Waterboarding, and Condoleeza Rice
Posted on | April 23, 2009 |
According the the Guardian.co.uk (a highly reputable British newspaper in its on-line format) it was Condoleeza Rice who approved waterboarding in 2002. Since the British High Court is also demanding documents about Gitmo as part of its investigation of torture allegations there, the general feeling is hardly in Ms. Rice’s favor.
Of course, if Ms. Rice authorized torture she would not have done so without telling others further up the hierarchy what she was doing. That means Bush, Cheney, possibly Rumsfeld.
Ms. Rice, the former White House’s token offering to Black women, was touted as a role model. I don’t think many people bought that. Most saw her as gesture to equality that Bush felt he could get away with. She obliged by shamelessly promoting his agenda. She disappeared pretty much during the last few months, which was a smart move on her part.
She’ll probably be made to take the rap for her superiors, much the way Scooter Libby did. I think it imperative that we, as a nation, pursue this topic, investigate her role in approving torture (no one now dares deny it happened), prosecute her, and imprison her if necessary. Torture is always torture. We cannot ignore this investigation. We cannot pretend that torture done in other countries is a crime but that our own secretary of State can get away with it without some dire consequences.
Personally I always rather felt for Ms. Rice (Dr. Rice, to give her her correct title). She was the good academic achiever (a University Provost plucked to be Bush’s helper), the dutiful Orphan, who found she was working Foreign Policy for a man who didn’t know anything about the rest of the world, didn’t care, and couldn’t be bothered to find out. How else do we explain Bush’s continued foreign flubs? The failure to get names right was just a symptom. Her ‘crime’ was that she did not stand up to him. She didn’t challenge him, and so she didn’t do her job. As an Orphan she was afraid to question her boss, and she went along at all times with what she thought he wanted. In an ordinary person this would not be a crime, just weakness. But in a secretary of State it is a crime; lives are destroyed as a result of such weakness.
So archetypes, such as the Orphan, which may be relatively benevolent in ordinary life, can take on a sinister aspect as power accrues.
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Hi—I’m Allan Hunter, author of The Six Archetypes of Love and Stories We Need to Know as well as two books on writing for self-exploration, Life Passages and The Sanity Manual. If you’re looking to live your best life I hope you’ll find lots of inspiration here.
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April 23rd, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
The Bush story is not over and hats off to Obama for not sweeping those ghastly events under the rug. This gives us a chance of becoming a trusted country of compassion again.
April 27th, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
I just realized today that your site feed had moved so I’ve missed several of your posts. I’m just now catching up.
I can’t say that I could possibly align myself with much of anything Rice has said in public, over the past near-decade, but I do concede that, by all appearances, she is clearly very smart and talented.
I want to believe that someone with those qualities couldn’t possibly align herself with the neo-conservative party and the policies of the Bush administration. I wonder, though, if she justified some of the worst of it as a calculated move to increase her odds of success in the future. Calculated insincerity is somehow more palatable to me than the alternative, though not by much.
It is also, incidentally, interesting to me that some of the leading female figures on the far far right, don’t really conform to the sort of 1950’s Norman Rockwell painting ideal of female norms. Women like Ann Coulter and Condoleeza Rice are both single working women without children. I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that I wonder how these women reconcile those expectations against their actual lives.
April 27th, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
Yes, sorry about that. The site just got re-done from the ground up (it apparently needed it to avoid future grief) so here I am again…. I wonder how many other folks I lost? The old Blog was very ordinary to look at. So I think this is an improvement. Now, I have to start putting in pictures….
With a smile, Allan
April 27th, 2009 @ 7:42 pm
Oops. I almost didn’t reply to your comments about far right women political figures. Perhaps I’ll just say that on the far right, whether man or woman, the tendency is to do exactly what fits one’s own agenda best. It’s the sort of cynical and heartless activity that sees everything as fine as long as it benefits the individual concerned. This, of course, is not the Republican party of old. It’s simple opportunism and exploitation. There’s no law against that. In Bush’s case he did all he could to the laws to make sure this sort of unbridled greed was facilitated. Dr. Rice was an opportunist who thought she’d hitch her wagon to Bush’s train.
Such amoral actions carry their own revenges within them. Unfortunately the innocent also suffer.