narrative contains all kinds of weird anomalies, such as <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744&contrassID=/has%5C">this</a> – and not to mention <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcON2XbFR3I&NR">this</a>, which has one of the <a href="http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707">five Israelis apprehended</a> in the New York metropolitan area who were observed jumping for joy at the downing of the World Trade Center admitting that (1) they were accused of being <a href="http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_document.php?article_id=137">Mossad agents</a>, and (2) "Our purpose was to document the event." Sounds like at least a hint of foreknowledge to me, but then nothing of this was so much as mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report. U.S. government officials forced to comment on reports <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiAC6FEN15o">in the mainstream media</a> that the Israelis had at least some foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks dismissed them as an "<a href="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j031302.html">urban myth</a>."
<div align="right">
<img src="http://idisk.mac.com/jenlart/Public/Condismile.jpg" align="right" width="350" height="230" border="5"></div>
 There is much we don't know about the events surrounding 9/11, and getting information out of this administration has been like pulling teeth. Now we know why Condi was so <a href="http://www.thehill.com/news/032404/rice.aspx">unwilling</a> to even appear before the 9/11 Commission. Her conundrum is to convince the public that she somehow "forgot" an unusual meeting with Tenet and Black two months before 9/11 in which she demurred when urged to take immediate action against the threat posed by bin Laden. As Max Cleland put it when he resigned from the Commission to protest the administration's stonewalling, "<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/1546256">They will never give the full story</a>."
 They may not give it out freely, but the full story is there, waiting to be discovered. And slowly but surely it will come out, all of it – unless and until another terrorist attack makes it almost irrelevant.

http://antiwar.printthis.clickabili...&url=http://antiwar.com/justin/#&partnerID=16

QueEx · Jan 13, 2007

Re: German abduction case gets murkier - did U.S. pay?

[frame]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6258027.stm[/frame]

QueEx · Jan 13, 2007

Re: German abduction case gets murkier - did U.S. pay?

[frame]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6259061.stm[/frame]

QueEx · Jan 26, 2007

Re: Condoleeza For President ?

15 months ago

Garifuna · Jan 28, 2007

Re: Condoleeza For President ?

QueEx said:
Were Dr Rice to agree, her Democrat opponent could be another woman - Sen Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady.

It would be like having two Black coaches in the superbowl; one HAS to win.

Any guess as to which?

The Democratic candidate would be a woman whose husband is a former President, and the Republican candidate would be a woman whose "husband" is the current President. :lol:

Accra · Feb 3, 2007

Re: Condoleeza For President ?

QueEx said:
Well, so far, she's been the darling of the media and a lot of white people, hasn't she ??? Why would they suddenly turn against her ??? They could and the might -- but what makes you think so ???

I thought it was just that -- her affiliation with the Bush administration -- that has propelled her to new heights. Except maybe for a misstep on Iraq or some other unforeseen international crisis that might arise, which she or Bush may make before 2007-1/2 (because they will be lots of opportunity to do so in the next 2 1/2 years) if Condi is elected, wouldn't it have a lot to do with her affiliation with the present administration -- hence -- dispelling the notion that that affiliation would discredit her legitimacy ???

The attack on her legitimacy, thus far, has come more from segments of the Black community, than anywhere else. If elected, would WE attempt to scuttle her ??? More importantly, should we ???

Do you think congress would go to great lengths to wreck a Rice presidency because she's black ??? I disagree with that statement for a lot of reasons, but -- considering the sheer size of the African American and Latino vote, do you really believe that congress would be that blind ???

If you are right, how do you explain her being confirmed as SecState in the first place ??? Why would congress not filibuster her confirmation -- then turn around and do so to her presidency ???

Help me with the apparent contradictions.

QueEx

-------

I read your post, and it honestly seems to be the most educated response. I will reply to it in the same manner.

Let us put hardcore politics aside...

All things being equal, If Mr.Bush were black, do you think there would be a backlash against blacks for the mistakes he made ?

Yes, I do see that as a possibility.

When the rain started to fall with the Bush administration, was Condoleeza Rice anywhere to be seen ? In all honesty, having a black person in any position of power is a good thing for black people ( in the U.S.A and around the world ). Having a black president would be an example of what a black person can aspire to be if he/she so chooses, but it is too soon for a black president. I'm black, and I consider myself biased in that direction, but I think the pressure for a black president to do things that are considered correct would be too great. We all see how the decisions the American public made in electing Mr. Bush changed the face of the world. Luckily he wasn't a black man. I don't think having a black president so soon would be beneficial to the black population.

