Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has withdrawn as commencement speaker at Rutgers University in New Jersey following protests by faculty and students over her role in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and U.S. interrogation policies. The Rutgers Board of Governors picked the former high-ranking Bush official in February. Rutgers faculty immediately circulated a petition decrying the role Rice played in, quote, “efforts to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” In September of 2002, speaking to CNN, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice uttered these famous words explaining the threat presented by Saddam Hussein.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon, but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
In a statement posted on her official Facebook page on Saturday, Condoleezza Rice said, quote, “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families. Rutgers’ invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time,” she wrote. Rutgers President Robert Barchi had refused to disinvite Rice after the protests and organized sit-ins at the university.
Carmelo Cintrón Vivas talking:
Saturday morning, we were very happy and very pleased when we heard the news that Condoleezza Rice herself decided to back out. We think that that might be even a more powerful statement than the university disinviting her, and we are proud that our direct actions and our pressure were felt and our voices were heard from the bottom up.
we felt that war criminals shouldn’t be honored by our university. Someone who has such a tainted record as a public servant in this country should not go to our university, speak for 15 minutes, get an honorary law degree for trying to circumvent the law, and receive $35,000. We believe that that is wrongful, and that’s not fair to any student graduating or not graduating at Rutgers University.
first of all, it was very small. This started about two weeks ago, and it was maybe—the actions started about two weeks ago. It was maybe about three or four people flyering at public activities. And all of a sudden, we decided that it was our chance to start creating direct actions. So we called for a rally and a sit-in on Monday, if we had the numbers. And luckily enough and hopefully enough, we had the numbers on Monday. So we staged a sit-in at the president’s office. And after that, it just grew exponentially, and it continues to grow. And we haven’t stopped working. We’re still on educating and making sure everyone knows why we protested this.
that is something the Board of Governors and the president have not been clear about. The process is normally one where there’s a 20-person committee, and they make different suggestions, and they vet different candidates. And admittedly, that process was changed when President Barchi first came into office, and that 20-person committee came down to two people. And after that, it’s very blurry. We have—the most information that we have from the whole process is a 96-email exchange between different function persons in the Board of Governors and the president that we acquired through OPRA, the Open Public Records Act. So it hasn’t been clear, and they haven’t really said anything. We have just been undigging the mystery of how she was invited.
Baher Azmy talking:
she was critical in promotion of the lies that led up to the war and the selling of the war to the American people. And I just—I want to congratulate Carmelo and his colleagues. I mean, I think it’s so heartening that this generation is reminded and thinking about the crimes of the Bush administration officials and not letting them get away with these sort of gauzy histories about what happened from 2001 to 2008. And I get discouraged when the sort of younger generation thinks things like war is normal or Guantánamo is normal or indefinite detention is normal. And this is an important step by this group.
we have been receiving since the beginning our main backlash, if we can say it’s that, is that, “Well, she’s a minority. It’s a woman. Why are you protesting this? This is supposed to be something that you’re always for. And she has free speech.” We think that those are a really valid question, but you have to go beyond that. You have to go beyond reducing a person to their race or to their gender and looking into their actions. Just because I am a minority—because I am, I’m Puerto Rican, I’ve only been here in the United States for two-and-a-half years—doesn’t mean that I’m not to be held to the same standards as everyone else and that I can break the law whenever I want to.
Carmelo Cintrón Vivas talking:
If we look into a lot of criminals and we look into a lot of international criminals and just bad people in history, a lot of them had great academic careers or great medical careers or great—your career is one thing, and the way you act as a person, as a human being, is another one. And that’s why you make this an issue about human rights.
— source democracynow.org
Carmelo Cintrón Vivas, media spokesperson for the No Rice Campaign and a senior at Rutgers University. He was one of the organizers of the protests and was involved in every direct action that the university students staged.
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.