The former secretary of state and national security adviser can be criticized on many grounds, but if there’s one thing that defined Condoleezza Rice’s history and government service, it’s her expertise on U.S.-Russia relations. So it’s conspicuous that she hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, taken any position on More…
The once-frontrunner, who’s slipped a bit behind Tom Campbell, gets a boost from someone once thought of as a possible president, now almost invisible in national politics. (She’s back at Stanford, where she once served as provost.)
“Based on my personal experience,” writes Rice in the press release, “I More…
It’s not just Alberto Gonzales. Adam Serwer talks to John Bellinger, who served as Condoleezza Rice’s legal adviser at the State Department and the National Security Council, about the Grassley/Sessions/Cheneyite smears on the Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees:
“I think it’s unfortunate that these individuals are
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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. More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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