Bush's 'plan', albeit hastily created, was contributed to by a black person. Black people will get there one day.

hgbdark · Feb 10, 2007

Re: Condoleeza For President ?

condi is a joke...white folks love her, but she has proven herself to be a dupe/dolt by allowing the U.S. to fall into this swamp in iraq. she continues to lie and support this nonsense an is an insult to the black race. what has she done 'for' black people......can anybody tell me? she is not a bad person and i dont consider her a traitor or anything, but to put her own personal interests above those of her country 'and' her people is unforgivable....screw her and the dildo she is fucking!!!!!!!!!!!!!

QueEx · Feb 28, 2007

Re: Rice: War 'Mistakes' will be Rectified

<center>US switch on Iran adds 'missing link' 
The decision by the United States to attend a
conference in Baghdad with Iran and Syria adds
what many observers have felt was a "missing link"
in US policy in the region</center>

Analysis
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website
Wednesday, 28 February 2007, 11:59 GMT

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that as well as the official level Baghdad meeting, foreign ministers from the same countries would also meet "as early as the first half of April".

She did not say where this meeting would be held but the talk is of Istanbul.

Nor did she say whether she would be meeting the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki one-on-one.

The result, though, is that, having initially and forcefully rejected the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that the US should engage with Syria and Iran, the Bush administration is now doing just that.

These will be the highest-level contacts between the US and Iran for two years.

And they might be a little more fruitful than the one in 2004 between the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharrazi. They were put side by side at a dinner in Egypt and confined their talk to innocuous chitchat.

Questions

Two questions arise immediately: why is the US doing this and what impact will it have on the issue of Iran's nuclear activities?

Part of the answer to the first came from Ms Rice in her Senate statement. Basically she said that the administration had changed its mind.

She acknowledged both the Iraq Study Group by name and pressure from the Congress. "I've had very fruitful discussions," she said.

But another reason was outlined by White House officials who explained the recent American strategy of building up its pressure points on Iran. These, in Washington's view, were needed because at the end of last year, the US was in a very weak position.

Since then, it has got its diplomatic ducks in a row and now feels that it can afford to make this gesture from a stronger position, not as a supplicant. Washington will be demanding that Iran be more helpful to the Iraqi government.

The US pressure on Iran has grown in several ways: it has planned and begun to implement the surge of troops in Baghdad; it has ratcheted up the campaign by producing evidence against Iran linking it to explosive devices used against US forces; it has moved a second aircraft carrier into the Gulf.

It is taking advantage of a ruling by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has defied a deadline from the Security Council to suspend uranium enrichment and has began discussions to tighten sanctions on Iran.

It has also developed its aim of boosting the Iraqi government itself by urging it to put its own house in order.

For example, a new law on getting foreign oil companies to work in Iraq and on the sharing of revenue within Iraq has been agreed in framework.

So the US can present this change in policy over Iran as something that will bolster the Iraqi government further.

Iran on the other hand might regard the move as a sign of US weakness and another stage in the growth of its own influence in Iraq and the region.

There is another element at work as well - the influence of Ms Rice herself. At the very moment when Vice-President Dick Cheney was making threatening noises against Iran on a world tour, this initiative is announced.

Nuclear

As for nuclear issue, that remains unresolved and could yet derail any attempt to forge some kind of US-Iran rapprochement over Iraq.

Whatever talks take place between the US and Iran, the planned meetings are not expected to deal with the nuclear problem.

The administration hopes that the drip-drip of pressure on Iran will eventually produce either a change of policy on uranium enrichment, though that is unlikely, or a change of government.

At the same time, the threat of military action remains "on the table" as Mr Cheney put it.

In the new twin track American diplomacy towards Iran, tension is being reduced on one track but remains on the other.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6403633.stm

muckraker10021 · Feb 28, 2007

Re: Rice: War 'Mistakes' will be Rectified

<table border="8" width="650" id="table2" bordercolorlight="#800080" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" bordercolordark="#800080" bgcolor="#000000" height="400">
<tr><td><img src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/images/msnbc/logo01.gif"> 
 <center>Keith Olbermann Smacksdown the Buffoonery & Lies of CONDI RICE <center>[wm]http://www.crooksandliars.com/Media/Download/14750/1/Countdown-SC-Condi.wmv[/wm]</center></td></tr></table>

<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="12"></hr>


Negroponte To Run State, Condi Just Window Dressing



Jan 14th, 2007

http://www.haaretz.co.il/

by Gideon Alon

My little hamster wheel has been spinning white hot ever since I read that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04secretary.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin">John Negroponte is leaving</a> his position as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to take a position as Deputy Secretary of State. This is some really, really strange stuff. There are some very deep politics beneath this.

