- The gross misrepresentations in Condoleezza Rice's testimony
to the 9/11 Commission are manifold, but I would like to briefly mention
two: the No-Fly Zone & Bush Assassination Attempt. These are perhaps
not the most important misrepresentations Rice made, but should be discredited
nonetheless since they are so often repeated by politicians and the press.
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- Rice gave the 9/11 Commission two reasons for the Bush
Administration's singular focus on and eventual invasion of Iraq. Interestingly,
she didn't mention WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). That ship has sunk.
Instead, Rice justified the Administration's obsession with Iraq because
American military planes were being shot at by the Iraqis in the no-fly
zone. What she doesn't say is that the no-fly zone was illegally established
by the U.S.. The Iraqis had every right to defend their territory. There's
quite a bit of corroboration of this fact readily available online, but
Libertarian leader, Jacob Hornberger, published an interesting and very
succinct article on this issue in November 21, 2002:
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- "The no-fly zones were unilaterally established
by the U.S. government after the Persian Gulf War, supposedly to enforce
UN resolutions on Iraq. There was one big problem, however: The United
Nations never authorized the no-fly zones to be established. U.S. officials
have always claimed that the U.S. government, as a member of the United
Nations, has the right to unilaterally enforce any resolution of the United
Nations. Such a position, however, is patently fallacious. Enforcement
of an organization's rules and regulations belongs to the organization
itself, not to each and every individual member of the organization....Several
years ago, the U.S. government knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately
imposed an illegal embargo against Nicaragua. The case reached the World
Court, which ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States.
As part of its judgment, the World Court awarded reparations to Nicaragua....That
official court judgment is still outstanding and remains unsatisfied. The
U.S. government has continually refused to comply with the judgment and
has even blocked attempts of the UN Security Council to enforce it."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0211h.asp.
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- Secondly, Rice once again claimed that Sadam attempted
to assassinate the former President George H. W. Bush. However, there is
no credible evidence to back up that claim. In a November 1, 1993 article
in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh wrote:
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- "Someone gave a Boston Globe reporter access to
a classified C.I.A. study that was highly skeptical of the Kuwaiti claims
of an Iraqi assassination attempt. The study, prepared by the C.I.A.'s
Counter Terrorism Center, suggested that Kuwait might have "cooked
the books" on the alleged plot in an effort to play up the "continuing
Iraqi threat" to Western interests in the Persian Gulf. Neither the
Times nor the Post made any significant mention of the Globe dispatch,
which had been written by a Washington correspondent named Paul Quinn-Judge,
although the story cited specific paragraphs from the C.I.A. assessment...
A senior (Clinton) White House official recently told me that one of the
seemingly most persuasive elements of the report had been overstated and
was essentially incorrect. And none of the Clinton Administration officials
I interviewed over a ten-week period this summer claimed that there was
any empirical evidence"a "smoking gun""directly linking
Saddam or any of his senior advisers to the alleged assassination attempt.
The case against Iraq was, and remains, circumstantial." http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020930fr_archive02
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- What can any of us say? As the lies pile up, the credibility
of U.S. politicians and the press sinks to new lows.
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