Rice Planted Question With "Friendly Journalist" To "Erase" Pre-Iraq War Legacy

Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress at 4:00 AM on December 1, 2007.

Satyam Khanna: Condoleezza Rice has fake press conferences down to a fine art.

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This post, written by Satyam Khanna, originally appeared on Think Progress

In 2003, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice helped push America into war with Iraq. She disregarded at least two CIA memos and a personal phone call from CIA Director George Tenet stating that the evidence behind Iraq's uranium acquisition was weak. She infamously said, "[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

In an interview with C-SPAN's Washington Journal today, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, author of Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, revealed that after President Bush promoted her to Secretary of State, Rice mounted a "public relations" campaign to distance herself from the pre-war fiasco.

As part of this PR campaign, she directed an aide to "plant a question" asking if she would run for President, in order to help "negate American memories of her very direct role" in invading Iraq:

She had a very deliberative public relations strategy when she became Secretary of State to help erase the images of how ineffective she had been as National Security Adviser. And I describe how one of her aides even planted a question with a friendly journalist to ask whether she would be interested in running for president -- to give her the aura of someone who might have presidential aspirations, make her seem more powerful than she was.

And that all helped negate American memories over her very direct role in the invasion of Iraq.

In October, it was revealed that FEMA clumsily staged a "fake" press conference where agency employees posed as journalists. Condi, however, has fake press conferences down to a fine art.

Tagged as: rice, tenet

Satyam Khanna is a Research Associate for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.