Condi: If It Smells Like Nixon, It’s Criminal
Cenk Uygur got an absolutely damning video of Condi Rice channeling Richard Nixon. After denying she "authorized" torture–she just conveyed policy authorization to the agency, but I’m sure that authorization had a virgin birth before that–she explained that if the President authorized it, then it couldn’t violate the Convention Against Torture.
By definition, if it was authorized by the President, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.
By definition, I think Condi’s future just dimmed considerably.
Dimmed?
I think we’re at “Turn out the lights . . . the party’s over.”
I expect she’ll be backtracking wildly today on this, saying that “by definition everything Bush approved was not torture therefore…”
We shall see. She has an uncanny ability to avoid consequences for her crimes.
And boy I wish I had been in the room. The student who called torture torture should have referred to teh JPRA document that did so as well–if Condi didn’t review that, she didn’t do her job, if she did, then it’s torture. (Thoguh I still maintain that that doc was probably leaked by John Bellinger, which suggests Condi may NOT have had it contemporaneously).
EW, I don’t believe you have presented a fair representation of the full context of her statement. I suppose that is ok, but can you at least add an editing markup to indicate that you are excerpting from the middle of a sentence? i.e. [B]y definition…..
I think the most important part of her statement is the disclosure of the tack that will be taken by former Bush Admin Players. They are letting the CIA hang alone. Specifically, she is indicating that the CIA had approval “subject to the Justice Department’s clearance.” The 2002 waterboarding approval did not allow for doctors in the room, tracheotomy kits, and pulse oximeters, or more than 20-40-second applications of water. When the CIA did their waterboarding, they EXCEEDED the Justice Department’s clearance. She is outlining the Bybee, Yoo, Cheney, Rice, Haynes, Bush Defense. They allowed “harmless” waterboarding, but not the actual bad shit that went down.
But if the Bush Admin watched the tapes, saw that the torturers were exceeding the baby torture they had authorized, and did nothing about it while the torture tapes were destroyed as evidence, then how do Condi and friends avoid the appearance of tacit approval for everything?
Same will go for Obama someday if he interferes with an investigation of this.
It doesn’t defend Yoo or Bybee (as lawyers) or anyone that had decent access to lawyers. Any decent lawyer could have told them that this was illegal.
The excerpt you’ve shared does nothing at all to change Condi’s position.
Even in the fully expanded version, she’s still saying that if the president said it’s okay, well, that was good enough for her.
In her capacity she should have been intimately familiar with the terms of UN-CAT, U.S. reservations and declarations to the same, and known that she cannot simply rely on the word of the president in her capacity. She was a principal and should have been telling the president what was and wasn’t in compliance with UN-CAT and Geneva Conventions, in both of her roles as Natl Security Advisor and as SecState — should NOT have been the other way around.
Jeebus. She was a freaking ADVISOR to the president. Obviously she thought that meant head cheerleader.
The job of a Bush advisor was to either tell Bush what he wanted to hear or to tell Bush what Cheney wanted him to hear.
I honestly don’t know anymore if Rice’s diploma’s came out of a crackerjack box or if she simply knew where her bread was buttered.
Boxturtle (Yes, I know. Both could be true)
I think she knew who was buying her CrackerJacks.
I’m reminded of an old punchline attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “We have established what you are, Madam. Now we are merely haggling over the price.”
Rayne,
The sentence is presented in the EW Post as a context free statement- wherein legality is defined simply by the president doing something, ala Nixon.
But the actual paragraph indicates that the “definition” to which she is referring is an original intent not to violate CAT.
They indeed violated CAT and probably from the outset intended to violate CAT. But this post excerpts from a sentence in a way that is in my opinion out of character for the usual accuracy of this blog. Now I’ll shut up, as this is not my house.
I’m trying to understand your meaning. How does icluding And somake a different meaning? “And 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 in the Convention Against Torture. ”
It sounds to me that she merely repeated 3 times that being told nothing would be illegal is what made anything legal.
Think about it! This is a teaching situation. She is an official teacher. And she’s teaching despotism!
yup, that’s how it reads to me as well.
Funny. Even in your quote, it’s not “the middle of a sentence.”