<div align="right"><img src="http://wiw.org/~jess/weblog/condi2.jpg" align="right"></div>
 First we have to examine <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte">John Negroponte</a>. He currently has a very prestigious position. He is in charge of coordinating all U.S. intelligence activities and, most importantly, he has the job of briefing the President each morning. The people that serve the President can be loosely defined into three groups. There are the principles (Cabinet members, plus Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and DNI Negroponte), and their deputies, and everyone else. You might remember that Richard Clarke complained about being demoted under Bush to a deputy level. That meant he could not directly get the ear of the President. Richard Clarke was stuck jibber-jabbering with Richard Armitage, Scooter Libby, and Paul Wolfowitz rather than talking to Powell, Rummy, and Cheney). Why on earth would Negroponte agree to move from the adult's table to eat at the fold-out kiddie's table?
 The official explanation is completely disingenuous:
 
<blockquote>Mr. Negroponte previously served as ambassador to the United Nations and to Iraq, and administration officials say Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been trying to recruit him to bring more Iraq expertise to her office.
 Mr. Negroponte’s move to the State Department has been rumored for months. [ed. note: I haven't heard a peep] Ms. Rice was pushing to bring Mr. Negroponte in as her deputy, and officials in Washington speculated that the career diplomat might be more comfortable returning to the State Department.
</blockquote>
 Can you imagine George Tenet leaving the CIA to be Powell's deputy? Can you imagine Rumsfeld leaving the Pentagon to be Rice's deputy? If Rice had suggested to Negroponte that he be her deputy he would have looked at her like she had two heads and told her to ream herself.
 So far I have come up with two scenarios that might explain this entirely unprecedented development. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
 Scenario One: Condi Rice cannot handle her position as Secretary of State but there is no position to move her to. It would be too big of a blow for Bush to fire her but he cannot get rid of her by retasking her. Negroponte is being brought in to run the State Department, while Rice will remain a figurehead. After a period of time Rice may take a job in the private sector citing burnout or ill-health or something. Negroponte has been assured that he will take over the top spot at some not too distant point in the future, or has been satisfied that he will be in the principles meetings and this is just for show.
 Scenario Two: This is another part of a Poppy Bush coup. First they forced Porter Goss out of the CIA, then they moved Robert Gates into the Pentagon, now they move Negroponte into the State Department and put former NSA chief (under Poppy Bush and Clinton) J. Michael McConnel in as Director of National Intelligence. Poppy's people know that Rice is untouchable, but they will use their old-hand Negroponte to control State and reassure our Sunni allies.
 Why are they selling this as something that Rice wanted? Because it clearly indicates that she is unable to do her job and it undermines her authority. They are trying to blunt that perception by making it look like it is her idea.
 The big questions are: how did they convince Bush to go along with this, and how did they convince Negroponte to go along with this? And who recommended <a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=62198&p=IROL-govBio&t=Regular&id=115100&">J. Michael McConnel</a>.
 And here is a bit of connect the dots trivia for you. McConnell is currently Vice President and Director of Booz Allen Hamilton's Infrastructure Assurance Center of Excellence. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen">Booz Allen Hamilton</a> has a longstanding relationship with our intelligence agencies, with former employees including R. James Woolsey, Jonathon Bush, Dov Zakheim, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Copeland%2C_Jr.">Miles Copeland Jr.</a> Here's a little tidbit from Copeland's career in-and-out of the CIA and Booz Allen.
 
<blockquote>In 1953, Copeland returned to private life at the consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton, while remaining a non-official cover operative for the CIA. In this role he traveled to Cairo to offer Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown King Farouk and taken power in Egypt, U.S. technical assistance in their ongoing border conflicts. At the time, the U.S. considered the new state of Israel a threat to oil industry interests in the region.
 In 1954, Syria merged with Egypt in the United Arab Republic; and in 1955 Copeland returned to the CIA. During the Suez Crisis, the United States decided to block France and the United Kingdom, which had invaded, and back Egypt's independence and control of the Suez Canal, a move said to have been advocated by Copeland with the goal of ending British control of the region's oil resources, and forestalling the influence of the Soviet Union on regional governments by placing the US on their side. Nevertheless, after the crisis Nasser moved closer to the USSR and accepted massive military technology and engineering assistance on the Aswan Dam. Copeland, allied with John and Allen Dulles, worked to reverse US diplomatic policy on Egypt at this time.
 After King Faisal II was deposed by Iraqi nationalists, Copeland admittedly oversaw CIA contacts with the regime and internal opponents including Saddam Hussein and others in the Ba'ath Party. With Egyptian assistance, Hussein was aided in the failed assassination of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim, who had blocked union with the United Arab Republic, a goal of the Ba'athists. Hussein fled to Cairo and bided his time under Egyptian protection until a coup against Qassim — which blindsided American officials — occurred in 1963. Seizing the moment, Hussein, said to have been provided with U.S. weapons, took part in massacres of suspected Communists as the new regime consolidated power, and rose in the Ba'ath power structure. [2]
</blockquote>
So, you see? Bringing in a new Booz Allen guy to replace Negroponte is just in keeping with our rich history of getting it right in the Middle East. Same old guys doing the same old shit.
 Deep. Very Deep.

