Rice Gets Cooked

Condi Rice gets her ass handed to her by a bunch of Stanford law students.


Part of the transcript:

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.

So if the President does it, it can't be illegal. Nearly 40 years and we're still using the Nixon Defense. And she gets pissy about it too.

RICE: Let me tell you something: unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11 you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that we faced in trying to protect Americans.

Ahh, but we did imagine the dilemmas. We also managed to imagine the massive abuses of power and fixing of intelligence to lead us towards a war of aggression against Iraq, too.

RICE: A lot of people are second guessing now, but let me tell you the second guessing that would have hurt me more is if there had been 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.

If by "doing everything to protect them" you mean killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and then torturing folks to get them to confess to whatever you wanted to? Yes, that kept us safe. You keep telling yourself that the end justifies the means so you can sleep at night. But here's my favorite Condi Rice quote from the video:

RICE: If you were in a position of authority and watched Americans jumping out of 80-story buildings, because these murderous tyrants go after innocent people, then you would have...determined to do anything you could that was legal to prevent that happening.

But what your government did was not legal, madam. And for that you will always be considered a soulless monster. And let us not forget Bush failed to stop 9/11 in the first place. Condi, when YOU first warned the President of Al-Qaeda plans to fly airplanes into buildings back in August 2001 when YOU were National Security Adviser, the President ignored YOU. And close to 3,000 Americans died because of the ignorance of the man YOU worked for.

You do not get to play that card when you failed in your duty to protect America. Period.

You know, Condi Rice probably should be allowed in public where law students can completely whip her ass like this. Of course in a just world, she shouldn't be allowed in public because she was in prison for war crimes.

History will not be kind to you, madam. Nor should it ever be.

[UPDATE] As Andrew Sullivan points out, the only way this is legal is if America drops out of the Geneva Conventions based on Chuck Krauthammer's arguments that are almost identical to the defenses Condi Rice employs in the video.

The idea that Krauthammer's is an argument against the use of torture is therefore preposterous. It is an argument for the embrace of torture and abuse whenever the executive branch wants to use it, against anyone it deems likely to cough up information. There is not a scintilla of distrust of executive power in either essay, which reveals the radically unconservative vision that underlies the torture state. And the moral outrage used to make his argument seem less monstrous is mitigated by the rather obvious fact that, by the logic of Krauthammer, nothing that happened at Abu Ghraib was morally or legally awry (except the murder-by-torture of one prisoner). All the other techniques - ordered and authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney - were used against possible insurgents with possible real information that could have possibly saved the lives of American soldiers. Given his arguments, how does Krauthammer object to anything that was done there? Or is his response that it was amateurish and the real torturers and abusers don't take photos? Or that only Lynndie England is vulnerable to sadism? He can't possibly object to the cruelty in principle - just the fact that it slipped into the public domain. The screams of the tortured should be reserved for a few elite ears.

And no one can possibly doubt that a policy along the lines Krauthammer wants is a clear, ongoing violation of domestic law, the Geneva Conventions' Article 3, and the UN Convention on Torture. So when will Krauthammer formally argue that the US should withdraw form these international and obligations? If we are to follow his advice in turning the US into a state that routinely abuses prisoners in the war on terror and tortures them at will, then we have no choice.

We're either a nation of laws or we're not. Period.