My impression is that COndi misspoke–but I disagree with you absolutely that I’ve misquoted her. Because the whole logic behind her statement is the same word game Bush has played from day one–that we don’t torture therefore if we do it it’s not torture. And THAT assertion, which flies in the face of the evidence, in turn rests upon Yoo’s opinions that basically DO assert that if the President decides to do it, then it cannot be illegal. So while I think she MEANT to restate her original comment, she didn’t, which IMO is a reflection of her unstated recognition thta ultimaately you ARE back to Nixon’s proposition.
In any case, she’s going to regret this, because it is a terrible statement and given the extensive legal background that says they were arguing precisely this point, it’s going to be hard for her to claim she didn’t mean precisely what she said.
Absolutely, there is no way to parse the whole passage without arriving at the circular proposition that Bush declared that nothing we do violates the law and, that being the case, it follows ineluctably that whatever he authorized is not illegal. The setup sentences only give the superficial appearance that there is some kind of non-dictattorial logic, but they don’t actually.
Also, Condi’s defensive “by the way, I didn’t authorize anything” (oh, snap!) is a rather blatant tell. If she really believed that there was nothing wrong with the policy, why go out of the way to say, “no flies on me!”? Why distance yourself from the policy? (Of course we know that she was intimately involved from the get-go and even was part of the White House’s torture porn fan club meeting in which they were treated to live demonstrations, so that explains that.)
what condi did is cute but still depraved, she said;
“since the president gauaranteed he is not breaking any law or convention, we had no reason to believe he was, therefore if he ordered it we knew it would be legal”
or;
“the president told us he wouldn’t do anything illegal, he said it, I believe it, that’s the end of it”
To paraphrase that old song I think “her bucket has a hole in it.” She did a Nixon and it serves her right that she gets caught and can’t backtrack. Detest the woman.
Yes Rice’s word parsing is indeed very cute. She is welcome to use the same reply to a torture victim family member. Oh, but they don’t count. Their shit stinks, but Rice’s does not.
She says the president said X and now a lot of people believe he did Y. That isn’t so hard to believe. I have to agree with those who have said she has great teflon. In this statement she says she didn’t authorize anything, she just passed along the president’s authorizing statements.
Just like WH journalists she was (apparently) good at taking dictation.
So. Ms. Rice asserts that _any_ order that comes from POTUS by definition is legal? Why? Because all orders without exception are based on solid legal judgments made by Executive Branch lawyers? There would therefore be no possible justification for refusing to obey _any_ order issued by the President? IANAL, but wouldn’t the Nuremburg Trials have come out rather differently if this argument had been accepted then?
BTW, congratulations to those providing justification for the President’s wishes; it used to be that an “absolute monarch” would claim justification directly from God via Divine Right, but now we just do it all in-house.
I hate to be put in the position of defending Condi, but wait a second.
Her whole preface to that sentence was that Bush stated he would do nothing that violated CAT; so her point is that since Bush prima facie ”established” he would not violate torture treaty, nothing he would authorize would be illegal in his view.
This is different than the statement’s context is presented.
I agree that what you describe is what she was attempting to convey, but that just underlines her dishonesty. The context was expressly whether waterboarding was torture.
She was trying to say that waterboarding was not torture when she signed on the line because the President said it was not torture and that was good enough for her even if it is torture now so she can’t be blamed with a violation of international and national laws that the President told her she was not breaking.
She used a lot of words, in short, as a very inadequate fig leaf for her naked guilt.
Condi has a B.A., Master’s, and Ph.D. in Political Science and apparently never had to read either the Constitution or modern political history where Nixon’s quote would have been a case study? What classes did she take? If her defense is “if the President says so, it’s perfectly legal”, then she’s got no defense at all.
By the way, I think the finger pointing fest is really gonna get fun… “Who me??? Nah, I was just doing what that guy over there said…”.
Thanks for this post EW, that was damning and Cenk was great.
Cenk did a great job in the video. Ya, Condi, you might want to be working on the connection betwen your brain and your mouth.
OT, emptywheel is being called out in Orange. (but not by name)
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…..-Chase-Now
Sooo. Are We Unboycotting Chase Now?
On topic, yes Dr. Rice has better Teflon than Reagan.
Just because it makes me so crazy I would like to add that I’m getting really sick of the “we’re too stupid to breathe” line of defense that endlessly comes out of BushCo… who knew? who could have imagined? what Constitution? what legal precedent? Youngstown — that’s a city in Ohio, right? if the President orders it, it’s legal — Nixon, who? Torture, what’s that — it’s too hard to define…
These fuckers are very well-educated. They knew exactly what they were doing. The dumb-blonde routine simply doesn’t apply here, so knock it the fuck off. Ok, I’m done ranting. Jeebus this makes me angry though…
This is just the beginning, for her, of students pressing her on this. With the ubiquity of cell phones and other means of memorializing everything she says, I have this feeling she’s gonna take a leave of absence or something. I’d like to hear what the students concluded.
