Condi Rice Includes Canada In The Coalition That Supported The Iraq War & Condoleeza Rice Gets Testy When Lawrence O'Donnell Asks Her Tough Questions About Faulty Intelligence to Justify Iraq Invasion 5&6MAI11

GIVEN the chance to prove she is not a liar, not stupid and not a FOTZE on "The Last Word" condi rice blew it, and as all war criminals and those guilty of crimes against humanity (the entire george w bush administration) repeated and tried to justify the same lies, deception and propaganda the bush cabal spewed leading up to and during the ongoing illegal and immoral Iraq war. Check out the video...and the follow up video with Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow...
Last night, during a contentious interview with Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered if Saddam Hussein “was the same threat to New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden was.” With the obvious answer being, “No,” Rice had to come up with something. Similar to President Bush’s “You forgot Poland” line during the 2004 presidential debate, Rice said the threat from, and thus invasion of, Iraq was justified by the coalition Bush put together. O’Donnell noted that the so-called “coalition of the willing” didn’t exactly represent the full support of the international community, but in the fog of the interview’s back and forth, Rice just started adding countries that weren’t even part of the coalition:

RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –
O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?
RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who — the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?

Watch it, starting at 5:22:

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This must be news to the Canadians. While Canada did participate in reconstruction projects after the war began, the Canadian government led by Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did not support the decision to invade. But seeing that Dr. Rice has never made a mistake in her life, perhaps it’s the facts that are wrong in this case.

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May 05, 2011 08:58 PM

Condoleeza Rice Gets Testy When Lawrence O'Donnell Asks Her Tough Questions About Faulty Intelligence to Justify Iraq Invasion

By Heather (Crooks & Liars blog)

In what turned out to be a very contentious interview, the Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell pressed former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about the Bush administration's use of faulty intelligence to invade Iraq. Rice was defensive and got angry with O'Donnell for his line of questioning and was still defending their excuses for the invasion.
It got sticky pretty early:

O'DONNELL: As we look back and reflect on September 11th today, I want to quote something that President Bush said about September 11th, the lesson of September 11th. He said this repeatedly. It became boilerplate in the speeches.
"September 11th taught us a lesson I will never forget and America must never forget -- America must confront threats before they fully materialize. My administration looked at the facts and the history and looked at the intelligence in Iraq and we saw a threat."
He's clearly saying that September 11th is the reason he looked at Iraq differently and saw a threat there.
RICE: Yes.
Are you surprised by that?
O'DONNELL: Yes. Because --
RICE: After September --
O'DONNELL: -- because Iraq had --
RICE: -- after September 11th --
O'DONNELL: -- nothing to do with --
RICE: -- after --
O'DONNELL: ---.
RICE: -- after, of course you look at threats differently. Your country has just been attacked. You know that you cannot allow threats to materialize.
Do you know how many times I've been asked --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: But there was nothing in the --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- threat that Iraq --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: Lawrence --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- presented --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- Lawrence --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- that was in any way related to us --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: Lawrence, we can end this --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- and.
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- interview right now if you don't want me to finish my --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: Go ahead.
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- my point.
Thank you.
If one looks at what happened to us on, we didn't connect the dots. There was a threat materializing that we didn't respond to. Saddam Hussein had been a threat from the time that he invaded Iran in the late 1980s, through the 1991, when, in fact, he went into Kuwait, dragging us into war.
We thought he had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction. And in a context in which terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was a nexus that we could not allow, we decided that this was a threat that had to be dealt with.
O'DONNELL: Forty thousand casualties later, in Iraq, 4,400 military -- American military deaths in Iraq later, would you say that is the single biggest miscalculation that the Bush administration made, that Osama -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and must be stopped by those military men who went in there and found no weapons of mass destruction?
RICE: Sadda -- Saddam Hussein was threat. He had used weapons of mass destruction. This was not --
O'DONNELL: But we now know he wasn't a threat --
RICE: Lawrence, are we going to do this with my answers or with --
O'DONNELL: Go ahead.
RICE: -- your commentary?

It's about time someone subjected one of these Bushies to an interview where they were pushed the way Rice was here. This is the way any of them should be treated any time they're allowed on the air. I'm tired of watching them all come back on the television to revise history without even being questioned on their lies on Iraq and WMD's, much less challenged when they lie on the air as Rice did here.
Rachel Maddow came on the air a few minutes early to discuss the interview with O'Donnell.