 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"></hr>

QueEx · Mar 2, 2007

Re: Rice: War 'Mistakes' will be Rectified

<center>The Bush conversion:
how the president saw the light
and changed foreign policy
Aggressive - and ineffective - approach
abandoned in favour of diplomacy </center>

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 2, 2007
The Guardian


It is being called George Bush's Come to Jesus moment. As in the midlife realisation that led Mr Bush to give up alcohol and embrace Christianity, the president in his sixth year in the White House has undergone another radical conversion, abandoning an ideological foreign policy for a more pragmatic approach, foreign policy experts say.
Within the space of two weeks, the Bush administration has made dramatic steps towards diplomatic engagement of two countries once shunned as part of the Axis of Evil - agreeing to contacts with Iran and opening the door to recognition of North Korea.

In Washington, the shift was seen yesterday as a belated acknowledgement that the administration's approach to the world - on Iraq, nuclear weapons proliferation, and Middle East peace - was not just ineffective, but dangerous.
"The main thing was that there was a sense that American foreign policy was spinning out of control. The administration was looking at one series of failures after another and these were really beginning to damage national security," said James Steinberg, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now heads the Lyndon Johnson school of public affairs in Texas.

Others attribute the conversion in part as a product of Mr Bush's stark view of the world. "It is the president's impulse-driven, faith-driven, black-and-white view of the world that enabled the hardline contingent within the administration to pursue the path that it pursued," said David Rothkopf, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who is writing a book about US foreign policy. "It is only the shift in recognition that that approach isn't working that has created very much the equivalent of his Come to Jesus moment when he was 40."

The deepening chaos in Iraq, the heightened nuclear tensions with Iran and North Korea, and the instability in Lebanon also served to discredit the approach advocated by the hardline powers within the administration: the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the former Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld.

Until Mr Rumsfeld was sacked last November, the two men, friends and ideological soulmates for the last 30 years, had formed a powerful neoconservative front. Mr Rumsfeld's exit, and the departure earlier of other neocons, left Mr Cheney relatively isolated. That allowed for the rise of a new foreign policy pairing: the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence chief, Robert Gates.

Both are viewed as proteges of Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under the first President Bush, whose view of the world is almost diametrically opposed to his son's. Bolstered by that institutional ally - and a state department bureaucracy dominated by career service officers rather than politically driven appointees - Ms Rice has been more confident in recent weeks in asserting her views. As a longtime friend of the president, she also has his ear and was able to transform policy.

Some see recent belligerent comments on Iranian support for Shia militias in Iraq as an early sign that talks could be on the cards. "Both Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates made remarks about a month ago that said: 'look, if the negotiations are going to be successful, you have to get the context right'," said Paul Serwer, vice-president of the US Institute for Peace. "I had been hoping that what they were doing with all these manoeuvres and cracking down was to get the context right."

Such changes were not instantaneous as they appeared this week, but they could be even more far-reaching. Philip Gordon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, published an article on US foreign policy last July called The End of the Bush Revolution.

He notes shifts in US foreign policy as early as 2005 when President Bush on a tour of Europe made a point of visiting France and Germany - a change from his 2001 itinerary that saw the president shunning his critics. Mr Gordon also notes that Ms Rice spent far more time courting European allies in her first year as secretary of state than her predecessor, Colin Powell, spending 70% of her time abroad in Europe in 2005.

In another less noted foreign policy reversal, the administration two years ago began to revise its position on international aid and climate change, in an attempt to improve its image.

The softening of the line on North Korea and Iran was also linked yesterday to the growing realisation that the US position had been based on faulty intelligence. In a repeat of the intelligence fiasco in the run-up to the Iraq war, it now appears US agencies overestimated the threat posed by the Pyongyang and Tehran nuclear programmes.

