There's been a Condi Rice sighting, everybody! And she brings good news with her. She says that we'll get hit with another terrorist attack if we leave Afghanistan.

In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, Rice offered extremely sharp criticism of the idea of withdrawal and painted the consequences of this course of action with an almost Cheneyesque bluntness.

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.

"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

As the Washington Post reported Monday, Obama is rethinking all aspects of the U.S. strategy in the Afghanistan in light of the disputed presidential election, an increase in U.S. casualties and waning public support here in America.

In the interview, Rice did acknowledge the recent election as a setback. But she argued that our own experience with democracy proved that it takes time to get things right: "Our democracy wasn't so perfect at the beginning either," she said, citing her own family's experience in the pre-Civil Rights era.

This comes from the woman who ignored the NSA memos about Osama Bin Laden which warned her that terrorists might fly planes into buildings. This comes from the woman who lied about those nasty aluminum tubes and said: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Let's continue to follow her down the road paved of blood.

Blue America is just beginning our campaign against the Afghanistan war with our new action titled "No Means No!" We are slowing bringing in other partners to join in before we amp it up....

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It's obvious that the marching orders have been given for Bushies to come forward and justify torture ever since we saw Dick Cheney do just that. This time it was Condi's turn, and she sounds just as wacky. Every time she opens her mouth she digs herself deeper in the muck. Here's her latest incoherent explanation over her remarks about the president's power to make waterboarding legal or not:

Rice: I said at one point that it was ahhh, given, right that if the president authorized it, it was legal. This was not a "Nixon/Frost" moment. What I ontended to say or what I meant to say about this is: The president said I won't authorize anything that is illegal. It's not that because he authorized it, it was legal...

And she has to even justify her position to a fourth-grader:

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

... Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."

Waterboarding is and always has been torture, so it was not legal. The above clip includes video of her talk at Stanford, which started this whole incident:

“[President Bush] was also very clear that we would do nothing – nothing – that was against the law or against our obligations internationally,” Rice said May 3rd at a Washington school.

And ended with her saying, again, that she didn't make a "Nixon/Frost" type gaffe.

Well, what should we call it then?

Andrea Mitchell said that she may have been bitten by an insect playing golf and was having a allergic reaction in her eye, so that's why her face looks swollen. But her words are just gibberish, and you can't help wondering if those words and their strangled reasoning are causing Condi's discomfort. Is their endgame to just try and move polling a few more points in their favor against torture investigations?

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From Countdown April 30, 2009. Keith reports on Condoleeza Rice's run in with a group of Stanford students. From that exchange:

Student: Is waterboarding torture?

Rice: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, 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.

Student: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

Rice: I just said, 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.

John Dean feels that Condoleeza Rice just admitted to being part of a conspiracy to commit torture.