Condoleezza Rice is still a liar and a psychopath

If you don’t think that Condoleezza Rice is a liar who ought to be behind bars for the rest of her natural life, then pick up her new book Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom at your local library and start reading. Move to the section about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and you will find that this woman is a psychopath.

Keep in mind that psychopaths don’t care about how many people they have killed. They don’t care about the truth. They don’t care about whether they have killed four people or four thousand innocent lives.

They only care about shedding blood and producing lies – bold and categorical lies, lies that can send thousands and even millions of people to their unfortunate deaths. And when those psychopaths see that their lies have been discovered and discarded, they invent new lies to seduce the masses. Such is the life of Condoleezza Rice.

In the old days, Rice probably would be hanged for killing so many innocent lives in the Middle East. But since not a single investigation has been done, Rice and the Neoconservatives still think that they have a duty to ask for more blood in the Middle East. Here is what Rice said during a recent interview: “We didn’t go to Iraq to bring democracy to Iraq, we went to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who we thought was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction and who we knew had been a threat in the region. It was a security problem. We didn’t overthrow the Taliban to bring democracy to Afghanistan, we overthrew them because they were harboring Al-Qaeda in a safe haven after 9/11.”[1]

Rice articulated the same thing in her recent book Democracy: “We did not overthrow Saddam to try to bring democracy to Iraq at gunpoint. To do so would have been a misuse of American military power and I would never have advised the president to do pursue that idea… Saddam was a security threat. It was our belief – supported by the intelligence of multiple countries – that he had reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons programs and was well on the way to doing so on the nuclear side.”[2]

Total lie. A little historical background here: George W. Bush repeatedly declared that he tried to avoid war, but it has been shown that Bush was determined to fight.[3] He repeatedly used expletives in order to demonstrate how he was going to deal with Saddam long before the U.S. invaded Iraq, saying things like “I’m going to kick this sorry mother***er all over the Mideast.”[4]

John Prados, co-director of the Iraq Documentation Project, noted that the record plainly “demonstrates that the Bush administration swiftly abandoned plans for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi adventurism by means of sanctions, never had a plan subsequent to that except for a military solution, and enmeshed British allies in a manipulation of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic designed to generate support for a war.”[5]

Bush’s statement that he tried to avoid war also fails to take into account Washington’s policies since 1996, when Jewish Neocons such as “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith crafted a policy for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which they advised him to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.”[6]

One year later, William Kristol informed the Clinton administration that “Saddam Must Go.”[7] Even before going to war, Donald Rumsfeld declared: “Sanctions (against Iraq) are fine, but what we really want to think about is going after Saddam. Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about.”[8]

John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago declares: “There is no evidence in the public record that Saddam tried to convince the world that Iraq possessed WMD (weapons of mass destruction)… Indeed, [the Duelfer Report] itself provides evidence that casts doubts on that contention. It notes ‘Saddam never discussed using deception as a policy,’ and that one of his most trusted deputies stated that he ‘did not reveal he was deceiving the world about the presence of WMD… In fact, [Saddam] said on a number of occasions that he had no WMD and he was telling the truth.”[9]

UN inspectors repeatedly said that Saddam’s weapons programs had been “neutralized” and Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who ran the WMD program in the 1980s, declared to the CIA in 1995 that “Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”[10]

So where did Rice and the Neocons get the so-called evidence to invade Iraq? Well, they made it all up and then bludgeoned decent Americans to death with fake evidence and fake news![11] The fact that Saddam had no WMD made no impression on the Washington Neocons, who only wanted to go to war.

Moreover, it was widely known that the Bush administration had manipulated what the CIA and fifteen other U.S. intelligence agencies had declared about Iraq’s WMD program.

