Condi Rice: Can She Be That Dumb?

I don't know if there is any Bush administration official who pains me as much as Condi Rice does. She's an educated woman, lots of opportunity to learn how things work in the Pentagon, State Department, and White House, and yet she says the most ridiculous, stupid things. She was quizzed by a Stanford student who noted that the United States had not used torture during World War II.

Q: Even in World War II facing Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced –

RICE: Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

Q: No, but they bombed our allies –

RICE: No, just a second, just a second. Three-thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Q: 500,000 died in World War II –

RICE: Fighting a war in Europe.

Q: — and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.

RICE: We didn’t torture anybody here either.

As Rob Farley points out - and, by the way, you don't have to be a history professor to know this - German submarines sunk a good number of American ships within the territorial waters of the United States. So in fact, the Germans did attack the US homeland, and yet our government didn't torture German POWs to find out where the "next attack" would be.

With all due respect, Dr. Rice, you're an embarrassment. And you did authorize waterboarding of at least three al Qaeda terrorists, which - by everyone's account except for you and your Bush administration colleagues - is defined as torture. Perhaps some day, a court will actually hold you accountable for those actions.

Comments

[Sven Ortmann]

Jason, I believe you would be quite naive if you really believed that the USA didn't torture in WW2.

It was not done with approval from the top, but it would be foolish to bet against it.

Not every MI officer who interrogated POWs was an FBI-grade interrogation expert. The usual MI officer had a ridiculously short training and military career before reaching ranks like captain or major - and they were under pressure to learn something that saves G.I.s.

[J.]

Sven, with due respect, you're missing the point entirely. I don't believe that Pres. Roosevelt or his cabinet authorized the use of torture to gain information from enemy captives. That's all that really counts here. I'm sure there were war crimes on both sides during WW2, but that's anecdotal evidence, not a policy.

[sglover]

Not only that, but I'm guessing that, say, Cordell Hull was basically acquainted with the history of the Great War.

Look, little Condi's PhD is mainly a testament to the declining returns of credentialism. The woman **might** make an effective low-level supervisor. Even aside from her astonishing historical ignorance (her 'scholarship' was supposedly in history), every account of her tenure at the State Department paints her as an incompetent manager.

But that only makes sense, because her ONLY qualifications for that gig were that she told the man-child nothing he didn't want to hear, and that Cheney and Rumsfeld found her even easier to steamroll than Powell.

[Sam]

The Stanford student quizing her ought to be slapped around for not thinking to shift his line of questioning to the Japanese and Pearl Harbor. We had internment camps, but we didn't go so far as to waterboard people.

You know what I hate about the pro-torture crowd? They never have a single, concise argument, I presume because they never take the time to learn the facts about what they're arguing about in great enough detail to know what's going on. Usually it goes something like this:

1. It's not torture.
2. Even if it is torture it's a necessary and effective means of getting intelligence out of subjects quickly to protect American lives.
3. Even if it isn't effective, they're bad people so they had it coming.

Um...if you really believed point one and point two, you wouldn't need to go so far as to also assert point three. Really what it all boils down to is these folks just like torturing people.

[Carl O.]

There isn't an intelligence professional alive (unless he's ideologically compromised) who will tell you that torture works as an interrogation method to gain intelligence. I went through POW training in the Air Force in 1984, and I remember, back then, the school instructors (the commander at that time was a former Vietnam War POW) reported that the North Vietnamese found very quickly that torture was useless in gaining intelligence about U.S. operations.

the only good thing about Condi Rice is that she's no longer in office.

[Kotare]

This reminds me of the time (May last year) when McCain said that Iran posed the same level of threat to the US as the Soviet Union did in its heyday.

Not sure which is worse:

McCain: Iran = USSR)

or

Condi: al-Qaeda > Nazi Germany

[yogi-one]

I learned a long time ago that having higher degrees - even from top Ivy League Schools - cannot save a person from being stupid.

When it comes to politics, emotion almost always overrides logic. The highly educated simply marshal their training in constructing arguments and apply it to the position they are emotionally attached to.

If you understand this, you can see how political scientists can come to support positions that basically undermine any real political process.

Condi Rice made a decision a long time ago to drink the kool-aid of the hard-core, hate-mongering, paranoid fascists she worked for in Washington.

She has great powers of logic that, in her own mind, justify her emotional attachment to those positions.

The good news is that a larger and larger percentage of Americans are not buying it anymore. Dick Cheney goes on FOX and blabs away, once again, "9/11,9/11,9/11,blah, blah, blah..." and what do you know, next comes Condi Has-Been, parroting away "9/11, 9/11,9/11 blah, blah, blah..."

And you know what? We don't care. It comes at us on the same level as the post-post, after-game analysis that airs an hour after the game is over. The players have all gone home. America is watching something else.

Does she really sit at home all the time watching 9/11 videos over and over again, repeating those phrases like mantras just to make sure no other thoughts enter her mind?

That's what it looks like. I can imagine her in GWB's living room with Cheney, Rummy, and all the rest, drinking whiskey with the plasma screen on constant rerun of the collapsing towers, reminiscing about the good ol' days.

I think I'm getting sick to my stomach...

[yogi-one]

On a separate note, there's some pretty bad factual errors and logic missteps in Rice's argument.

1. As noted, we did use torture occasionally in WWII, and I have seen pictures from Vietnam of American soldiers waterboarding captives in the field. The difference is that in WWII and Vietnam, those were were not the result institutionalized policy directives from the highest officials in Washington. That doesn't make them justifiable, but to point out that what is horrifying to most Americans, such as myself, was the official endorsement of such practices, which runs deeply counter to my beliefs of what it means to be an American.

2. "Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States"

I have several problems with this position. First of all, why the heck is she defending the Nazis? Did they do some stuff she liked? Nuff said on that.

Second, has she forgotten about Pearl Harbor? While technically speaking, it wasn't the Nazis, it was the Japanese, the point is that is is the closest possible thing to a Twin Towers attack that happened, and that event did, in fact propel us into WWII. The fact that we suffered Pearl Harbor, which was the result of an Axis country attack means that we were, in fact attacked on our soil, by the same enemy. So the point is, even after Pearl Harbor, we did not make torture an official policy (even though, arguably, the creation on internment camps for Japanese-Americans can be seen as evidence that we weren't all high-minded about such issues back then, either).

3. The idea that 9-11 justified the Bush Administration in unilaterally breaking American law and international law, as a matter of policy emanating from within the White House, is not legally defensible.

If someone breaks into your house and robs you, it does not make it legally justifiable for you to rob someone else's house. Condi's logic here is that one crime provides the justification for a separate crime, and she, of all people, should know how not only how illogical that is, but that it doesn't work legally. Even if your house has been robbed, it is illegal for you to rob someone else. It's still breaking the law.

But like I said, she is just using logic here to back up her emotional attachments.

If I was caught running a torture operation in my basement, I'd be subject to investigation and prosecution, and sentencing if found guilty by due process. That's because I am American citizen subject to American law.

So are Condi and her buddies. I see no reason they shouldn't be subject to the same investigation and prosecution under the law that I would be.

She is simply benefiting from the fact that the USA is not a nation of laws, as evidenced by the fact that we refuse to hold her and Bush Administration officials accountable for their crimes. Just like we refuse to prosecute the people who sabotaged our economic system, but instead give them more money to do more damage with.

When we prosecute these people, then you can tell me we are a nation of laws. Until then, I don't see it.

It's a fundamental, basic level breakdown of the very definition of America, and Condi was one of the people at the center of its cause.

It's time she was held accountable for that.