There is an interesting exchange that has surfaced between a Stanford student and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. The student confronted Rice about whether waterboarding is torture. She responded with a Nixonesque argument that, if the president ordered it, it cannot be a war crime. It sounds a lot like Nixon’s 1977 statement: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” I discussed the Rice comment on this segment of Hardball.
Here is the exchange:
Q: Is waterboarding torture?
RICE: 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.
Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?
RICE: I just said, 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 Convention Against Torture.
The exchange is fascinating from a number of perspectives. First, it shows Rice desperately trying to fall into Obama’s ever-increasing group of exempted people “just following orders.” Her role, however, was significant in establishing the torture program. She had an independent responsibility to refuse to participate in a war crime.
Second, most war crimes involve officials who order them under the claim that they are perfectly legal. The Germans, Japanese, Serbians, and now the Bush Administration have made such claims.
Rice can certainly try to convince the world that waterboarding is not torture — an admittedly unlikely prospect. However, she can hardly portray herself as a messenger girl for the president with no independent judgment or responsibilities. The Senate Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees have released reports that show a much greater role by Rice than she has ever admitted.
Article II, Section 3 of the Convention Against Torture expressly states “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”
The fact is that Rice could do much better in studying the use of this defense by a professional, here.
Brilliant performance JT, or shall we call you ‘Chief’?
From HBO’s ‘You’re Welcome America’…
I did tune in to MSNBC tonight to see you “debate” Pat Buchannan on torture. Never have I seen such a mismatch of argument and, sorry to say, very nice job of hanging PB’s arguments with his own rope at the end. The very reason we need to prosecute for torure crimes is to ensure that we have credibility in the world and to avoid moral ambiguity for future Americans. What we have witnessed is an eroding of the US constitution and our standing in the world.
Hey, they’re turning on each other. That’s always a good sign.
Thank you BuenaVistaMall!
Weasel language is the stock in trade for many politicians, but its use by lawyers and scholars, for whom precision of expression is critical, is unforgivable. Prof. Rice’s response to the student’s questions make one wonder about the quality of her scholarship.
The question of whether waterboarding is torture is difficult only for those who wish not to answer. Her response, that the president “instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our (legal) obligations,” was an incoherent avoidance. Did she mean that the president assured his staff that no one would be asked to do anything unlawful? Or did she mean that his instructions would be lawful by virtue of his being the source of those instructions? That she immediately attempted to separate herself from the chain of authorization tells us more about her true beliefs than does the rest of her answer.
Thinking she had deftly avoided the Nixonian quicksand, the student’s persistence caused her to sink into it up to her neck. Yes, waterboarding is torture, but not if explicitly ordered by the president, and besides, I was simply the president’s courier to the CIA, as though her role was to take coffee and donuts to
George Tenet and, by the way, hand him this note while you’re at it. Gentlemen, coffee, tea, waterboarding instructions?
What a disgusting display of moral and intellectual equivocation.
Hey, I am a westerner, does someone have a video clip link to this Hardball appearance?
I watched the professor discuss this issue on Hardball.
Pat Buchanan was there for the warsters once again.
Let’s face it, the illicit relationship with our greatest enemy has given illegitimate birth to the ideals he is trapped by.
That infestation will never be understood till we know who our worst enemy is:
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-is-americas-greatest-enemy.html
Frightening.
I was thinking just the other day that if Ford had simply allowed the wheels of justice to go forward, instead of pardoning Nixon, would we be where we are now, in the wake of the Bush administration’s continual efforts to advance an imperial Presidency? While the precedent may not have completely stopped them, perhaps it would have given at least one administration lawyer pause.
I think that is one of the strongest reasons for a full legal investigation now — to establish precedent on the limits of Presidential authority. Otherwise, I fear we will be facing some of these same issues again in 30 years.
JT
Kudos on what appeared to me to be an unqualified success on Hardball. Pat Buchanan was literally flummoxed, stumbling all over himself in a vain attempt to defend the Imperial Presidency. His repeated references to WWII era events, long since reputiated and covered by new treaties, was laughable at best. Your deft use of Buchanan’s and other conservatives’s defamation of the Soviets as being untrustworthy when signing treaties to illustrate how these actions make the US look similarly distrustful was a brilliant stroke.
lottakatz,
Did she ever wear a Blew Dress? Was she friends with Linda Tripp? Did she masquerade with Cigars?
Then the answer might possibly be maybe yes, but I would have to categorically say maybe, unless I knew why I could not give you a definitive answer to the question that was asked, now what was the question that you asked?
Snark alert:
Ms Rice once publicly referred to G W Bush as her husband. Having let free a couple of Freudian monsters of my own over the years (and realizing how they informed my behavior) I had to wonder if her lack of effectiveness at State had roots in other than her level of skill and scholarship.
It amazes me that anyone is surprised at her response! She has been front and center in defense of an indefensible administration.
There are two things that have made this country strong, The rule of law and the fact that we honor our treaties! People who bring up other war crimes, in an attempt to sanitize what we’ve done, are never going to get people like me to put aside all that makes us great, flawed though we may be!
Hi Professor Turley,
Well Done!
I just watched you on “Hardball” and it was a far more pleasant viewing experience than last week; when both Chris and Pat were acting like hysterical ninnies who refused to listen or let you speak. Thank-you for being an outstanding voice of reason!
P.S. Chief Justice Turley sounds good to me!
Mike,
Every time I would see a picture of Ms Rice and George Bush, “Yes woman” would reverberate around in my mind. She may well have been a great student, and a great parrot of the company line, but her capabilities, operating in the real world, weighing the facts, reaching her own conclusions, and standing by and fighting for her own principals, seem to have been lost somewhere along the way. She was the shy, intellectual wallflower, seduced and steamrolled by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld frat boy/football captains/prom kings.
Completing a college education is an admirable accomplishment and deserves respect, but what you do with the rest of your life, after school is out, really demonstrates the measure of the man or woman
Big Fella,
You raise an interesting point. Everything I heard about Ms. Rice was that she was smart and savvy. She was, however, monumentally ineffective as National Security Adviser and as Secretary of State. Perhaps it shows that being a good student and earning degrees doesn’t necessarily equate with competence
First of all, you consider that she did in fact go to class and did not have a free ride.
Second of all: Sig Heil, Sig Heil Main Furror.
Dr. Rice, despite her long association with Stanford and academia has proven to be nothing more than a sycophantic enabler of an ignoramus (George W. Bush) being manipulated by a greedy war profiteer (Dick Cheney). Rice’s hiding behind “presidential authority” is truly pathetic, and seems to indicate her own education was wasted.
‘Fesser Turley,
Are you for sure and for certain that you want to, once again, subject yourself to “Tweety’s” Twitter?
Ms. Rice disgraces intelligent women throughout the free world.