The October 2002 NIE (National Intelligence Estimates) report on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program revealed that some experts believed, in spite of a lack of conclusive evidence, that Iraq had WMD. The Bush administration, thirsty for evidence, classified the report, then released an unclassified version a few days later with deliberately altered wording that supported the theory that Iraq possessed WMD.[12]

This was not the first time that the Bush administration had deliberately ignored evidence for ideological purposes. In February 2002, the CIA reported that there was no conclusive evidence that Saddam was buying uranium yellowcake in Niger. Yet in September 2004, Tony Blair declared that “Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, to which the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, added “We agree with their findings.”[13] Halper and Clarke declared that this “finding” was of course “in the president’s most important speech of the year”[14] – the 2004 State of the Union address. While Bush’s audience praised his speech, the CIA called the claim “highly dubious”.[15]

The inescapable conclusion then is that the Bush administration, in the words of noted attorney Vincent Bugliosi, deliberately lied about the war in Iraq. In addition, if WMD were the sole issue for going to war, then America would be going to war all over the world, for countries such as France, China, and Israel all have WMD.

The real question is whether Saddam posed a threat to America, and sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies declared that Saddam was not an imminent threat to the U.S. (the only place he posed a threat was in the minds of the neocons eager to marshal arguments for the war).

Paul R. Pillar, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA and a visiting professor at Georgetown University, blew everyone out of the water with the publication of his provoking book Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy. The information in Pillar’s work is not all new, for others have spoken along similar lines for years (see Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack).

But because he has had a long, distinguished career as a member of the CIA, Pillar’s words carry a great deal of weight. Pillar not only agrees with the assessment that the war in Iraq was orchestrated by the neoconservatives, but makes the convincing case that Bush lied about what the CIA actually reported on WMD.

For example, when counterterrorist chief Richard Clarke told Bush after many examinations that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaida, Bush told him to go back and come up with new evidence.[16]

Pillar later declares that the administration was pressing the intelligence community to fabricate evidence to present to the American people as a basis for invading Iraq.[17] When Deputy DCI John McLaughlin presented the information on Iraq weapons, the president told him: “That’s not good enough. Nice try, [but] it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.”[18] In other words, creating a rationale for “selling the war to the public” was much more important than providing actual evidence for the war.[19] Moreover, “On November 21, 2001, nine days after the Taliban was driven from Kabul, Bush directed Rumsfeld to construct in secret a fresh plan for going to war against Iraq. When Rumsfeld suggested he should bring DCI Tenet in on the planning, the president denied him permission to do so, saying that could be done later.”[20]

Then the administration began to pass around the false idea that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Niger. When a former diplomat began to refute those false ideas, he was ostracized and rebuked by the office of the vice president for doing so.[21]

Although the intelligence community repeatedly told the administration that the notion that Saddam was buying uranium from Niger was false, it made little impression on the administration. Bush used this as a reason to go to war in 2002, and even talked about it again in the 2003 State of the Union Address, despite the fact that the intelligence community continued to tell him not to.[22]

When it became clear that the administration was making up evidence, Condoleezza Rice blamed the CIA, saying that it didn’t do its job. “You failed to prevent us from misusing intelligence when, despite your repeated previous efforts and warnings, we insisted on doing so. It’s your fault because you didn’t keep us from misbehaving,” said the former Secretary of State.[23]

Later, when Richard Haass, the State Department’s policy planning chief, tried to articulate his reservations about invading Iraq, Condoleezza Rice told him: “Save your breath, Richard. The president has already made up his mind on Iraq.”[24]

So, does it make any sense that Rice is now saying that the Bush administration tried to avoid the invasion? Doesn’t a woman like this deserve to be behind padded cells? Why is she still writing books while decent Iraqis are still paying the consequences of her diabolical move?