She’s describing herself like a courier – just carrying the drugs! That defense is not gonna work! “Don’t look at me! I just passed them from one person to the next!”
Up till now she’s been this “golden girl” in a bubble. Now she’s really gonna see the world from another side. I think she is unprepared for it!
wow
wow
I thought of the three, here, cheney, bush, she was the most inteligent, I have to re-evaluate
I don’t think that intelligence is the variable that tracks with lust for unchecked power …
I’m reminded of that Chic song “L’Etat, C’est Moi”.
Former Kremlinologist Rice just described how Brezhnev, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leaders that preceded Gorbachev used to operate.
Now we have Condi “reverse-engineering” – how convenient that she had studied up on that: “And it came to pass.”
I’m afraid Condi has earned herself a sound bite. BushCo has a tactical problem: Do we attack in public and run the risk of incriminating ourselves or do we shut up and lawyer up at the risk of losing in the court of public opinion?
Bush (oddly enough) is being the smartest right now. He’s simply shutting up, using the excuse that he’s not president anymore and he doesn’t want to step on Obama.
Boxturtle (Which lawyer is going to be busier today: Condi’s or Bybee’s?)
Regardless of how bad this statement turns out to be, in or out of context, can we stop referring to female public figures by their first name and males by their last names? TIA
The first/last name thing is more complicated; traditionally the name that truly belonged to women was their first name. Sadly, calling Ms. Rice Condi somehow fits a woman who went shoe shopping when New Orleans drowned. Sorry just had to be catty.
And I don’t think she even went near the rubber boots or waders section.
Um, why don’t I keep doing what I do, which is refer to people by a range of names. I’m sure Condi likes Condi more than Jello Jay likes that name, or Haggis/Scrapple likes that name.
But I also have been known to refer to Waxman as Henry and PapaDick as Dick and so on. So this is not a gender thing.
Please keep doing what you do! In every sense of the word.
Cenk’s video has showed up over at Think Progress this morning also. Spread the wealth, Condi will be pleased.
spotlight, spotlight, spotlight…
They call her Condi because it’s more uniquely memorable than “Rice”. It’s why we call him “W” to distinguish him from his father (another ignorant twit).
The whole parsing of cruelty is a fiction for folks who will listen to its illogic. The field manual makes clear the difference between heat of battle in contrast to treatment after sequestration elsewhere. I think Rice is speaking out because her two successive posts charged her with responsibilities in each realm, treatment of executive detainees, international treaties, diplomacy. Her Europe tour to calm anxiety after the ghostplane sites were proven, swearing the same litany in each country she visited in Europe, ‘The US does not torture,’ was about as vacuous as ‘diplomacy’ gets, speechwriter driven or not. Somehow, though, I get the sense that the rules of intraadministration hegemonies among the various principals allied with the ‘war council’ may seem to render her less protected than the decisionmakers who opted for torcha and the specialist researchers who grasped for historic precedents of prior justifications for ‘treatment bordering on’ all the Geneva conventions banned. Is the local county sheriff allowed to bludgeon arrested people who are in a cell in the calaboose, does the state penitentiary maximum security campus for the worst criminals do some of the bondage the prior administration set forth, the list is lengthy, rhetorical, and banal.
Absolutely! Or as Cole would say…
Do do that voodoo
that you do so well.
For you do something
to mefor us!that nobody else could do!
Keep those nicknames comin’ EW. And Condi better watch out, she is likely to be called much worse any day now ; )
Looking for rice recipes for dinner tonight.
What about boiled rice, baked rice, steamed rice or thick rice soup?
Make mine avgolemono soup, please. Rice, chicken, combined with the shocking tartness of fresh squeezed lemons. (Add a clove of garlic to the broth, too.)
I like Fried Rice!
I like this one.
And Fried Rice can be dangerous, too. Ingesting reheated Fried Rice can lead to vomiting or diarrhea. Best not to keep it around.
from TextbookofBacteriology.net
Rayne, your recipe sounds good. Does it work with substitutions? chickenhawks for chicken might ruin it, I assume.
