A Marvel-esque No-Prize to whomever can find me video of this, but: remember when Condoleezza Rice, perhaps the most disastrously inept national security adviser in history, snapped at a Stanford that the U.S. hadn’t tortured anyone and that because the president said "enhanced interrogations" were legal they were, in fact, legal? It didn’t work on the Stanford kid. So Rice is now testing the line on a presumably less capable debating foil — a fourth grader in Washington, young Misha Lerner. Reports Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post:

Rice took the question in stride. First, she said she was reluctant to criticize Obama. "I will not agree with everything they do, and I won’t agree with everything they say," she said. "But the worst thing about being in government is that people outside government who don’t have to deal with the daily struggles you do, and aren’t trying to solve really difficult problems, are just sitting out there commenting and criticizing, particularly people who’ve just been in government. That’s really unfair. So for the time being, if I disagree, I will keep it to myself." 

I know, I know. The real victims here are the former Bush officials who have to endure an endless litany of bad-faith criticism from, like, citizens. Remember: they whipped the Savior up the hill that morning. Draw strength from the example, Ms. Rice. (Sorry, Doctor Rice.)

 Then she got to the heart of the question. "Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After Sept. 11, [2001,] 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."

She added: "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. Sept. 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."

And I was trying to drive safely home, officer, and never intended to plow my car into that schoolyard full of fourth graders. We can debate whether I should have had those drinks before getting behind the wheel, but my lawyers informed me that there were understandings of the law under which everything I did was legal, and in any event my trusted friend told me that even before my lawyers gave me that advice I should go warm up the car. This is a time to look forward and not backward. And I might add that you weren’t even at the bar when we were making these plans.

This is just gravy:

Leaving today’s event, Rice was pressed to clarify her remarks by an al-Jazeera TV crew. She seemed to suggest that it was Justice Department lawyers who deemed the waterboarding legal, not Bush himself. "Let me be very clear. The president said he would not authorize anything that was illegal," she said. "It was not legal because he authorized it. It was because he said we would do nothing illegal and the Justice Department and attorney general said it was legal."

Let’s diagram the claim here. Nothing in the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation" program was illegal because

(1) Bush said not to do anything illegal

(2) the Justice Department and the attorney general said everything in the program was legal

The first claim will not be remotely persuadable to a fourth grader. The second has the veneer of plausibility. But, again, we know from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s timeline that Rice authorized "as a policy matter" the use of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques before the Office of Legal Counsel had issued its August 2002 blessings. And the memos themselves contain legal thinking so clearly tendentious, even to non-lawyers — Abu Zubaydah can be tortured because his gunshot wound is healing well? His mental state is shipshape for waterboarding? Says a… SERE psychologist who’s part of the interrogation team so, you know, OK then — that it’s clear they were legal absolution for agreed-upon policy, as the timeline suggests. And to lawyers, the reasoning is even worse. In the words of Harold Koh, they amounted to "perhaps the most clearly erroneous legal opinion that I have ever read." (But that may just be Koh’s "transnationalism" acting up, and only an idiot would counsel showing a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.)

Even better than video of Rice’s chat with young Misha: if only there could be a record of the conversation Rice eventually has with Jesus about this period in her government service.