Could it possibly be that even Condi Rice is shocked at the depth of the incompetence and greed that are being publicly revealed by the Iraq corruption hearings?
Head of State Dep’t Anti-Corruption Office in Baghdad Is A Paralegal
By Spencer Ackerman – October 25, 2007, 11:35AMHow well are the State Department’s anti-corruption efforts in Iraq managed? Don’t ask Condoleezza Rice.
Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) laid it all out. Not only are there duplicative U.S. offices in Baghdad to oversee anti-corruption efforts — the Anti-corruption Working Group and the Office of Accountability and Transparency, to name two — but coordination is so bad that the OAT for months boycotted the meetings of the AWG. Rice said she was “not aware” of that.
What, officially ‘not aware’ or actually not aware? Or could it be both? Could it really be that she did not know and the depths of her ignorance are only now becoming clear to her? She’s certainly looking as though something’s knocked what little stuffing she had out of her recently. It could be from that… or maybe they didn’t have the patent Ferragamo boots in her size. Who knows.
Another point she wasn’t aware of: OAT has had, according to Rep. Tierney, four acting or permanent directors in the past ten months alone. The most recent one isn’t a diplomat or a trained anti-corruption official at all, but rather a “paralegal” who works at the U.S. embassy. “I should get back to you with a sense of how we manage these programs,” she replied.
Perhaps Rice actually didn’t know; not that that gives me have any sympathy towards her. Why didn’t she know? It’s her frickin’ job.
It could be she’s just been brought down to earth with a great big thud on learning that she isn’t the noble liberator of the barbarians and the heroine of her loyal underlings, but rather the aider and abettor of a gang of common thieves and murderers, but even so her ignorance was deliberate policy not inadvertence.
Plausible deniability they call it – with former attorney general Samuel “I don’t recall” Alito, it’s foremost proponent. It got so ridiculous that he had to resign, but he never actually admitted anything much.
Alito made sure he didn’t know anything that could condemn him – even if he actually did know, he made sure he officially ‘didn’t know’.
It’s a useful and convenent bit of sophistry, that – it covers up much administration wrongdoing and plasters over all sorts of festering sores. When you don’t know something you can’t be blamed and if everybody stonewalls, no-one gets caught. But the one thing you can’t escape from is the fact that an officer of state should know what’s going on their department.
That’s why Alito had to go, that and the ridiculousness of the country’s senior law officer being seen to deliberately obstruct a judicially-powered committee.
Whether Rice knew details about the fuckups and corruption in her department officially or otherwise is kind of irrelevant anyway, complicit as she is in the larger crime of the illegal invasion of Iraq, the unlawful killing of much of its population and the wanton destruction of its infrastructure. Everything else flows from that original offence and to even begin to list Rice’s resulting crimes is to pile Pelion upon Ossa.
But it’s looking increasingly less likely that she’s got the stamina for the long- planned attack on Iran, even though she is currently managing to hold the line in public:
During a hearing bristling with partisan snipes between Democrats and Republicans, the overall state of affairs in Iraq was never far from the surface. Pressed by committee members to acknowledge any regrets, Rice said that the war in Iraq had been difficult and expensive.
“Yes, frankly, it has been harder than I thought it would be,” she said.
But she defended administration policy and praised patriotic Iraqis who had risked their lives.
“I cannot by any means make up for the terrible sacrifice,” she said. “But I can say that I think nothing of value is ever won without sacrifice. And yes, I do believe that it’s been worth it.”
I expect it’ll be the same with Rice as it was with Alito: she’ll continue to deny she knew anything, say “I don’t recall” a lot and eventually resign, leaving Bush to make another dreadful recess appointment, perhaps the odious John Bolton (or someone equally rabid) who will push for nuclear strikes on Iran.
Rice has to be got rid of now , even if she is George’s best friend. She may be talking up Iraq success but anyone watching the hearings can see she’s at the end of her tether. If is the case that even she has been shocked at the depth and breadth of the corruption revealed in Iraq it could be that there may be some dark moral places that even Condi won’t go, unlikely as that might seem.
But that would mean she disagreed with Bush: that means disloyalty and if you ain’t for the Chimperor, you’re against him. You have to go, office wife or not.
