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Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and secretary of state to George W. Bush, put on something of a torture-and-responsibility clinic to a student at Stanford University. Annie Lowrey at Foreign Policy does the hard work of transcribing, so I can simply cut-n-paste Rice’s recollection of her July 2002 approval of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah:
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….
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 Conventions Against Torture.
My emphasis. I had intended to stop this post with a notation of Rice’s rather Nixonian overtones –"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal" — but it appears Rice has actually made some news here. Until now, Rice has been the seniormost Bush administration official known to have signed off on waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" methods for Abu Zubaydah. In an April 2008 interview with ABC News, Bush said that he knew that his top advisers had met to discuss what was acceptable for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002, but acknowledged merely that he "approved" of such meetings, but gave no indication that he specifically signed off on the interrogation plan.
But Rice is now portraying herself as merely being a conduit for approving the CIA’s interrogation regime: "I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency." Well, there are only two more-senior officials than Rice in this context, and that’s Bush and then-VP Dick Cheney. If she hadn’t made a decision on the part of the administration for the Abu Zubaydah interrogation plan, only one of these two men would have had the authority to do so. And all of this would have happened before the Justice Department determined the interrogation techniques to be legal.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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Yes. She did.
Rats. Ship.
pithy
Wow! Condi should check her history book regarding the Water Board. It is torture, even if the President authorized it.
The buck is moving.
It looks like it will stop in the “swanky north Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow”, where a recent retiree and his lovely wife bought a house.
Such as good excuse — I was just following orders, or
“So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
Pithy in light of Omama’s comment about “peeple who were within the four corners of the memos…” Trying to see if these memos fir, Condi?
Poor Bush. (Not) Condi’s pointing fingers. And, Ed Schultz is doing a pretty good job making fun of him too. This is what our President said last night…clip…and he’s not saying “blah blah blah”, but defintely with a Bushish twang.
Pardon my smirk.
And also own land in Paraguay, which does not extradite.
Have I mentioned on this thread yet how much I detest this woman?
Is anyone else enjoying MSNBC’s new show?
implicate?
yes
some other words too
yes, yes, and yes
but do let me finish my point,
and do your homework first!
Have you seen Stone’s W? I thought the actress portraying Rice really nailed her. Rice is so strained, it would be a hard portrayal to do honestly and without looking like satire.
1. why would students want to meet with Condi?
2. I am sure she will (diplomatically) throw her bosses under the bus if she thinks she might seriously face prosecution. I don’t get the sense that she’s a 100% brain-fried koolaid drinker. 95% maybe, but not 100%.
3. I’m picturing a Jack Nicholas scene for Cheney in court: “You can’t handle the truth!”
(and, don’t forget) a woman scorned…
Ed Shultz has been a pleasant surprise, he’s almost in the fire breathing lefty category.
sorry, no, i didn’t see it. did you enjoy the movie? it’s hard for me to imagine sitting through it after sitting through the last 8 years. and, except for bush, all the same “principals” are still roaming around speaking freely in public.
the student is asking her about torture and she’s acting like she’s in a debate and she’s being really arrogant and putting him down. ugly.
Let Justice roll down like waters…to refresh and wash clean..The unstoppable rush and flow of waters
Same for me…I have a friend who says the actors really nail it…who needs that for 2 punishing hours?
Wow. Just — wow.
“I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
All that’s missing is the “Let me make this perfectly clear…”
what a lovely image.
Sorry, gotta go OT. People were talking at FDL earlier in the day about that mean, mean, mean Virginia Fox, or as (I think) cbl2 called her – Ginny “tarbaby” Fox and her remarks about Matthew Shephard’s death. His mother was in the chambers for that bit of hate. She’ll be on Rachel Maddow tonight.
Well, know that there is an edge to the movie, maybe just my eyes. But, I thought there was a bit of, oh I don’t, know. Maybe it was the way it was shot. A bias of “How could this have been allowed to have happen”.
I really enjoyed it, fwiw. Watched it twice.
I also like how the whole room goes quiet…
Even if Condi and Co. escape legal proceedings,
surely Stanford can be forced to pay war reparations-
to the American GIs who were put in harm’s way by this ditz.
She is so arrogant…
Is this an out? Was this an instruction that they could go ahead after OLC approved it?
Condi is so, ummm, 2002.
Well, time to put all this behind us.
She’s really a bitch, isn’t she. She feels threatened by his questions.
This sentence follows the normal cadence of Condi’s language. It sounds like something Condi would say,…except that she usually uses the specific words the President wherever applicable.
In this instance she did not. She said the administration which is more broad than the president, obviously, and as you point out above, the only two people in her chain of command are Cheney and Bush.
I’m betting that the orders were passed from Cheney. If the order came specifically from Bush she would have used the president.
“I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
So this is the contemporary equivalent of “I was just following orders”? How bloody Orwellian.
I’m almost entertained by the CYA and “duck & cover” I’m sensing from the various apparatchiks of the previous mis-administration.
It seems like the best they can come up with is “I was only following orders, and anyway, we got SOME info, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.” I don’t believe they think that what they did was legal (hence the running for cover no matter how thin it might be). If it wasn’t for the horrible things they have done in our name, it’d be funny.
My new favorite recipe – Spanish *court* Rice.
You have your good listening ears on. You!!!
Hello ES. Yikes. That’s what I had for lunch.
(Nice to see you…I just can’t stay up for LLN anymore. )
It wouldn’t be a War Crimes Paella without Rice, would it?
