It is truly appalling the number of times that Condi Rice has been falsely accused of having been informed about serious affairs of state, when in fact, she had never been apprised of them at all. Unbelievable in fact.
The latest episode involves her denying she had ever seen a sweeping proposal from Iran in May 2003, in which Teheran offered to put just about everything on the negotiating table--including their nuclear enrichment program.
Now a former aide to Rice, Flynnt Leverett, who worked on the National Security Council when she headed it, says he was confident that proposal--akin in potential to the 1973 US opening to China, was seen by Rice and then Secretary of State Colin Powell but "the administration rejected the overture."
Testifying before a U.S. Congress committee last week, Rice, said about Leverett's previous public comments on the Iranian proposal: "I don't know what Flynt Leverett's talking about."
She faulted him for not telling her, "We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it." State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "What she said is she has no recollection of having seen it. She has said that repeatedly."
Indeed, she has said that repeatedly not just regarding Leverett's charge--but involving all sorts of similar "miscommunications."
On her way to Jidda last Fall after Bob Woodward's latest book came out, she told reporters it was "incomprehensible" that she could have ignored dire terrorist threats two months before 9/11. She was responding to the charge made by Woodward that she had failed to act on warnings delivered to her in July 10,2001 by George Tenet, then director of central intelligence. She also claimed not to remember any such meeting with Tenet in the White House on that date.
Now it turns out there was such a meeting, but Rice still denies receiving any urgent warnings about Al Qaeda. Condi Rice we know has yet to plead guilty to anything, other than being misled by the CIA about Saddam.
But there's a telling passage in Paul Bremmer's account of his tour as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad, My Year in Iraq. As Bremmer tells it he realized early on that the insurgency was going to represent a serious, perhaps fatal, threat to U.S. plans for Iraq. He repeatedly expressed those fears to Washington, along with increasingly blunt requests for more U.S. troops on the ground to handle the occupation as well as training of the new Iraqi security forces. (One of the reasons for the problem, of course, was Bremmer's decision-backed by the Pentagon-to disband Saddam's army, and fire all the top ranks of the civil service.)
Bremer also repeatedly warned Condi Rice, then the President's National Security Advisor, about the situation. On May 19,2004, as Bremer recounts it (p. 357), "I gave Rice a heads-up that I intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that the Coalition needed more troops."
In that message Bremer described the drastic deterioration in the security situation and the fact that the U.S. militarily simply didn't have the forces to do the job it was supposed to do in Iraq. They couldn't even provide security for the drive to and from Baghdad's airport.
Bremer verified that Rumsfeld received his message but never heard back from him.
And as for Condi? A few days later, says Bremer, he briefed Condi and her deputy Steve Hadley, on the catastrophic security situation. Bremer warned that there would be an increase in insurgent attacks. So, he told Rice, "the message to most Iraqis is that the Coalition can't provide them the most basic government service: security...We've become the worst of all things-an ineffective occupier."
Rice and Hadley's reaction? They "listened but made few comments." Bremer and his assistant walked away "not sure if our analysis would have any effect in Washington." Sounds like the impression George Tenet said he had after briefing Condi in July 2001 about the imminent Al Qaeda threat.
Does Condi remember Bremmer's call?
Another historical tid-bit: According to Amnesty International officials who I have spoken with in Washington, D.C., by June of 2003, Amnesty and other human rights organizations were already attempting to alert the Bush administration to the alarming number of cases of torture and killing taking place in U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan...this of course was almost half a year before the Abu Graib scandal broke.
Among the top officials they personally alerted: Colin Powell-and Condi Rice.