Scott Horton on Condi Rice: "perhaps she’d better hire a good lawyer"

[ProSense]

Condi’s Really Bad Day

By Scott Horton

For eight years, Condoleezza Rice dealt with the Beltway punditry and the access-craving White House press corps. The reception she got, with a handful of exceptions, was fawning. Which leaves her totally unprepared for a return to an academy populated with the Daily Show generation: bright young minds with a very critical attitude towards the last eight years. In a meeting with Stanford students at a dormitory reception on April 27, the school’s former provost got off to a shaky start and ended in a train wreck. She may in fact have her last words in the exchange quoted back to her some day in a law court.

<...>

Let’s fact-check Rice’s claims:

(1) She perpetuates the Abu Ghraib myth (“Abu Ghraib was not policy”), even as the Senate Armed Services Committee report demolishes it. The words she uses are essentially identical to those she uttered to me at a group meeting in the White House in May 2004. But the efforts to delink the abuses in Iraq from the formation of policy in Washington—a process in which Rice played a focal role—have gone flat. The Senate report makes clear that the abuses at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from policy choices made in the National Security Council that Condi ran.

<...>

So I score this: Stanford student 6, Rice 0. Rice needs to do some homework before her next appearance on campus. But first perhaps she’d better hire a good lawyer.

"she is implicitly suggesting that the responsibility for torture...rest with the President himself"

[Danger Mouse]

1. It's like she really doesn't get it.

[ProSense]

2. Maybe she's trying on the

"guilty by reason of insanity" defense.

[PatSeg]

18. They've lived in a self made bubble for so long,

they haven't caught up with the real world yet. She's still living in that old world. When she wakes up, it will be devastating.

[Barack_America]

3. Hmm, has the love affair ended?

Looks like Condi just left a flaming sack of poo outside Bush's door.

[thunder rising]

4. Monica Goodling is available!

[ProSense]

5. Actually, Condi, When the President Breaks the Law, It’s Still Illegal

Actually, Condi, When the President Breaks the Law, It’s Still Illegal:

<...>

Well, according to my review of the text of the convention, approved and sent to the Senate for ratification by President Ronald Reagan himself, and of the implementing statute passed by Congress and signed by the president, there just isn’t any such exception.

Article I of the treaty defines torture as:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession … when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Okay, nothing in there about “unless the president authorizes it.”

Here’s another piece of the law that Condi may want to be mindful of, given her statements yesterday about how exceptionally scary it all was after the attacks on Sept. 11:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

and

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

What’s more, contrary to the arguments of former Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Bradbury and his crew, the treaty applies not only within the actual territory of the country, such as the territorial United States, which is how the recent OLC memos described it, but “When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State.”

<...>

You know, it’s just looking worse and worse for Condi and President George W. Bush, not better.

<...>

[WinkyDink]

9. Solidified law under Nixon.

[Cha]

6. What I remember about condi is that

she lies a lot. It really is good to be rid of those pod dips.

[chill_wind]

7. Didn't she ever, though. Her worst, I think, was her claim,

months into the Iraq occupation, that she hadn't read the most critical parts of the NIE refuting bogus intel for WMD's because they were all in the addendums. I mean, c'mon, this was a highly intelligent, highly accomplished, disciplined PhD academic in former life who didn't get to where she was in life without being extremely attentive to detail.

[Flying Dream Blues]

11. First, it's highly doubtful that the most relevant facts about WMD were hidden

in the addenda. Second, even if they were it's her job to read the whole thing, since she was supposedly in charge, or to at least let someone who works for her read it and give her the executive summary version. It's really fresh and new when laziness is put forth as an excuse from someone at her level. Just once, I'd like to hear one of these bushbots say, "No excuse for what happened, and I take full responsibility." Never gonna happen. But I do think some of them will see some jail time, unless they go join Ken Lay in Paraguay first.

[Cha]

14. One of her most infamous

whine's as she lies.

Another was saying they couldn't be expected to know the 9/11 attacks would have to do with airplanes(paraphrasing)..and since they ignored the August 6, 2001 memo about possible terrorist attacks by hijacking how could they know anything? Unless they let it happen on purpose to secure bush's presidency and War On Iraq?

