Post by wheelspinner on Oct 24, 2011 6:15:09 GMT -5
Big deal. The real point is, for both her and Powell, that they didn't have the guts to go through with it. It's useless to make these noises now, when she could have made a real difference by standing on her principles at the time. How many lives could she have saved if she had done so?
Rice quit threat over Cheney
Peter Baker Washington
October 24, 2011
Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice in discussion in the Presidential Emergency Operation Center at the White House, following the September 11 attacks. Photo: AP
CONDOLEEZZA Rice clashed repeatedly with US vice-president Dick Cheney over what to do with captured terrorism suspects and at one point even threatened to resign when she felt circumvented, according to a memoir of her time in Washington due out next month.
No Higher Honor is the latest in a string of memoirs emerging from Bush administration figures trying to define the history of their tenure.
But this volume, at 734 pages, deals only with her time in office, making it the most expansive record of those eight years by any of the leading participants.
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First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Dr Rice says she often argued against Mr Cheney and his staff, who were ''very much of one ultra-hawkish mind''.
The most intense confrontation came in August 2006, when she urged president George W. Bush to acknowledge holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas. She and Mr Cheney argued for several minutes while others remained uncomfortably silent. Mr Bush sided with Dr Rice and moved the suspects to the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In November 2001, she writes, she went to Mr Bush upon learning that he had issued an order prepared by the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, authorising military commissions without telling her. ''If this happens again,'' she told Mr Bush, ''either Al Gonzales or I will have to resign.'' The president apologised.
Dr Rice was perhaps Mr Bush's closest adviser, often dining with the first family and spending weekends at Camp David. But she writes of one meeting in December 2006 when she and the president spoke sharply with each other over whether to send more troops to Iraq. He favoured an increase in troop levels and a new strategy to protect the Iraqi population, while she wanted to pull troops out of the cities.
''So what's your plan, Condi?'' Mr Bush asked testily. ''We'll just let them kill each other, and we'll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?''
She was angered by the implication that she did not care about winning in Iraq and retorted that ''if they want to have a civil war we're going to have to let them''. After the meeting she told Mr Bush: ''No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have.'' He said ''I know, I know'', and she describes his expression as wretched with pain over a war going badly.
The way Mr Bush rejected the Kyoto climate change treaty without promising to seek alternatives was a ''self-inflicted wound,'' she concludes.
NEW YORK TIMES
Read more: www.theage.com.au/world/rice-quit-threat-over-cheney-20111023-1meh9.html#ixzz1bhFp0fbp
Rice quit threat over Cheney
Peter Baker Washington
October 24, 2011
Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice in discussion in the Presidential Emergency Operation Center at the White House, following the September 11 attacks. Photo: AP
CONDOLEEZZA Rice clashed repeatedly with US vice-president Dick Cheney over what to do with captured terrorism suspects and at one point even threatened to resign when she felt circumvented, according to a memoir of her time in Washington due out next month.
No Higher Honor is the latest in a string of memoirs emerging from Bush administration figures trying to define the history of their tenure.
But this volume, at 734 pages, deals only with her time in office, making it the most expansive record of those eight years by any of the leading participants.
Advertisement: Story continues below
First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Dr Rice says she often argued against Mr Cheney and his staff, who were ''very much of one ultra-hawkish mind''.
The most intense confrontation came in August 2006, when she urged president George W. Bush to acknowledge holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas. She and Mr Cheney argued for several minutes while others remained uncomfortably silent. Mr Bush sided with Dr Rice and moved the suspects to the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In November 2001, she writes, she went to Mr Bush upon learning that he had issued an order prepared by the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, authorising military commissions without telling her. ''If this happens again,'' she told Mr Bush, ''either Al Gonzales or I will have to resign.'' The president apologised.
Dr Rice was perhaps Mr Bush's closest adviser, often dining with the first family and spending weekends at Camp David. But she writes of one meeting in December 2006 when she and the president spoke sharply with each other over whether to send more troops to Iraq. He favoured an increase in troop levels and a new strategy to protect the Iraqi population, while she wanted to pull troops out of the cities.
''So what's your plan, Condi?'' Mr Bush asked testily. ''We'll just let them kill each other, and we'll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?''
She was angered by the implication that she did not care about winning in Iraq and retorted that ''if they want to have a civil war we're going to have to let them''. After the meeting she told Mr Bush: ''No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have.'' He said ''I know, I know'', and she describes his expression as wretched with pain over a war going badly.
The way Mr Bush rejected the Kyoto climate change treaty without promising to seek alternatives was a ''self-inflicted wound,'' she concludes.
NEW YORK TIMES
Read more: www.theage.com.au/world/rice-quit-threat-over-cheney-20111023-1meh9.html#ixzz1bhFp0fbp