"Inside of all of this is a much bigger problem," Mr Rothkopf said. "This once again underscores how bad the intelligence community is in dealing with the most critical mission they have in measuring existential and armed threats."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2025025,00.html

QueEx · Jul 23, 2007

Condoleeza - Fading Star

<center>WANING INFLUENCE
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finds that her star is fading</center>

San Francisco Chronicle
Joel Brinkley
Sunday, July 22, 2007

I remember the heady days for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

About 2 1/2 years ago, when she was new in office, I accompanied her on her first trip around the world, with stops in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan and China. Crowds gathered to see her limousine drive past; people whistled, waved and cheered. Interviewers routinely asked her whether she was planning to run for president. One TV reporter in India told her she was "arguably the most powerful woman in the world." She chuckled but did not exactly agree -- or disagree.

How things change.

A few months ago, she decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept "telling me to shut up," he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. "They just wanted us to be Bush automatons."

Does that sound familiar? Earlier this month, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told Congress that Bush administration officials had repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because they clashed with administration dogma. He said he was ordered to mention Bush three times on every page of his speeches. Floyd's experience shows that the same close-minded zealotry afflicting many departments of government under Bush has descended on the State Department, too. In effect, as Rice's power and influence has waned along with Bush's, intolerance and monomania have taken its place.

Rice did have her moment. But little came of it. Under her predecessor, Colin Powell, major foreign policy decisions were made at the White House or Defense Department. The neo-conservative heavyweights -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, among others -- set the policies in Iran and Iraq, North Korea and Israel.

Powell left frustrated. But Rice came into office with Bush's inarguable support; she wore their close relationship on her sleeve. And, for awhile, that worked for her. She called mini-summits on Iraq, Israel and other topics. Everyone showed up. In many countries, she met with the president instead of her bureaucratic counterpart, the foreign minister. Wherever she went, she was a star.

But what has she accomplished? Iraq has slid far downhill in the past 2 1/2 years. Iran is no closer to giving up its nuclear weapons than when she took office. Even though the Bush administration has done more than any other country to help the victims in Darfur, the carnage there continues unabated. Last week, the Sudanese government began bombing Darfur civilians again.

Relations with Russia, her area of speciality, have steadily worsened; a week ago, Russia dropped out of a key arms control treaty. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has evolved from an irritant to a menace as he moves to nationalize Venezuela's oil industry. Despite many visits to Israel and the Palestinian territories, she has had no appreciable impact on events there.

North Korea has shut down its nuclear reactor. That's an accomplishment. But I give most credit to Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state who continued pushing for a diplomatic solution even as administration hardliners disparaged his work. Hill despised them, and ultimately outlasted them.

From his new position at the American Enterprise Institute, John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador, continues to call for "repudiation of the Feb. 13 deal" that Hill negotiated. But now Bolton is powerless.

Where does that leave Rice?

"I think there is nothing they can do now," Floyd argues. "It's too late. The negatives," primarily Iraq, "are too big. They take all the oxygen out of the room."

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/22/INGDFR1UV512.DTL

VegasGuy · Jul 23, 2007

Re: Condoleeza - Fading Star

San Francisco Chronicle

Nuff said.

-VG

the_monsterous_monster · Jul 23, 2007

Re: Condoleeza - Fading Star

I have a hard time believing that she believes the nonsense that she spews out of her mouth...she's allowed herself to become a caricature of all that is wrong with the Cheney/Bush administration...fucking fool ass fool...

KungFu-D2 · Jul 23, 2007

Re: Condoleeza - Fading Star

The San Francisco 'gay ass' Chronicle ... this nigga prolly gettin ready for a drag show as we speak, lookin like Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo.

Anyway, y'all niggas need to lay off Condi. I wonder how many times some of yall muhfukkas go out to the customers at your job and start talkin about how shit be against company policy when the company couldnt give two shits about your black ass.

You don't have to believe in somebodys politics 100 percent to show respect for that persons accomplishments -- I don't really care much for Barak Obama talkin about how he wants the federal government to pay for abortions as well as some of this other bullshit he be talkin, but I also see him as an intelligent black man with a real shot at the White House and for that reason i'll support him as much as possible.

Instead of bashin the sista because you don't agree with her politics, we as a community need to start speakin out against shit like the number of blacks in jail gettin havin kids by 4 different women -- thats the shit that's killin our community, not Condoleeza Rice.

Costanza · Jul 25, 2007

Re: Condoleeza - Fading Star

I remember Dick Morris wrote a book called Condi Vs. Hillary forecasting the 2008 election...

Her fortunes are as tied to the war as are the Presidents and she doesnt do much better in her defense of it. That's the end of the story.

GET YOU HOT · Jul 28, 2007

Re: Condoleeza - Fading Star

ohh! well...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1XFTIYLZM

The Official Condoleeza Rice Thread

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