Dicky being the vice Liar-in-Chief.
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Published on Friday, April 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Bush's Fixer
Condoleezza Rice Has a History of Covering for the Bush Administration's
Failures
by Joy-Ann Reid
Condoleezza Rice is not known as an ideologue. Instead, she has built her
career and reputation on loyalty, and in particular, on carefully ploughing
the intellectual and political minefields for George W. Bush.
When she was Bush's national security advisor during his first term, Rice
sometimes seemed adrift in her role as coordinator of national intelligence
and sifter of threats to the United States. Her infamous failure to grasp
the urgency of a Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to
attack inside the United States" became the leading highlight -- or
lowlight -- of her confirmation hearings for the position she was promoted
to in Bush's second term; Secretary of State. Her slipperiness in not taking
her share of responsibility for the president's 2003 State of the Union
speech, in which he misstated intelligence on Iraq's supposed attempts to
procure enriched uranium from Niger (a debacle that led to the leaking of a
CIA agent's name and which could yet send two reporters to prison),
established her, on the chat show circuit and in the minds of many political
watchers, as Bush's most effective spin-meister -- and as her own.
Now, Rice is facing her most daunting challenge: reigning in a State
Department which the neoconservative hawks inside the administration, led by
Vice President ***** Cheney, and their intellectual backers consider to be
Arabist outliers, disdainful of the president's foreign policy and
insubordinate in its implementation. Under their old boss, Collin Powell,
the "regime change" doubters and "spread of democracy" scoffers could find
sympathetic ears, including Powell's and those of his chief deputy, Richard
Armitage. And despite the insertion of blustery ideologues like the former
undersecretary in charge of arms control, John Bolton, into their midst,
State once served as a weak but ever-present brake on the wilder ambitions
of neocons like Wolfowitz, Feith and Cambone at Defense. Now, the house of
diplomats is headed by Rice, a woman whose sole ideological passion appears
to be protecting the president, including from his administration's
failures.
Admittedly, sales and protection are now distinctly in Rice's job
description. And as chief salesperson for American foreign policy, she has
towed the line brilliantly, securing almost universally glowing press
coverage for her whirlwind charm offensive tour of Europe earlier this year,
and barely a mussed headline since. In Russia a week ago, she managed to
chide Vladimir Putin on developing an independent press, free from
government pressure, without a hint of irony. And while she has succeeded in
doing little beyond changing the atmospherics of America's battered image
abroad, few would argue that Rice has not proved to be a skilled
pitch-woman.
Back at home, she has weighed in to back Bolton's nomination to become U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations -- offering support but not so much support
that the White House couldn't back away from Bolton at any time. And she has
done so despite a side-swipe from the man who once held her job -- Collin
Powell -- who reportedly has weighed in with some thoughts of his own on
Bolton's fitness for the job.
But Rice's most daring attempt at covering for Mr. Bush comes with the
release of a State Department report on global terrorism. The annual report,
which will be released to Congress this week, has been carefully scrubbed of
anything that might illustrate that in fact, terrorism around the world, and
particularly in Iraq, has skyrocketed in the two years since the fall of
Baghdad. In fact, the U.S. government estimates that the number of terrorist
incidents has tripled worldwide, from a record 175 in 2003 to approximately
655 last year, according to a report in the Washington Post. In Iraq, the
number of terrorist incidents ballooned from 22 to 198 -- nine times the
2003 total. Attacks have also spiraled on the West Bank and Gaza, inside
Israel, in Afghanistan, Russia, Europe and the states of the former Soviet
Union, with the overall death toll exceeding 1,000, not including U.S.
military personnel. We know this not because the agency charged with
reporting these figures to Congress -- namely Ms. Rice's State Department --
has told us so, but because the information was leaked to the Post by
congressional aides.
That it was leaks which brought these numbers to light speaks volumes about
the Bush administration, which, since the 2001 terror attacks in Washington
and New York, has taken information management to levels that would make
Richard Nixon blush. That the agency headed by Ms. Rice is doing the
covering up, is, sadly, not surprising at all.
The Post reported that critics of the move believe the State Department was
breaking with tradition in sanitizing the required annual report, in an
effort "to shield the government from questions about the success of its
effort to combat terrorism by eliminating what amounted to the only
year-to-year benchmark of progress."
That notion has a familiar ring. Last year, the Department under Mr. Powell
had to retract the same annual report after it was revealed that its
terrorism count was artificially low. That it was an election year was lost
on no one. Powell was forced to apologize.
This year, Mr. Bush is no longer running for office. But Ms. Rice remains in
protective mode, and the terrorism data shield is far from the only example.
This week, Rice is also attempting to buck up American policy in Latin
America, where a leftist revolution has seemed to follow in Mr. Bush's wake.
(According to the BBC, more than half of South America's population is ruled
by leftist leaders, elected over the last six years, and relations with
countries like Venezuela -- which supplies the United States with about 15
percent of its oil supply -- are deteriorating fast.) In Colombia on
Wednesday, Rice defended the Bush administration's $3 billion
counter-narcotics and insurgency program, which government statistics show
has failed to shrink that country's 281,000 acres of coca production. Rice,
during a press conference, dutifully focused on the positive, telling
reporters, "I don't think it is time to abandon a strategy that is both
diminishing the crop here and a strategy that is restoring the democratic
security of Colombia."
That, after all, is part of her job. As Bush's chief representative abroad,
Rice is expected to put a positive spin on administration policies. And
Rice's personal loyalty to the president makes a public airing of the
failures of his initiatives highly unlikely.
Still, on the issue of terrorism, which goes to the heart of the personal
security of every American, the Congress of the United States -- not to
mention the American people -- deserve greater candor, particularly from a
secretary of state and an administration so given to lecturing other
countries about openness and democracy. As California Rep. Henry Waxman told
Rice in a letter urging the State Department to fully release the terrorism
data, "the large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may
undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror, but
political inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding
facts from the American people."
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0429-27.htm
--
The results of the world's four largest oil companies illustrate just how
well the industry has fared lately. Since the end of 2003, Royal Dutch/Shell
Group of Cos., BP Group PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp. have
earned a combined $97 billion, including $23.8 billion during the first
three months of this year (2005).
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=715999
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