The Source Beyond Rove: Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal

Summary:

The evidence of Rice's complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice?s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice?s deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President?s, Rice?s, and the regime?s inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity?in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.
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By Roger Morris - Senior Fellow, Green Institute / GP360 Online
Republished from GlobalPolicy360 (Online)
Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime?s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator?s ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice?s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson?s now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration?s immediate retaliatory ?outing? of Wilson?s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President?s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney?s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak?altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely?or deliberately ignored?in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush?s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame?s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

"God's never failed me yet"

One summer weekend in 1998 at the family estate at Kennebunkport, Me., former president George H. W. Bush introduced his ambitious son George W. to a 43-year-old political science professor, Condoleezza Rice. One of the rare African-American women in the field of Soviet studies, she was rarer still for her archly conservative views. She had interrupted a teaching career at Stanford to work from 1989 until 1991 on the elder Bush?s National Security Council staff as a specialist on Russian and East European affairs, and remained a vocal Bush loyalist. George W. Bush was planning on running for the White House and was woefully uninformed about world politics. At Kennebunkport, the politician and academic hit it off right away, and Rice was entrusted with a vital task: ?to instruct and protect G.W. at his most vulnerable,? as a friend put it. How the woman who became his National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State has fulfilled that trust has had fateful consequences for the United States, other nations, and not least for George W. Bush.

Since the end of the Second World War, the National Security Adviser?s staff domain has varied between a dozen and nearly 100, but its function has remained strikingly the same: to be the presidency?s eyes, ears, and brain, devoted like no other institution in Washington to protecting and serving the Chief Executive, the National Security Adviser?s constituency of one. Rice, who worked for Brent Scowcroft, a cautious NSC adviser under the elder president Bush, defined her role early in 2001 as ?stitching the connections together tightly.?

The gravity of the NSC Adviser?s role demands an extraordinary combination of intellect and substantive knowledge, with shrewd understanding of both the world and Washington-a capacity that previous office-holders have had to varying degrees, from Henry Kissinger?s mastery of power on down.

Although usually relatively hidden from public view in her sensitive role as the president?s advisor without peer, the Nigerien uranium scandal and case for war mounted by Rice illustrates vividly that she was a full party to the now notorious intelligence claims about Iraqi weaponry and ties to terrorists. Prey to the same impulse of the uninformed men around her, she repeated to the 9/11 commission, in one of her rare under oath testimonies before Congress, the regime?s cant about terrorism in general-insisting ?they attacked us for who we are, for no other reason? ignoring a half century of history of American foreign policy and musing with stunning hubris that victory in Iraq will "inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater Middle East."


Continued Here (Lots of leads and excellent research)


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