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Being
Condoleezza Rice Means Never Having To Say You're
Sorry
July 29, 2003
By Joy-Ann Reid
 George W. Bush's vaunted
National Security Advisor was his tutor during his "sobering
up for politics years," readying her charge for the White
House by teaching him to pronounce the names of countries he'd
never been to, and to sound like he knew the history of this
one well enough not to repeat the bad parts. She's the most
powerful woman in the administration (since Karen Hughes fled
for Texas). She's even got an oil tanker named after her.
These days, Rice has gone from head teacher to chief
spinmeister. She's dispatched to the Sunday chat shows
whenever there's a credibility dust-up. And when the going
gets really tough, it's her job to find a way to blame Bill
Clinton.
Lately, Rice has been displaying another quality: dispatch.
She ruthlessly heaved CIA director George Tenet over the bow,
apparently for not throwing his body between George W. Bush
and those 16 words somebody put into his State of the Union
address. Never mind that it was Tenet's CIA that the
"Unknowable" Donald Rumsfeld cast aside for not being bullish
enough on invading Iraq. Or that it was Tenet who insisted the
Nigerian yellowcake references be deleted from an October
speech given by the president (who apparently just reads
whatever's in front of him.) Or that those 16 words included
one - "nuclear" - that ratcheted up the supposed threat posed
by Saddam Hussein about 100 notches in the psyches of many
Americans.
Rice would have us believe the inclusion of the Africa line
was a wee mistake, like pronouncing "nuclear" as "nucular"
(maybe that's Bush's out ... he didn't say "nuclear" at all!)
But it was deliberately added to a speech meant to sober
Americans up for the urgent necessity of war. It was no
throwaway line. Still, Rice is doing her best to make Tenet
take the fall (or the British, or if that doesn't work, cue
Bill Clinton). Now, she and Georgious Caesar have imperiously
declared the matter "closed."
But if Rice is good at spinning for her former tutee, she
isn't so hot at covering her own mistakes.
It was Rice, who declared after 9/11, "I don't think
anybody could have predicted that these people would take an
airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another
one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use
an airplane as a missile." Turns out she had been briefed by
her predecessor about precisely that threat from al-Qaida
against key sites in the United States, and against the G8
summit in Genoa - which Bush attended, sleeping aboard a Navy
carrier instead of a comfy Italian hotel - in July 2001. And a
1999 report by the National Intelligence Council warned that
al-Qaida terrorists could crash an airplane full of explosives
into the Pentagon.
Then there's the January, 2001 report by a national
security commission chaired by former senators Gary Hart and
Warren Rudman. (It was the Hart-Rudman commission, tasked by
Bill Clinton to come up with a 21st century security strategy
for the U.S. - and not George W. Bush - that originally
proposed creating a Department of Homeland Security. The Bush
team shelved its recommendations before 9/11.) Hart pleaded
with the Bush administration to take the al-Qaida threat
seriously throughout the spring and summer of 2001, with Hart
even meeting personally with Rice just one week before the
Twin Towers were attacked.
It was Rice who, along with Vice President Dick Cheney,
assured Americans that Bush hadn't gone into hiding in the
early hours after 9/11, when then-New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani effectively became the nation's Commander-in-Chief.
Condi claimed the president was routed away from Washington
because of credible threats to Air Force One. That turned out
to be a whopper.
It was Rice who responded to the attempted coup against
duly elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by warning
Chavez to learn from the lesson in Democracy. "The world is
watching," Rice scolded the newly-restored leader, after which
she was promptly scolded by news outlets the world over, for
apparently not understanding how the democratic process works.
It was also Rice who last October contacted NBC, ABC, CBS,
Fox and CNN to "suggest" that they edit any audio or
videotapes attributed to Osama bin Laden, apparently tossing
freedom of the press to the same four winds reserved for Tenet
and the CIA.
The job of the national security advisor is to synthesize
all the intelligence data from the competing agencies and
advise the president on security and foreign affairs. It was
her job to police that State of the Union speech, not George
Tenet's, and certainly not some low-level functionary in the
vice president's office (who Rice would have us believe also
sends ex-ambassadors on fact-finding junkets to Niger).
Something tells me the wrong bureaucrat is being tossed
over the side.
Joy-Ann Reid's column appears in the Miami Herald.
She can be reached at joyannreid@hotmail.com.
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