Condi's Not So Candid
It is a week to do a liberal's heart good. The star of the show last week was Condoleezza Rice, a black woman. The chief supporting actor was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Jewish woman. The occasion was the ceremonial swearing in of Rice as U.S. secretary of state. Ginsburg is the Supreme Court justice who administered the oath.
This week, if all goes as planned, Alberto Gonzales will win Senate approval to become our next attorney general. Gonzales is Hispanic and was born into poverty.
And, ending yesterday, elections were held in Iraq.
For these reasons, you'd expect liberals to be jumping up and down with joy. Don't liberals support diversity and racial equality? Don't liberals support free elections in other free nations?
The answers are yes and yes. So why aren't we cheering?
Well, in a small way, we are. No matter how you might suspect President George W. Bush's motives, you have to give him credit for his actions. He's done a marvelous job of putting minorities into positions of power.
However, one could argue (and I do), that Rice and Gonzales are the wrong minorities. Rice's claim to fame over the past four years has been her willingness to lie to the American people. Gonzales's crowning achievement, as a White House lawyer, was to write a justification for ignoring Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and providing a legal window of opportunity for us to torture al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
At congressional hearings, Gonzales has come across as a bit of an intellectual lightweight but a real champ at evading questions.
The election in Iraq is a bit of a sham. Among the qualified voters are Iraqi-Americans who left Iraq decades ago. I'm writing this two days before the election, but it's a safe bet the Sunnis will boycott it, as they've said they would, the Shiites will vote for fellow Shiites, and the Kurds will vote for Kurds.
The estimated 100,000 Iraqis who died because of the war won't vote.
My concern at the moment, however, is Rice. Why are we getting a new secretary of state with a proven history of lying to the American people?
Rice lied to support the administration's buildup to the war. She indicated with great certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. She suggested that if we didn't invade Iraq, there would be mushroom clouds over our cities.
That was then. Now, with the absence of Saddam's weapons a proven fact, Rice claims she was given false information by our intelligence agencies. Interestingly, no one has been singled out as the purveyor of that false info.
If that's the case, how is it that I knew -- or had a pretty good notion -- that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Here's what I wrote on Aug. 5, 2002, more than seven months before our invasion of Iraq:
"Is Saddam stockpiling 'weapons of mass destruction' to use against us? People who have been to Iraq, and have had access, say no. People in our government say yes ...
"It's possible that Saddam is up to mischief -- he's certainly capable of it -- but I prefer to believe the reports of independent outsiders rather than those of our government, which has a pretty solid record of lying to us."
My belief at the time was based on the opinions of Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, former and present United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq. Neither man had a personal ax to grind; both were seekers after truth. Both were competent inspectors.
Writing in the Boston Globe on July 20, 2002, Ritter said: "While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq."
Quoted in Time magazine in October 2002, Ritter said the Bush policy (being promoted by Rice) "threatens a war that probably lacks any basis in law or substantive fact. It has a real chance of putting thousands of American lives at risk and seeks to dictate American will on the world."
Hans Blix was more cautious, or diplomatic, in his public utterances than Ritter, yet he reported that Iraq had given grudging cooperation to the U.N. weapons inspectors and was actively destroying its few remaining weapons. He felt that near absolute compliance could be verified within a few months. But he was pulled out of Iraq and the war was begun before he could finish his job.
In any event, Secretary Rice knew, or should have known, that Iraq posed no threat to the United States while she was busy making speeches to the contrary.
California Sen. Barbara Boxer and Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton were both correct to question Rice's honesty in Senate hearings. These two senators, doing their duty, gives liberals something to cheer about. A new secretary of state, who, like her predecessor, has a problem telling the truth to the American people, does not.
I started to bold some passages but I soon realized that the whole article should be bolded.
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