The Condi takes time away from the golf course to defend the use of torture enhanced interrogation techniques by the Bush Administration:

Here’s a partial transcript, thanks to our friends at Foreign Policy:

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.

STUDENT:  Okay. Is waterboarding torture?

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 Conventions Against Torture.

Setting aside the Condi’s utter disconnect from reality here (and the utter condescension — “do your homework first”), who told us that nothing violates our obligations under the Convention against Torture?  And you needed to be told it was okay to torture?  Doesn’t that imply that you had doubts?

And if not, why not?  Do you really believe the ends justify the means?  And if so, when do the ends not justify the means?  Where’s the spot on this slippery slope Condi would have us try to stop?

There are several other problems here.  First, in my reading of the torture memos (which, I want to acknowledge was a few weeks ago), there was no attempt to discuss whether the proposed techniques violated the Convention against Torture — it was about Section 2340 of the U.S. Criminal Code, which is the specific law prohibiting torture.

Second, in attempting to deny her own complicity, The Condi notes that she transmitted the findings of the Justice Department to the CIA.  That means there must be a cover memo somewhere.  Which means she’s part of the food chain.  Which means that she broke Section 2340 of the U.S. Criminal Code.

There’s been a movement for quite a while now to encourage the University of California-Berkeley to fire John Yoo, and more recently a call for the impeachment of Jay Bybee.  Isn’t it time we encourage Stanford to fire Condi as well?

BTW, kudos to these kids, who had the guts to raise questions that no mainstream journalist has bothered to ask.

Related posts

• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• The Growing Campaign to Impeach Jay Bybee
• Powell, Obama, and Torture
• Johnson and Johnsen
• Goldsmith’s Tortured Apologia