secretary of state condoleezza rice Archives

What's going on – News Roundup

Wednesday Evening News Roundup

Politicians continue to amaze me. It seems to me that politicians have the ability to smile and promise one thing while knowing that they are going to do nothing. Just two days ago, Joe Lieberman (laughingly called an Independent from Connecticut) supported waterboarding. Now it seems that he’s changed his mind. Waterboarding may indeed be a bad thing. Can someone explain to me why Connecticut reelected Joe Lieberman?

Marcy Wheeler has done the homework that we would’ve expected most newspapers would do. She has read all four torture memos and synthesized that information with what is known from the 9/11 commission report. She’s done a truly remarkable job and should be congratulated (she will be on my radio show this week). Wheeler has a series of extremely long posts which really help to draw a clearer picture of what happened in the Bush administration. As we all suspected, key players include VP Cheney, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales. (check out these links – here, here and here)

From McClatchy:
A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration’s advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time, the narrative suggests that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process. (more… )

I think Gov. Rick Perry’s craziness will come back and bite him… even in the very conservative state of Texas.

Radio talkshow host Ed Schultz has been working to find his groove on TV. He had an outstanding rant on Dick Cheney yesterday.

It appears that Atty. Gen. Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to look into torture. President Barack Obama may have played this perfectly.

By ecthompsonmd|2009-04-22T21:02:18-04:00April 22nd, 2009|Party Politics, Torture|Comments Off

What's going on – Wednesday Evening News Roundup

Wednesday Evening News Roundup

Note to MSNBC: upgrade your servers!!! From 7 p.m. to midnight Eastern Standard Time, it is nearly impossible to watch any of the videos (Countdown with Keith Olbermann , The Rachel Maddow Show). You need more bandwidth!

Peter Bergen, counterterrorism expert, has a few comments on why Osama bin Laden has raised his ugly head. I’m not sure that Mr. Bergen adds anything new to the discussion. He does believe that recent air strikes by US predator drones in western Pakistan may be having some effect on the Al Qaeda leadership. It should be clear to all Americans that Al Qaeda and Bin Laden are linked to the Palestinian cause.
One of the things puzzling me over the last several years is why Motorola has been struggling. Three years ago, everybody had a Motorola Razr phone. The latest Motorola phones pale to the iPhone or a new Blackberry. Motorola has announced today that they’re cutting 4000 jobs. Why don’t they keep most of those folks and put them into R & D? (Fire the folks currently in R & D, because they aren’t getting the job done!)
There’s an interesting story that has been circulating over the last several days which truly points out how ineffective Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been. Remember that UN resolution that called for both sides to cease aggression in Gaza? Well it appears that Condoleezza Rice had a big part in drafting that resolution. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went around Condoleezza Rice and spoke with President Bush directly asking for the US to abstain from the vote. So the Secretary of State had been working on a resolution that basically asked Israel to stop. Then the Israeli prime minister called Bush and we completely changed course. Does that make any sense to you?
Dick Cheney believes the deaths of 4500 Americans and over 100,000 Iraqis was clearly worth it.
For the most part, I usually agree with Thomas Friedman. Yes, I know that he continually tried to justify the Iraq war which really has no practical justification. Of course, the premise of his wildly successful book, The World Is Flat, that globalization is good, was overly simplistic and really overlooked the terrible suffering that globalization has brought to some developing countries. Well, now that I think about it, I guess I don’t agree with him all that often. In today’s column, he pretty much glosses over the negative consequences of war again. He tries to justify Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon and appears to be as delusional as President Bush in stating that this incursion was successful. Collateral damage (aka civilian deaths) was not a bad thing as everyone else in the world thinks, but instead is a good thing. I’m not sure that killing civilians in Lebanon or Gaza (or anywhere) can ever be thought of as a good thing. It is obvious to me that the politics in the region are extremely complex. With Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, it is hard for Israel ever to get a good night’s sleep. Some solution needs to be found. Thomas Friedman does not have the answers. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on Friedman’s column.

By ecthompsonmd|2009-01-14T20:46:49-04:00January 14th, 2009|Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, Economy|Comments Off

Hope

I wrote this for the Urban News (April 2008):

I just finished watching the History Channel’s two-hour documentary on Martin Luther King narrated by Tom Brokaw. It was extremely well done but… something was missing. There were interviews from civil rights activists like Representative John Lewis, Ambassador Andrew Young, and Martin Luther King, III, along with thoughtful commentary from contemporary activists including President Bill Clinton, Bono, Forest Whitaker, Jr., and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who grew up in Birmingham.

The program was like a wonderful BBQ sauce that tastes great but is missing some key ingredient or ingredients that give the sauce a pizzazz. That’s what was missing! Pizzazz! In spite of that, I highly recommend it.

As I sit here in my house, in a nice suburban neighborhood, in Arden, North Carolina, I am dictating this column into my Dell computer using sophisticated (translation: expensive) speech-to-text software. I mention this because it takes some capital to do what I’m doing — capital that, in the 1960s, 99% of black Americans didn’t have. My world has been made possible by the sacrifice of Martin Luther King and tens of thousands of others. I’ve attended some of the best schools that our nation has to offer. I have worked at some of the best hospitals because of those who’ve come before me (like my father who was also a doctor). For this, I am forever indebted and grateful. (more…)

By ecthompsonmd|2008-04-24T21:36:45-04:00April 24th, 2008|Newsletter|Comments Off