"APRIL 10--Under pressure from the September 11 commission, the White House today declassified and released an intelligence digest given to President George W. Bush weeks before the 2001 terrorist attacks. The confidential President's Daily Brief (PDB) for August 6, 2001 contained a two-page section entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," and refers to possible hijacking attempts by Osama bin Laden disciples and the existence of about 70 FBI investigations into alleged al-Qaeda cells operating within the United States. The August 6 PDB, an excerpt from which you'll find below, was presented to Bush while he vacationed at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The digest is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, an official from which briefs the president on the report's contents. While Bush critics have described the August 6 PDB as a warning of an impending al-Qaeda attack, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, testified Thursday that the document contained "historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information.."

<more>
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0409041pdb1.html

[chill_wind]

24. And then.. there was her outing of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan

in which she gave the name of a mole to the media in doing her part to keep the terror alerts whipped up to frenzy level, based on intel that had turned out to be several years old..and then they got caught using old intel.. and then destroyed an ongoing operation in order to cover for their BS..


Then she completely tried to disassemble about doing it on Blitzer/CNN. I couldn't understand how she still even had a job in government at all after that, but she did. A Dem in the Clinton admin would have been tarred and feathered, dragged through the streets and THEN impeached..

Disaster:

Published on Tuesday, August 10, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
Bush Team on Defensive Over al-Qaeda Leak
by Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - One of the greatest coups in Washington's nearly three-year war against al-Qaeda has suddenly turned sour with reports the White House prematurely exposed the identity of a key source whose contacts and communication with the terrorist group's operational masterminds had yet to be fully exploited.


The outing of Khan, probably the most important asset the U.S. has ever had inside al-Qaeda, is a huge disaster and a setback to attempts to finish off the top leadership of al-Qaeda.

(...)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0810-01.htm

If they ever get the investigation shows on the road, I hope they stop by Henry Waxman's office. He must have hundreds of letters just like this one:

Waxman to Rice: Bush admin use of Niger Yellowcake Forgeries

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/Waxman2Rice.html


I could go on and on..

[Cha]

26. It's all coming back..

condi is as dispicable as any of the Horsemen of the Apocolypse.. The Anti-Christ, Famine, War, and Death.

[adamuu]

16. Are they ever really gone? N/t

[WinkyDink]

8. She ain't as smart as she thinks.

[Cha]

17. Or as her "degrees" and "experience" would

have us think.

[mwb970]

10. More crap from the premier bush-licker.

Yuck!

:puke:

[rhett o rick]

13. That is wrong on sooo many levels. Ewww nm

[lunatica]

12. She doesn't exist in a bubble anymore. That student would have never

gotten that close to her while she was Sec of State. She's never had her finger on the pulse of the American people so she naturally thought we were so stupid that her lame excuses would be believed. Funny how they sound really pathetic when she utters them in front of a real public.

[PatSeg]

19. This is the aftermath of a time

when no one asked her or the rest any really hard questions. They got too used to it.

[DavidDvorkin]

15. Why? No one will prosecute her.

Or Dubya, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld, and so on.

[HopeOverFear]

20. Here's the video of Condi arguing with a student who confronted her about torture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA&feature=player_embedded

[beac]

22. I thought my urge to reach through the screen and punch Condi might have diminished since January.

It hasn't. Her smug face just cries out for a fist. :mad:

[BlooInBloo]

21. Sounds like she's about to learn what "they'll never like you" really means.

[lunatica]

23. Condi, meet the reality based party

[Karenina]

25. Anyone else remember her "commanding" dominatrix costume?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51640-2005Feb24.html

:puke: :rofl:

[saltpoint]

27. Poor Condi.

"All I did was carry the message. It was Bush and Cheney who called the shots."

[adoraz]

28. All I did was help rob the bank...

it was so-and-so who told me to.

What is she, an immature kid?

[saltpoint]

29. Perhaps in a way, she really is emotionally immature. I mean glaringly

immature.

She seems to like power. Its scent wafted down from the Bush clan and she breathed it in deep.

And she never recovered. She's been under their spell for as long as she likely remembers and lives in a fairy-tale land where Power alone defines one's importance.

I don't think she ever self-realized as a grown-up. She doesn't act like it, anyway.

[grasswire]

30. come down from the cross, Condi -- we need the nails!

She portrays herself as a victim of 9/11 -- such a victim that she couldn't be expected to observe the rule of law or the Constitution regarding detainees. "We were in a pressure cooker to keep the country safe!" And yet she had been warned in advance and failed to heed the warning or act to prevent the attack on WTC.

She has the bitter edge of victimhood, defiance and superiority that will likely put her in the looney bin within the decade.

Delusional grandiosity.