Tony Blair's Big Lie of Omission 3SEP10

SO here's a big surprise, a politician continuing the deception and the lies that got us in the Iraq war. Someday bush and blair will have to answer for their war crimes, their crimes against humanity. Someday......

— Zuma / Guardian

In his new book, the former British prime minister asks for a fair hearing on the Iraq war. But he ignores a key meeting where George Bush suggested they con their way to an invasion.

— By David Corn

In his new (self-serving, of course) memoir, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair praises George W. Bush as a man of "genuine integrity and as much political courage as any leader I have ever met." Yet Blair leaves out of the 700-page tome any mention of a meeting he had with Bush in which the US president proposed a plan to trigger the Iraq war through outright deceit.
The early media coverage of Blair's book, A Journey: My Political Life, has zeroed in on his complex and dramatic relationship with Gordon Brown, his onetime political soulmate. (Blair writes about him as one would an ex-lover.) Yet Blair devotes a serious chunk to defending his decision to partner up with Bush for the Iraq war. "I can't regret the decision to go to war," he writes. "…I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded." He adds, "I have often reflected as to whether I was wrong. I ask you to reflect as to whether I may have been right."

Blair rehashes the familiar arguments—the years of Saddam Hussein's recalcitrance and opposition to United Nations resolutions demanding he disarm, the so-called evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Blair writes of his first meeting with Bush—whom he describes as "very smart" but possessing "immense simplicity in how he saw the world"—in February 2001 at Camp David, when they discussed sanctions for Iraq ("there was no great sense of urgency"). Blair recalls in detail other visits and calls with the American president: his trip to Washington shortly after 9/11, a meeting at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where the two men discussed a possible attack on Iraq. Blair even recounts specific notes he sent Bush and telephone calls they held during the run-up to the invasion, as the pair sorted out military and diplomatic matters. And over several pages, he chronicles a September 2002 trip to Camp David to see Bush.

"The US was thinking," the memo said, "of flying US reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions.

But there's no reference to the meeting Blair held with Bush in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003, less than two months before the war would be launched.
During that conversation, Blair told Bush that he needed a second UN resolution that explicitly authorized military action against Iraq, having promised his Labour Party that he would seek one. Blair explained that the resolution—or, at least, an attempt to obtain the resolution—was necessary political cover for him and, according to a memo written by a Blair aide documenting the meeting, "international cover, especially with the Arabs." Bush agreed to try to twist arms at the UN, but he informed Blair that he had already selected a tentative start date for the war: March 10. (Ultimately, there would be no such UN resolution.)
But more than politics was discussed. According to the memo, Bush and Blair each said they doubted any weapons of mass destruction would soon be discovered by the UN inspectors then searching for such arms in Iraq. With no WMDs, it could be harder to win support for the war. But Bush had an idea—or two.
The memo notes that Bush raised the notion of provoking a confrontation with Saddam Hussein. "The US was thinking," the memo said, "of flying US reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. A retaliatory attack would then be fully justified; the war could begin. Bush also discussed producing some "defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD." At this meeting, the two men also agreed that it was unlikely that "internecine warfare" would break out between "different religious and ethnic groups" after an invasion of Iraq.
This memo was a startling revelation. Here was the US president hinting at mounting a giant con game to start a war: creating a phony incident to grease the path to an invasion. The memo—portions of which were published in the New York Times and in Philippe Sands' Lawless World—does not record Blair objecting to this potential subterfuge. (I have read the entire memo.)
Blair could provide a tremendous service to historians (and the citizens of England and the United States) by offering an accurate, eyewitness account of what transpired in the Oval Office that day. What did Blair think of a US president hinting at such trickery to kick-start a war? Did he take Bush's notion seriously? Did Bush propose any other unconventional ideas? Yet by engaging in Soviet-style revisionism—don't recognize an inconvenient historical event—Blair doesn't have to answer these questions. Nor does he have to defend his apparent silence in response to Bush's suggestion that they cheat their way to an invasion. Nor does Blair have to reconcile his description of Bush—a man of integrity—with the documented record (created by Blair's own aide). By ignoring this conversation, Blair demonstrates that this book—despite his passionate claims—is not a good-faith and candid accounting of all the trials and tribulations he underwent as the United States and England headed to war.
At one point in Blair's memoir, he refers to Bush as a "man at peace with himself." That's not how Blair comes across in his book. Perhaps that's because he realizes he is not being completely honest.