"Still, it struck reporters traveling with Rice as odd that the State Department had declined to comment on Vanity Fair's findings. Was that an implicit acknowledgement that it was correct? There was only one solution: We had to ask Rice about it when she held a news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.Rice, of course, said she wasn't going to comment on an article she had not read. But then she offered a defense of U.S. aid for Abbas's Fatah forces, calling the central premise of the article "ludicrous" and saying it was necessary to counteract Iranian influence."