Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state under George W. Bush and defender of his administration's sins, has joined the board of file-sharing service Dropbox. Here's how Businessweek reported it:
The former secretary of state's consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates, has been advising the startup on management issues for the last year. Now she'll help the company think about such matters as international expansion and privacy, an issue that dogs every cloud company in the age of Edward Snowden and the NSA.
"As a country, we are having a great national conversation and debate about exactly how to manage privacy concerns," Rice says about her new position. "I look forward to helping Dropbox navigate it."
There has been some outrage in response to the idea of Rice "thinking" about privacy. In 2005, Rice defended President Bush skipping the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) Court and not bothering with getting warrants to place National Security Agency (NSA) wiretaps on foreigners in the U.S. with suspected terrorist ties (despite concerns at the time from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress).
Those who remember Edward Snowden's very first NSA document dump about PRISM, the program to give NSA access to files and communications on servers at several major Internet companies, may recall that Dropbox was not yet listed as a participant program but would be joining soon. Dropbox denied any involvement at the time—but then, so did everybody else.
Rice's addition to the board has quickly prompted the creation of the "Drop Dropbox" campaign to encourage Dropbox to dump Rice or for consumers to dump Dropbox. Though ostensibly her support for the surveillance state should be the excluding factor for leadership of the company, Drop Dropbox also wants to use Rice's involvement in starting the Iraq War, defense of torture, and role on the board of directors for Chevron as reasons why she shouldn't serve. While the first two items are bad things that she's done, they're completely irrelevant to anything Dropbox might be doing, unless they've got some really, really unusual expansion plans.
Also, Dropbox announced that Pearl Jam was becoming an investor in the company. This also prompted a little bit of outrage by Fortune Senior Editor Dan Primack in the "Ya sold out, Eddie!" vein. Read his argument here.
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]]>The faculty council at Rutgers University in New Jersey is upset the school invited former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to deliver the commencement address in May, and to receive an honorary doctorate, passing a resolution calling on the university administration to rescind it. The Star-Ledger reports:
[T]he faculty council cited her war record and her misleading of the public about the Iraq war as reasons for their opposition.
"Condoleezza Rice … played a prominent role in (the Bush) administration's effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction," according to the resolution. And she "at the very least condoned the Bush administration's policy of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' such as waterboarding," it said.
"A Commencement speaker… should embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship," it continued, and "an honorary Doctor of Laws degree should not honor someone who participated in a political effort to circumvent the law."
The measure was introduced by a chemistry professor who said students were also concerned.
Misleading the American people? Participating in a political effort to circumvent the law? Condoleezza Rice has a long career in academia and policy making, and her life stories can certainly provide some kind of inspiration and even direction for graduating seniors, the role of a commencement speaker. Iraq was a major policy blunder, one that cost the U.S., and Iraq, too much blood and treasure. And the Bush White House, for whom Rice served, is certainly guilty of a gross expansion of the powers of the executive branch, including waterboarding and other potential war crimes. Whether that precludes Rice from speaking to twenty-one year olds being sent out to the real world after spending four to six on a piece of paper isn't necessarily obvious.
Being a hopeless pessimist, what does seem obvious to me is that the faculty council is being driven not by any moral compass but by partisan concerns. They can prove me wrong. New Jersey's congressional delegation is lobbying for Barack Obama to accept Rutgers' invitation to speak at the 2016 commencement. Will the faculty condemn this invitation too? Obama, like Rice, and more so as the head of the executive branch, is also responsible for Bush school war and terror policies, misleading the American people, and attempting to circumvent the law. Arguments that would support Obama speaking to graduating seniors but not Rice are highly unlikely to be intellectually rigorous or anything more than partisan apologetics.
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]]>Last night, former Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told CBS Evening News that the U.S. doesn't have the option of doing nothing in Syria:
There is no doubt that it is time for the United States to make clear that it is going to engage in this effort to stop the difficult situation in Syria and to prevent its further spread, it's already spreading across the region. So, the United States doesn't have an option of no action.
Rice went on to highlight the number of players involved in the conflict in Syria:
When you have Iranian fighters in Syria, when you have Hezbollah in Syria, when you have the Syrians shelling the Beqaa valley in Lebanon, when you have the Israelis taking out Syrian installations because they fear for Israeli security you have a very serious situation on your hands and the United States really doesn't have an option to sit on the sidelines.
All of the above sound like great reasons for not getting involved in the conflict. I have written before about how the complexity of the situation in Syria provides some of the best arguments against intervention.
In her CBS appearance Rice doesn't once mention the fact that Assad's opposition includes fighters with links to Al Qaeda, an issue that those arguing for intervention in Syria have yet to adequately address. If a no-fly zone put in place or weapons are sent to rebels in Syria there is no way to guarantee that this wouldn't benefit jihadists.
Thankfully, Rice's thoughts on the situation in Syria are not shared by most Americans. A Gallup poll published on May 31 shows that 68 percent of Americans do not believe that the U.S. should use military action in Syria even if economic and diplomatic efforts fail.
Watch Rice's comments on Syria below:
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]]>Henry Holt and Company announced Tuesday that the book, currently untitled, will be published in 2015. The 58-year-old Rice has previously written or co-written a handful of policy books, along with memoirs about her family and her years in the George W. Bush administration.
Rice served as national security adviser during Bush's first term and secretary of state during his second term. She is currently a professor of political economy and political science at Stanford University, where she has taught off and on since the early 1980s.
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]]>The interruptions, which came hours before Rice's scheduled prime-time address to the Republican National Convention, highlight the calculated risk by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign to cast the high-profile Bush figure in a convention starring role.
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]]>A new Fox News poll shows 30% of voters preferring Condoleezza Rice to be Mitt Romney's vice presidential pick. That number is the same whether looking at all voters or just Republicans. Behind her in the poll was Marco Rubio, the choice of 19 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of voters overall. Chris Christie rounds out the top three with 8 percent of support. A hypothetical Obama/Biden-Romney/Rice match up is tied at 46 percent. The poll has President Obama's approval rating at 47 percent, with 50 percent of voters saying he deserves to be re-elected.
But could that level of support for Condoleezza Rice by voters sink her chances to be Romney's pick? As Peter Suderman noted when suggesting Mitt Romney could be his own running mate, the candidate doesn't appear to like to share the limelight with staffers. Matthew Feeney pointed out earlier today that Condoleezza Rice doesn't appear on the most recently reported veep list, and even the inclusion of Marco Rubio could just be a diversionary tactic, excluding the choice of almost half of Republicans in this latest Fox News poll. But when Mitt Romney was the first choice of only at most a third of Republicans in the first place, maybe he assumes Republicans will just come around to whoever he chooses as his running as well anyway?
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