condoleezza rice

At a conference on leadership in counterinsurgency at the National Press Club sponsored by Marine Corps University, Eliot Cohen, the respected Johns Hopkins scholar who advised Condoleezza Rice at the tail end of the Bush administration, slowly and steadily built up a critique of the Obama administration on Afghanistan. Obama’s apparent reconsideration of counterinsurgency strategy [...]

Marcy Wheeler may have solved a mystery about the previously unacknowledged CIA “enhanced interrogation” technique of “prolonged diapering.” I wondered in my initial post where the CIA got the legal authorization for the technique from, as the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture says that the CIA withdrew a 2002 request to the Justice [...]

Former Vice President Dick Cheney worries that the U.S. troop withdrawal from urban Iraqi areas might “waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.” Andrew Sullivan writes that he’s really just trying to establish a narrative whereby the Obama administration gets the blame for a war that spirals out of control. [...]

One last thing from today’s Zelikow/Soufan hearing. Phil Zelikow was an aide to Condoleezza Rice when she served as secretary of state during George W. Bush’s second term. In his testimony, perhaps unsurprisingly, he portrayed Rice as pushing to restrict the Bush administration’s torture policies. “As Secretary of State, Dr. Rice placed a high priority [...]

One thing that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wants in hand when he calls Philip Zelikow to testify next Wednesday: the memo Zelikow wrote in 2005 as an aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushing back against the Bush administration’s effort at giving torture the cover of law. A Whitehouse staffer says the senator has [...]

The FOIA request I filed on April 22 with the State Department for former counselor Philip Zelikow’s 2005 memo arguing against torture appears to be stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Luckily, four top House Democrats — Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY..),  William Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who occupy important roles atop the [...]

Remember when Condoleezza Rice, perhaps the most disastrously inept national security adviser in history, snapped at a Stanford student that the United States hadn’t tortured anyone and that because the president said “enhanced interrogations” were legal they were, in fact, legal? It didn’t work on the Stanford kid. So Rice is now testing the line [...]

So says Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and secretary of state to President George W. Bush, in this extraordinary talk with a student at Stanford University. Annie Lowrey at Foreign Policy does the hard work of transcribing, so I can simply cut-n-paste Rice’s recollection of her July 2002 approval of the waterboarding of [...]

Assume that the senior officials in the Bush administration acted in good faith from March until August of 2002, when senior officials in Washington were debating what CIA interrogators could and should do to captured al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah. Assume they wrestled with the moral and practical complications of what they were considering doing to [...]

As to my can-there-be-a-decent-right question about torture, Philip Zelikow, the counselor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, provides a compelling answer in the affirmative. His post at Shadow Government is a delicate and thoughtful rejection of the Bush administration’s architecture of torture. He makes short work [...]