Pillar declares that there was never a time when the CIA presented the administration with solid evidence that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States. Instead, they presented evidence proving the exact opposite![25] The closest thing to evidence was the fact that China’s power was on the rise, forcing the issue of weapons proliferation; Iraq was barely mentioned.[26]

Seeing that the administration accentuated Iraq more than anything else, despite the fact that there was no convincing case for war, Pillar declared: “Intelligence judgments about Iraq and Iraqi weapons programs were clearly not driving any decisions on more forceful actions against Iraq. The later sordid story of intelligence, the issue of WMD, and the selling of the war is a tale about policy-makers pulling, not of intelligence services pushing.”[27]

Pillar agrees with Mearsheimer and Walt in that the war in Iraq also had something to do with Israel; while the war cost the United States a fortune: “The direct costs for Israel were essentially zero.”[28]

One final point. Rice declares in her book that Saddam had a history of using weapons of mass destruction on neighboring countries.[29] Well, Saddam did use weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s against the Iranians, but the interesting thing is that Condoleezza Rice, throughout her book, never even remotely suggested that the United States of America, specifically the CIA, helped Saddam gas the Iranians![30] We are told that: “During the whole war, up to 20,000 Iranian troops were killed by mustard gas and nerve agents from Iraq and 100,000 were wounded. They were able to launch the strikes after being given maps, satellite pictures and other intelligence by the U.S. The Americans have always said that Iraq did not reveal that they would launch chemical strikes.”

“But documents released in the National Archives and interviews with former serviceman show that the U.S. acquiesced in the use of chemical weapons as they tried to help Saddam with the war.”[31]

Condoleezza Rice ignores all those facts in her book because mentioning them would obviously ruin her Neoconservative weltanschauung. What we are seeing here is that the Neoconservative ideology is so ingrained in Rice that she cannot think straight at all. She has progressively become a political zombie, an intellectual coward, and a useful lying puppet.

Rice is now producing and reproducing one lie after another. The only way she is able to produce lies in her book is because she has not been thoroughly prosecuted for her crimes. Perhaps it is high time to start putting people like her behind bars in order to put fear in the hearts of future psychopaths.

Notes:
[1] Quoted in Tom O’Connor, U.S. wars in the Middle East were not supposed to bring democracy, Condoleezza Rice says, in Newsweek, May 12, 2017.
[2] Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017), 275.
[3] Dan Froomkin, White House Reels from Insider Expose, in Washington Post, March 22, 2004.
[4] Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 3.
[5] Dan Froomkin, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies of George W. Bush’s Memoir, in Huffington Post, November 22, 2010.
[6] E. Michael Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1053.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 24.
[9] John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
[10] Jonathan Cook, Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008), 2.
[11] For a study on this, see Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (New York: Perseus Books, 2008).
[12] For conclusive evidence, see Bugliosi, Prosecution of George W. Bush.
[13] Stephen Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 216.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 27.
[17] Ibid., 32.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., 33.
[20] Ibid., 27.
[21] Ibid., 32.
[22] Ibid., 33.
[23] Ibid., 34.
[24] Ibid., 28.
[25] Ibid., 30.
[26] Ibid., 30-31.
[27] Ibid., 31.
[28] Ibid., 21.
[29] Rice, Democracy, 275.
[30] Rob Cooper, CIA ‘helped Saddam Hussein carry out chemical weapons attack on Iran’ in 1988 under Ronald Reagan in Daily Mail, August 26, 2013; Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran, in Foreign Policy, August 26, 2013; Seymour M. Hersh, U.S. Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in Its War Against Iran, in NY Times, January 26, 1992; Julian Borger, Rumsfeld offered help to Saddam, in Guardian, December 31, 2002; Mark Memmott, New Details On How U.S. ‘Helped Saddam As He Gassed Iran’ on National Public Radio, August 26, 2013; US gave Saddam blessing to use toxins against Iranians, in Russia Today, August 26, 2013; Natasha Lennard, CIA helped Saddam gas Iran in ’88, in Salon, August 27, 2013; U.S. Gave Iraq Intel, Ignored Chemical Attacks In 1980s, Report Says, in Huffington Post, August 26, 2013; Norm Dixon, How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons, in Counterpunch, June 17, 2004.
[31] Cooper, CIA ‘helped Saddam Hussein carry out chemical weapons attack on Iran’ in 1988 under Ronald Reagan, in Daily Mail, August 26, 2013.

yogaesoteric
November 13, 2017