When she calls him “dear” in that CONDIscending tone I just want to smack her.
I think she gets where this is going and is practicing her alibi and indignation all at the same time.
Spencer/all on Hardball tonight there was a go around between Pat Buchanan and Jonathon Turley about the Rice statement. Turley said that Rice should be considered one of the “targets” of an investigation on torture.
That clip is not up at Hardball yet
here it is.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/
Matthews said that “Rice was channeling Nixon”
Turley wipes the floor with Buchanan
I saw that at the first airing. It’s staring again right now…the show..on the west coast. Just telling those who want to see/hear.
Well, it looks like she, Bush, and Cheney will be condiscending to the gates of hell together!!
I don’t think so. It’s the kind of deflecting someone would do when implicating, oh, say, an abusive boyfriend.
Hi Demi.. to much camomile? /s
atroce con pollo
Condo’s destined to become a trick question on Liberty University Law School’s entrance exam:
Condoleeza Rice was:
1) National Security Advisor in the first Bush administration who missed the Bin Ladin PDB nearly six months before 9/11.
2) Secretary of State in the second Bush administration best known for her Imelda Marcos shoe mania.
3) An Exxon crude oil supertanker.
4) A war criminal who inadvertently implicated herself and the architects of America’s systematic torture policies from 2000 to 2008.
5) All of the above.
Well, not too much…but you nailed it. For me to get enough good sleep to wake up at 5:30, I pop 1 or 2 valerian root capsules and have a cup of tea, and read and then, if I’m lucky, I zzzzzzz. By nature, I’m a think-think-think brain. It really gets in the way of the sleep thing.
scarecrow is upstairs, fyi.
I need to try valerian root. Peppermint melatonin works nicely..if i take it and lay down immediately.
Treason is never a mistake and it’s always a mistake not to call it treason.
Only traitors torture …
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
She’s definitely channeling the ghost of Richard Nixon, which makes the argument for prosecution all the more compelling. The failure to prosecute Nixon et al lead us thru the Reagan crimes to those of the Bush admin. So long as we assert the fiction that we’re ruled by law then by gum let’s hold’em all to account. Otherwise pls send me my own get-out-of-jail-free card asap. I’ve a mind to pay off my quarter million dollar medical expenses with money I don’t have.
If there is anyone who would whither under hard questioning it is mde. ‘who could have imagined’. Arguements aren’t hard when you are right. She wasn’t doing well.
I think the President is playing 3D chess here. There is going to be a Chinese Drip of toxic information coming out, for months. It will offend the World and I’m hoping America. It is going to play out on the World stage. I think these guys will be tried in abstentia.
There is no way the President could say anything was a crime till the AG makes a determination. Also I don’t think it is safe to try these people with the present supreme court. I lived through US VS Nixon, there is a real danger the clowns that appointed bush will exonerate him.
now bush is going to have some serious trouble, if he wants to protect his loyal servant who made a mistake at this press conferance he’s going to have to bury cheney
someone falls here, rice, cheney or bush, it’s not going to be bush
yet
Is that even true? She’s a direct member of the cabinet as the Sec. of State and a direct advisor to the President as the National Security Advisor.
In either role she reports directly to the President. The office of the Vice President is orthogonal to her relationship to the Presidency. So, when she says, “Administration” she can only mean, “the President.”
This assumes criminal prosecutions & convictions.
Other than the magistrate in Spain, Obama administration bipartisanship prosecutions are highly unlikely and there will be no Federalist Society convictions.
The bubble will get smaller, but they’ve made it impervious to accountability which was the plan all along.
“No, dear, you’re wrong…. Do your homework…”
My god, the lying arrogance of this smug politico. My favorite part of the video is where Condi stops the student and tells him the attacks on 9/11 were worse than facing the Nazis in World War II, “because they [the Nazis] never attacked the Homeland.” The student: “But 500000 died in WW II — ” Condi: “I don’t care, they didn’t attack the homeland…”
Yes, mein Fuhrer, and waterboarding didn’t violate the Convention Against Torture, either.
Why listen to this High Priestess of the Cult of Mendacity? I guess you and EW pulled as much from this woman’s talk as anyone might want to get. For me, it was an emetic experience (assuming I can use that word as an adjective).
What a disloyal cowardly bitch. This ‘well educated Russian expert’ was totally useless other than to spoon feed the guy and change his diapers.
Hey, she made her own bed and is equally at fault.
The Court just ruled in a 7-2 opinion in an accidental gun discharge case, that if you want to play with guns you take full blame for whatever happens.
I hope they all rot, for the brutal sheer torture they put us all through for 8 years.
Abu Zubaydah, who’s job was a personnel clerk, was waterboarded 83 times and his keepers filmed as they did it -for Cheney’s pleasure no doubt. He now has severe brain damage.
http://www.latimes.com/news/op…..9097.story
That distinction also fits with the story about what they learned from the Iran-Contra thing: run these illegal things from the Veeps office to keep it away from the President.
Of course *technically* the Veep has absolutely no power to authorize anything. Remember, he’s only a barnacle. I hope Veep Biden remembers that too. I’m sure it’s awfully tempting to be part of the inner circle and to begin doing stuff.
Condi did find herself unprepared and missing that White House authority to call the shots.
It seems to me she confessed in carrying out torture and tried to give the, “If a President does it is legal”.
I’m very disapointed in Condi because she sounded like that White House Sarah Taylor in front of congress in a hearing when she said, “I took an oath to the President”. I believe Pat Lehey at the time addressed this oath with her and told her there is no oath to the president.