On Thursday night’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell conducted an intense interview with former Secretary of State  Condoleezza Rice, challenging her on what many consider the Bush administration’s detour into Iraq, away from the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Rice was among the Bush administration officials who tried to establish a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, a link they later backed away from. O’Donnell milked the interview like a rented cow, teasing it out in tiny saucers over the course of the show, but the result was fairly spectacular.

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O’Donnell began by asking Rice if President Obama‘s visit to Ground Zero earlier today was appropriate, which she did, and she explained former President Bush‘s absence, attributing it to a desire to stay out of the spotlight, and not to detract from President Obama’s moment.

Things got gradually more “tense,” as O’Donnell described it, when the subject turned to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 assessment of the threat that Saddam

Hussein’s Iraq posed. Rice’s responses were mainly Bush-era Golden Oldies about things Hussein did in the early nineties, but O’Donnell’s interrogation was a 180 degree shift from the more deferential treatment the administration received from the press at the time.

Some might even say O’Donnell swung the pendulum too far the other way, at times replacing actual questions with, as Rice observed, “your own commentary,” but he did land some powerful blows, such as his invocation of Rice’s famous “mushroom cloud” quote.

Condoleezza Rice, for her part, made an excellent point as she got in the last word. Asked by O’Donnell if it might have been better to “let history take care of Saddam Hussein,” Rice responded that anyone who thinks Hussein would have been moved an inch by peaceful protests like the ones in Egypt is sadly mistaken.

Here’s the interview, from MSNBC:
Tags: AlQaeda, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Ground Zero, Iraq, Lawrence O'Donnell, Osama bin Laden, President Bush, The Last Word