President Bush has named Condoleezza Rice to succeed Colin Powell as Secretary of State. The Center for American Progress has complied some data on Dr. Rice's record of the past four years.
INATTENTION TO TERRORISM: According to the 9/11 Commission report, chief White House expert on terrorism Richard Clarke sent Rice an urgent memo just days after she took office, stressing the severity of the terrorist threat. She did not respond, and although the national security leadership "met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks…terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions." The first meeting on al Qaeda did not occur until 9/4/01.
MISLEADING STATEMENTS PRE-WAR: Rice was one of the primary perpetrators of misinformation in the push for war with Iraq. In September 2002, she claimed, "We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon." Weapons inspector David Kay and his successor, Charles Duelfer, debunked that outright, saying Saddam had no nuclear program. Rice also pushed the phantom nuclear threat by charging that certain aluminum tubes Saddam sought were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." A 10/3/04 New York Times article exposed that as false.
RICE GIVEN LEADERSHIP ROLE IN IRAQ, FIZZLES: In October 2003, President Bush announced he was "giving his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the authority to manage postwar Iraq." With great fanfare, Rice was put in charge of the "Iraq Stabilization Group." Seven months later, the Washington Post reported "the four original leaders of the Stabilization Group have taken on new roles, and only one remains concerned primarily with Iraq." Even within the White House, "the destabilized Stabilization Group is a metaphor for an Iraq policy that is adrift." According to the White House website, the Iraq stabilization group hasn't been publicly mentioned for more than a year.
MISLEADING STATEMENTS POST-WAR: Even after the invasion of Iraq failed to turn up any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, Rice continued a calculated effort to keep the nonexistent threat in the public eye. On 9/7/03, she ominously warned, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." On 3/18/04, Rice said that "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." In fact, the administration's handpicked weapons inspector, David Kay, had publicly said – two months earlier – that he didn't believe Saddam had WMD before the March 2003 invasion. When Kay resigned in January he said "he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and that pre-war intelligence that said Iraq possessed WMD was probably "all wrong."
RICE UNDER OATH: Rice initially refused to appear before the 9/11 Commission. When she finally agreed to testify, she refused to play it straight. Called before the Commission to examine potential White House inattention to the al Qaeda threat before the attacks, Rice was asked about a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) the president received on 8/6/01. In front of the Commission, Rice testified there was "nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S." in the PDB. Under further questioning, she admitted that, in fact, "the title [of the PDB] was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'"
POLITICIZING NATIONAL SECURITY: Breaking with the precedent that dictates the director of national security should remain above the political fray and away from the campaign trail, during the 2004 campaign National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice took time out from her busy national security duties to stump for the president across key battleground states. She was roundly criticized by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, who "said the national security adviser is the 'custodian' of the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and should be seen as an objective adviser to the president."
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