Bush to Ask Congress to Take N. Korea off Terror List

But detected deadly White House toxin turned out to be false alarm

(NEWSER) - Condoleezza Rice recounted the day that she, President Bush, and Dick Cheney believed they had been exposed to a lethal toxin by terrorists. Cheney suddenly appeared on a secure video conference screen just weeks after 9/11 while Rice and Bush were traveling in China for the APEC summit. He warned them that White House sensors had detected botulinum toxin, and "we all—those of us exposed—were going to die," Rice revealed in an ABC interview . "I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the president saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’” recalled Rice, who was national security adviser at the time. “We were just a little unnerved." More»

She recalls clashes with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush

(NEWSER) - It's time for Dick Cheney to take a little return fire from Condi Rice. Less than 2 months after his memoir described her as turning tearful during a political discussion , Condoleezza Rice has written her own book, No Higher Honor, which comes out next month, the New York Times reports. Rice recalls White House clashes and encounters with creepy foreign leaders:

• Rice argued with "ultra-hawkish" Cheney that terrorism suspects can't just be "disappeared"; President Bush agreed, and moved several from secret prisons to Guantanamo Bay.
• Rice opposed increasing troop levels in Iraq, telling Bush, "If they want to have a civil war we're going to have to let them." The president appeared pained over a war going badly, she writes.

Autobiography shows he remained willing to act on weak intelligence: Bob Woodward

(NEWSER) - The “missing” WMDs in Iraq taught us a lesson: Don’t act on intelligence unless you’re 100% sure of it. Dick Cheney apparently missed that little tidbit, writes Bob Woodward after perusing the former veep’s new memoir. In In My Time, Cheney says he was the “lone voice” in the Bush administration calling for the destruction of “a clandestine nuclear reactor” in Syria “built by two terrorist-sponsoring states.” But no one else in the administration supported the idea, so the US didn’t carry out an attack. More»

Former secretary of state says she never 'tearfully admitted' anything

(NEWSER) - Add Condoleezza Rice to the list of people torqued by Dick Cheney's opus: The former secretary of state is taking umbrage to Cheney's assertion that she "tearfully admitted I had been right" that the administration shouldn't apologize over a claim in George W Bush's 2003 State of the Union. "It certainly doesn't sound like me, now, does it?" Rice bristles. "I would never—I don't remember coming to the vice president tearfully about anything in the entire eight years that I knew him." More»

Former VP discusses his conflicts with Condoleezza, Powell, Tenet

(NEWSER) - And the revelations from Dick Cheney's new memoir just keep coming: yesterday, news of a secret resignation letter. Today, the New York Times , which obtained a copy of In My Time , reports that Cheney pushed Bush to bomb what the US believed to be a nuclear reactor site in Syria in 2007. But others in the White House, wary of a repeat of the Iraq/WMD scenario, balked, and Bush opted to take the diplomatic route. "I again made the case for US military action against the reactor,” Cheney wrote. "But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.” More»