Experts See No Law Barring Rice Testimony

[deek]

Rate to make sure Yahoo news readers see this!

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - There is no ironclad legal doctrine buttressing National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites)'s refusal to testify publicly before the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, law experts said Monday

<snip>

"The whole idea of executive privilege is that the president's advisers should be able to give advice in confidence," said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University. "That means the advice should be kept confidential. But she's talked to everybody under the sun

"What is the difference between appearing before the commission privately, telling them her story, and saying it publicly under oath? She can't have it both ways," he said.

<snip>

There are several instances in which sitting national security advisers or White House aides testified before legislative bodies. Among them:

more:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=14&u=/ap/sept_11_commission

[Ilsa]

1. Thanks for the link.

Rated...

"She can't have it both ways..." I love that.

[Fridays Child]

2. Condi must be happy to hear this, given what she said on 60 Minutes...

...last night:

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that."

[JPZenger]

3. Rice Hasn't Testified Under Oath

Rice's previous testimony was NOT under oath. Also, there was no transcript kept of her testimony - so it is hard to catch her in a lie. The individual committee members kept their own hand-written notes - but those are classified and cannot be released.

[whistle]

4. Every good presidential adviser worth their own weight in salt knows...

...that you can talk in public all you want about advice to the president when you are not under oath, whether you are telling the truth or not. But, when you testify under oath, well gee, golly, gosh, if you don't tell the truth, that's a criminal offense. Better to tell lies therefore when you are not under oath. At least that way gullible folks, especially good republican folks, may just feel better even if they don't believe you.:eyes:

[GaryL]

5. Doesn't matter.

Whatever the pressure, Rice will never publicly testify under oath before the 9/11 commission. She would either have to commit perjury or expose the inadequacies of this lame administration. I just bet some loudmouth at work $100 bucks that whatever testimony she's given or would give would never see the light of day and he couldn't back down fast enough.

[Just Me]

6. The "privilege" of one person above the masses always bothered me.

Executive privilege, I thought, was only supposed to involve "personal communications". Moreover, it was created at a time when the masses really were too uneducated to reach something beyond mere emotional/intuitive conclusions. Times have greatly changed in the last couple of hundred years. The masses are, in fact, educated well enough to reach logical, informed decisions.

Yet, this privilege has been further extended,..too far, in my view. When executive communications involve impactful decisions concerning the public interest, whose interest is most important: the people (public interest) or the person who is supposed to be serving the people.

Blah, blah, yada yada,...

Nevertheless,...this article is quite poignant. With Rice going around to every major news outlet to do the propaganda thingy,...she has essentially waved all that bullshit about "executive privilege". If she "opens the door" to the administration's insights, she has subjected herself to the will of and questioning by the American people.

[dweller]

7. Condi, the scarecrow

Louis Fisher, a senior specialist on separation of powers at the
Congressional Research Service and author of the 2004 book "The
Politics of Executive Privilege," called the Bush administration's legal
claims "a scarecrow."

Rice "has the same risk on TV of disclosing confidences when people
ask her about what did you say to President Bush," he said. "The
argument isn't persuasive."

shaddup, or put up.
dp

[dax]

8. This story was on there too and it is gold

I love Minnesota-they know how to get down to the nitty gritty-great article about what clarke was really saying:

By this time the Clinton administration was winding down, so Clarke's new strategy was forwarded, with strong support from Berger, to the incoming national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. It took eight months, but the strategy finally was adopted on Sept. 4, just a week before the 9/11 attacks.

When Clarke says the incoming Bush team behaved as though it were "frozen in amber," he means its members could not understand that the world had changed. They couldn't get their mind around the threat from nonstate terrorism of the kind in which Al-Qaida specialized. When it paid attention to terrorism at all, the Bush team was still focused on state-sponsored terrorism, and especially on terrorism fomented by Iraq -- even though, as Clarke pointed out, Iraq had not been involved in anti-U.S. terrorism through the intervening eight years.

Clarke has been making the case that the consistency between Clinton and Bush counterterrorism prior to Sept. 11 was the problem. A new approach was needed, he offered one early in 2001, and the eight-month delay in adopting it meant that possibilities -- and only possibilities -- for disrupting 9/11 planning were forgone.

If the Bush administration had adopted practices in the high-alert months of summer 2001 similar to those the Clinton team adopted amid worries over millennium attacks -- daily Cabinet meetings on the issue, etc. -- the information already in the CIA and FBI about Al-Qaida operatives already in the United States might have become known to senior policymakers.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4692511.html