With NFL Commissioner
Roger Goodell under fire for the league’s reprehensible handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, the names of potential successors are already being bandied about. But one of them—
Condoleezza Rice—would be among the very worst choices the National Football League could make. After all, the NFL’s credibility is at risk for having condoned violence toward and degradation of women by some of its players. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Rice didn’t just
defend torture perpetrated by the government of the United States; she followed in
Richard Nixon’s footsteps by claiming "if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
On its face, Condi Rice’s experience in business, government and academia, her groundbreaking biography and deep love for the game make for an impressive resume to take over the NFL’s headquarters in New York. In 2002, then Bush national security adviser and longtime Cleveland Browns fan Rice made it clear that being commish was her “dream job.” In 2005, she declared, “If that jobs becomes open, I’m gone.” Already selected to the committee that will decide the four teams for the NCAA’s college football championship playoff, Rice has been suggested by press (see here and here) and pundits right and left, including Juan Williams of Fox News and Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post. As Williams put it:
I have always respected Rice as pioneer in her field and a role model for black America’s sons and daughters. Her hard work and commitment to education took her from a working class family in the segregated South to the highest heights of academia and politics. As the first African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State, she is the embodiment of the American Dream.
Condi Rice is, in Capeheart’s telling, “the one person who could save the NFL.”
Certainly not now, if ever. Because right now, the professional football is accused of being an accomplice to the violation of basic decency and human dignity. The person who would lead the NFL is confronting the threats, the intimidation, the beatings and the sometimes fatal consequences of domestic violence toward women cannot have been a cheerleader for the torture of prisoners held by the United States.
Please continue reading below the fold for more on this story.
In 2009, Rice’s aide and confidante Philip Zelikow first told the Senate Judiciary Committee about his memo which, as Scott Horton recounted, "caused senior figures in the Bush White House to go ballistic—they actually sought to collect and destroy all the copies." Three years later, a redacted version of the Zelikow memo became public, and with it his 2006 conclusion that the Bush administration's use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" interrogation techniques like waterboarding were "a felony war crime."
Of course, you'd never know that listening to his former boss, Condoleezza Rice. In 2005, Rice announced:
"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world."
Unfortunately, as
CBS reported, a 232-page report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee in August 2009, "then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice personally gave then CIA Director George Tenet the go ahead" on enhanced interrogation techniques in early 2002. (That is, before the publication of the notorious
Yoo/Bybee memo defining torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.")
But as CBS also reported on April 22, 2009, that's not what Rice told the committee:
CBS News's David Martin reported that, while serving as Bush's National Security Adviser, Rice gave verbal approval to CIA Director George Tenet to continue using harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding and stress positions, on detainees.
Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, Rice said she didn't recall the details of conversations at the White House regarding CIA interrogation techniques.
Just days later, Condoleezza Rice changed her defense from faulty memory to a 21st century version of Richard Nixon's memorable line that "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."
Under fire from a group of students at her beloved Stanford University, a defensive Rice protested:
"I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did."
In any event, Rice insisted, she was just following orders. "The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture," she said, before conjuring up Tricky Dick:
"The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
That kind of language, a sickening mix of the Nixonian and the Orwellian, is precisely the type of statement that has people calling for Roger Goodell’s head. That’s why the NFL's cure for Ray Rice cannot be Condoleezza Rice.