USA Today has replaced the doctored photo, with the following explanation:

Editor's note: The photo of Condoleezza Rice that originally accompanied this story was altered in a manner that did not meet USA TODAY's editorial standards. The photo has been replaced by a properly adjusted copy. Photos published online are routinely cropped for size and adjusted for brightness and sharpness to optimize their appearance. In this case, after sharpening the photo for clarity, the editor brightened a portion of Rice's face, giving her eyes an unnatural appearance. This resulted in a distortion of the original not in keeping with our editorial standards.

I wasn't so sure it was simple brightening of a "portion of Rice's face;" any seasoned Photoshop user would agree. I decided to attempt to replicate USA Today's "brightening" to achieve similar results. The following screenshots and examples are from my efforts.

The USA Today doctored photo (Photo #1)

The original photo (Photo #2)

There was nothing to suggest that a general area around the eyes was brightened. Adjusting the contrast to the extreme showed no signs of doctoring outside the focused area of the eyes, with most differences likely attributed to existing JPEG compression, resulting in distortion and artifacts.

To emulate USA Today's doctoring, I had proceeded to focus on the eyes, and use the Lasso tool to draw a marquee around the specific area of the eyes.

I figured the next best way to only darken the darks, and lighten up the white of the eye was to adjust the curves.

From there, it still didn't quite look right, so I actually darkened the iris and around the eyes a bit, my end result is shown side by side with the other images, noted as photo #3 (click to enlarge).

As you can see, it was a concerted effort to add some white to the eyes with the act of "brightening" rather than specifically replacing pixels one-by-one (which when attempted, did not yield acceptable results). Using the Brightness tool, similar results were achieved, but only when brightening the white of her eyes only.

It seems pretty clear there was a specific intent to brighten the eyes, significantly altering the appearance of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nice try, USA Today, but I don't buy your excuse.