No Lie Zone 
RICE 'N BALONEY
Posted March 30, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org

By: Ted Lang

President George W. Bush's National Security advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, is falsely claiming "executive privilege" and offering her principled approach to government service that precludes setting a bad precedent for a good president.  Yet, no weapons of mass destruction have been found to corroborate President Bush's claims to Congress and the American people that he needed war powers to set the first-time ever precedent of attacking a defenseless nation that neither attacked US or ever harmed US, or even intended to harm US.

The whole world sees this.  The whole world disagrees with our unjust attack, invasion and subjugation of Iraq's people.  The Kean 9-11 commission has unanimously agreed that Rice's testimony is most important. Counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, who has released a new book, Against All Enemies, and who has testified under oath and publicly for the Kean commission, corroborates what Bush's former Treasury Secretary offered: Bush was more interested in declaring war on Iraq than in pursuing the terrorist threat that carried out the 9-11 carnage against our people.

In an article entitled, "White House looks for compromise," posted March 29th on their website, MSNBC offers, "The White House was trying to strike a deal under which Rice would appear in private before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, but it refused to budge in the face of demands that she testify in public and under oath."  The article points out that the urgency to have Rice testify publicly and under oath is "cutting across both party lines."

The article continues, "Under one proposal, Rice's testimony would be released to the public shortly after her appearance, but it was not clear whether this would satisfy members of the commission or quell Democrats' demands to hear openly from Rice, a key aide to President Bush whose refusal to testify in public has magnified criticism by former counterterrorism director Richard Clarke.

Clarke accused Bush, who is running for re-election on his record of fighting terrorism, of being obsessed with ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at the expense of fully focusing on the war against terrorism.  The White House is refusing to let Rice testify publicly based on a long-standing position that presidential advisers who have not been confirmed by the Senate cannot give public testimony." It has also been an important principle as well as a long-standing tradition that we don't attack first, but the Bush administration didn't adhere to that tradition.  Nor did the Bush administration adhere to the principle of requesting that the Congress declare war on another sovereign nation, as is not only tradition, but also the law of the land as specified in the United States Constitution.

The commission was given life by the joint agreement of Congress and the White House; therefore requests of executive privilege, separation of powers, and national security are totally invalid here.  Additionally, as some in Congress have pointed out, she has spoken on several television shows and attacked Richard Clarke for his testimony in the public domain; why can she not do this, therefore, publicly on television and under oath in front of the commission?

President Bush's bullheadedness and Rice's refusal to testify, thereby raising the specter of a subpoena, an event which timing-wise is an impossibility, is creating a heart-wrenching spectacle not only for the families of the 9-11 victims who came to Washington to be part of an inquiry into the deaths of their loved ones, and is also putting on display for America and the world the cold-heartedness of this administration and its cavalier attitude towards those military families who also lost loved ones in Iraq.  The only one who displayed "compassionate conservatism" and showed any remorse for the brutal process of nation building President Bush is so enamored with is Richard Clarke when he told the 9-11 victims' families, "Your government failed you."  And thanks to George Bush, our government
continues to fail US!

Rice offered that Bush's push to have Clarke find a way to point the finger at Iraq was a natural desire on the part of the president, telling Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes on March 28 as documented in "Rice Leads Counterattack," posted on CBSNEWS.com, "'The president asked, I believe - though none of us recall the specific - conversation, the president asked a perfectly logical question.  We'd just been hit and been hit hard.  Was - did Iraq have anything to do with this?  Were they complicit in it?  This is a country with which we have been to war a couple of times, that were firing at our airplanes - in the no-fly zone.'"

Of course, there was no mention of the double-cross of Saddam who first asked permission of our State Department's April Glaspie before attacking Kuwait for slant-drilling Iraqi oil fields.  And there was no mention of approximately 500,000 Iraqi children dying from the blockade of Iraq.  And why shouldn't this beleaguered country fire at enemy aircraft bombing its towns and people?  What nation imposes a "no-fly zone" on US? Also posted on CBSNEWS.com on March 29th, was a chronological listing of events that led up to 9-11.  Summarized, the report begins with the foiled Algerian hijacking in Marseille, France.  Immediately after that event in 1994, the Pentagon received a report it requested that documented the possibility that hijacked commercial airliners could be crashed into the Pentagon or the White House.  Recall the deranged non-pilot who stole a Cessna 172 and flew it into the White House during the Clinton administration?

CBS goes on to report that in 1995, Philippine authorities linked an arrested Ramsi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and uncovered a plot to fly a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. And immediately after that incident, the FBI alerted flight schools and conducted interviews, but was unable to develop a productive surveillance program.  In August 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that a group of Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center.  The list goes on and on, yet Dr. Rice in her famous interview with the press explained that American government was never aware that airplanes would be used as missiles and flown into buildings.  It is clear Rice was lying.

The situation not only with this brilliant, intelligent woman, but also with the towering Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is an American tragedy.  Here is, to be sure, a case where virtually all of America was pulling for two promising black leaders who could have, once and for all, helped rid America of the horrible stigma of racism and discrimination.  Here were two Americans that could have made America more of an example of what America really stood for: true equal opportunity for each and all. Instead, these two promising individuals now stand in disgrace, disgraced by a clueless, bullheaded president who lied himself into the White House telling US he opposes nation building, who lied US into an unnecessary and deadly war in Iraq, and who lied America's two top promising black leaders out of their hard-earned futures and accomplishments.  If Bush continues to obstruct the 9-11 commission, he should be impeached.  Forget the elections - justice now!

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© Copyright THEODORE E. LANG 3/29/04 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political analyst and a freelance writer.