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Condoleezza Rice-Cooked in
Oil?
By Barry Lando
05/18/07 "ICH"
-- -- Now that Paul Wolfowitz has been more or less
sidelined, how about some questions for Condoleezza Rice?
What’s to
ask Condi? Well, for starters about her role in the Oil-for-Food
scandal–a role she might have played first in private industry,
and then, as President Bush’s National Security Advisor.
This
week
an investigation
by the International Herald Tribune and the Italian business
daily Il Sole 24 Ore revealed that Total, France’s largest
company, indirectly paid up to $1 million dollars in illegal
surcharges to Saddam’s regime on oil it bought from Iraq from
2000 to 2002.
That sum,
however, is nothing compared to the $20 million that–according
to another report– U.S.
oil giant Chevron apparently paid indirectly to Saddam during
the same period. Chevron will now pay between $25 to $50
million dollars in fines as part of a settlement with the U.S.
Justice Department.
What has
Condoleezza Rice to do with all that?
As she
tells it, she was just a very concerned spectator. In January
2005, during
Senate
confirmation hearings
to be the nation’s next Secretary of State, Ms. Rice expressed
her outrage at revelations that Saddam had used some of the
billions he skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program to purchase
dual use equipment that could have been used to produce WMD.
“I think
it is a scandal what happened with Oil-for-Food” She told the
senators. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of what happened
here…and those who were responsible, I think, should be held
accountable.”
Right,
except that during much of the period that Chevron was violating
the sanctions, Condoleezza Rice was on the Chevron Board of
Directors. She went on the board in 1991. Iraq began demanding
the illegal surcharges in August 2000. By the time that Rice
resigned from the board in January 15, 2001 to work in the White
House, Chevron had already bought millions of barrels of crude
from Iraq, even though Iraq’s supplemental charges violated the
Oil-for-Food program.
According
to the Volcker Committee which investigated the Oil-for-Food
program, the fact that Saddam was charging illegal supplements
was common knowledge in the oil industry.
Though it
may be argued that boards of directors are often big name
figureheads, according to Chevron’s own executives the company’s
policy was that “board members must hear the bad news along with
the good. And they should hear it in board meetings, before it
appears in the newspapers.”
As
Claudio Gatti, who wrote the IHT reports, pointed out, if any
board members should have heard the bad news about illegal
payments to Saddam, it would have been the board’s Public Policy
Committee, established specifically to consider important legal,
environmental and other policy issues. For two years, it was
chaired by Condoleezza Rice. (Perhaps some enterprising
reporter or congressional investigator will talk with other
members of that committee to see if the subject ever came up.)
But
Rice’s possible complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal doesn’t
stop there. At the beginning of 2001, she became President
Bush’s National Security Advisor. One of her major
preoccupations, of course, was Saddam Hussein. As she told the
Senate committee in 2005, the United States relied on
Oil-for-Food “to keep Saddam Hussein contained and checked. And
clearly we weren’t doing that. The sanctions were breaking down.
He was playing the international community like a violin.”
Who
arguably better knew the music and some of the key players then
Condoleezza Rice, fresh from the Chevron board?
One
wonders what thoughts crossed her mind when she read—as she must
have—reports by U.S. intelligence agencies detailing how
sanctions against Iraq were being thwarted by the major oil
companies..
Indeed,
according to the Volcker Committee, Saddam’s manipulations had
been reported to members of the 661 Committee which oversaw the
U.N. Sanctions. The most powerful member of that Committee, of
course, was the United States.
What did
Condoleezza know about all this and when did she know it? It’s
doubtful we’ll ever find out from Condi directly. She has an
impressive record of either somehow ignoring, forgetting or
gliding by when confronted with unpleasant issues.
For
instance when she was questioned by a congressional committee
this past February about why the Bush administration in 2003
rejected an offer by Iran to negotiate major issues with the
U.S—including Iran’s nuclear program—Rice testified that she had
never seen any such proposal.
She was
immediately contradicted by Flynt Leverett, who worked on the
National Security Council when it was headed by Rice. He
compared the potential offered by Iran’s proposal to the 1972
U.S. opening to China. He said he was confident it was seen by
Rice and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell but “the
administration rejected the overture.”
Other
congressional investigators are still trying to find out how the
charge that Saddam had been attempting to purchase uranium in
Niger got into President Bush’s State of the Union Speech in
January 2003. This despite a specific warning from the CIA to
the White House in October 2002 that the charge could not be
substantiated. In fact, Condoleezza Rice had deleted that
accusation from an earlier Bush speech for that very reason.
Condoleezza now claims that the CIA warning had somehow slipped
by, forgotten by both herself and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
“Maybe we should have remembered. We didn’t.” She recently said.
Ms. Rice
is refusing a subpoena to testify about the affair before a
committee of the U.S. Congress.
On
another occasion, after Bob Woodward’s latest book, “State of
Denial” charged that CIA Director George Tenet had come to the
White House on July 10, 2002 specifically to warn Rice of a
serious terrorist attack being prepared add aimed at the United
States, Rice told reporters that it was “incomprehensible” that
she could have ignored dire terrorist threats two months before
9/11. She also claimed not to remember any such meeting with
Tenet in the White House on that date.
It later
turned out there was such a meeting, but Rice still denied
receiving any urgent warnings about Al Qaeda.
In his book, Woodward also quotes David Kay, who led the hunt
for WMD after the invasion, and found out–to his own
surprise–that there were none. Kay later told an NSC staffer who
claimed that Rice “was the best national security adviser in
the history of the United States.” “Well, she could have stopped
trying to be the best friend of the president and be the best
adviser and realize she’s got this screening function,” Kay
said.
When Tenet had insisted the WMD case was a “slam dunk”, she
should have followed up aggressively, demanding a full
reexamination of every last shred of the “slam dunk”
evidence……‘She was probably the worst national security adviser
in modern times since the office was created,’ he said.”
There is
a similar damning account in Paul Bremmer’s description of his
tour as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad, “My Year in Iraq.” As Bremmer
tells it he realized early on that the insurgency was going to
represent a serious, perhaps fatal, threat to U.S. plans for
Iraq. He repeatedly expressed those fears to Washington, along
with increasingly urgent requests for more U.S. troops on the
ground.
Among
those he repeatedly warned, he says, were Donald Rumsfeld and
Condoleezza Rice. Rumsfeld didn’t even reply to one
particularly stark warning. Nor, says Bremmer, did he hear any
further about it from Rice.
A few days later, says Bremer, he briefed Condoleezza again, and
Steve Hadley, on the catastrophic security situation: “the
message to most Iraqis is that the Coalition can’t provide them
the most basic government service: security…We’ve become the
worst of all things–an ineffective occupier.”
What was the reaction of Rice and Hadley according to Bremer?
They “listened but made few comments.” Bremer and his assistant
walked away “not sure if our analysis would have any effect in
Washington.”
I heard a
similar account in the Spring of 2004 from a top Amnesty
International official in Washington. Already in June of 2003,
Amnesty and other human rights organizations were attempting to
alert the Bush administration to the many documented cases of
torture and killing taking place in U.S. military prisons in
Iraq and Afghanistan. This was almost half a year before the Abu
Graib scandal became public.
Among the
top officials they personally alerted: Colin Powell–and
Condoleezza Rice
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