No shit, really? I was just chowing down on some reheated Fried Rice as I read this. Now if the vomiting begins, how am I supposed to know if it’s the Rice or the swine?
shorter sparkles: ” Rice: I don’t think anybody could have predicted that”
Yes, Sparkles, it’s true. Even Rice can go bad.
Heat stable spores on uncooked rice grains can survive the initial cooking, like steaming the rice.
Eating rice right away will not cause illness, because there is not enough toxin, if any, present in the rice.
However, once that cooked rice cools off and sits at room temperature on a counter, those surviving spores begin breaking open and the bacteria b. cereus begins replicating on the rice. The bacteria produce toxins which cause illness (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea) if ingested.
This implies you could become sick from “freshly made” rice that has sat on the counter too long, even if you reheat it with stir fry, because the toxins now present in the room temperature cooked rice can withstand short bursts of cooking, such as stir fry.
Good news: not all rice has b. cereus spores in it, and not all people ingesting the toxin develop symptoms.
chinese cuisine offers Guoba aka scorched rice
Ah nuts, TheraP beat me to it… Fried Rice ; )
Of course, if one were going with pre-packaged, rice-in-a-box (you know the kind of thing that hasn’t changed in 30 or 40 years), Rice-A-Roni might do the trick, especially since it’s that San Francisco (or in this case Palo Alto) treat ; )
Now that I think of it… I like Rice-A-Roni. It doesn’t require any creativity or brains, you just follow the directions, heh heh ; )
lol
I have a rice cooker! You just put in rice and water. And push a button!
See…. this is why she needs to go by Condi! (vary that a bit and you get ‘candy’ – and you can cook that too!)
Mom and I used to make candy (as well as cookies) for the holidays. I wonder when Condi is on the witness stand whether she will prove to be “soft crack” or “hard crack” or maybe she’ll just lose her “thread” and curl up into a “soft ball” ; )
Condi Rice Balls:
Make your candy (condi) to your liking. Combine Rice. Test it for Hard Crack, Soft Crack, or Threading and Curling into Balls.
But officer: This “crack” was conveyed to me in an emptywheel thread! I”m just an innocent recipient!
LOL! Who could have ever imagined when I started reading EW, that this would become my go to resource for crack recipes ; )
dirty rice (it’s a dish, for real)
Andy Worthington
Posted April 29, 2009 | 03:51 PM (EST)
Even For Cheney, The Al Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..92865.html
http://tinyurl.com/cvwqq8
Given all that’s in this article, I was sure there’d be a link to EW, but I didn’t see one.
Andy Worthington’s research, reporting and analysis of the torture and detention policy, here and in the UK, is a major body of work in its own right. It doesn’t in any way diminish Marcy’s contributions to say that AW has no need to credit anyone else for the commentary he provides. He is an authority, an indispensable one.
This won’t even be covered by the MSM.
Unless Keith or Rachel bring it up. Or David or Ed or Chris, maybe.
The most she will get is Worst Person in the World. I feel this is bigger than that and deserves more coverage. I mean this is it, their admission they could do anything they wanted if the President said it was ok.
I like KO, but a lot of what is on his program is only seen on his and Rachel’s. The MSM is too much in bed with each other to let this go to the top story it should be.
It is very clear what she said. There is no argument for context misinterpretations.
Sad.
you guys already mention this ? Energy Secty’s Staffer has swine flu – aide was on advance team for Energy Secty’s Mexico trip. Both Secretary Chu and POTUS continue to test negative
As for the quality of Rice’s degrees, I understand that, when she was interviewed on Russian radio, the Russian audience found the (poor) quality of her Russian hilarious.
So much for Stanford’s reputation for integrity.
“By definition, if it was authorized by Pol Pot…’
–Steve Earle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avwJPNmCDh0
If you haven’t reviewed the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal and New York Times/CBS News Polls on torture I have two posts up that give the details. There was some interesting info that was not reported (big surprise)
By definition if you’re using Condi-logic like that, Bush is not the president he’s a dictator.
But then, that’s exactly what he pledged, now isn’t it.
Trouble
Oh trouble can’t you see
You’re eating my heart away
And there’s nothing much left of me
“By definition, if it was authorized by the President, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.”
Wow. Just wow.
Glenn’s going to have a field day with this.
Didn’t Condi just throw “Dubya” under the bus?
Well, I find myself inclining more to drational’s reconstruction of what Rice was saying.
She seems to be saying,
1. Bush wouldn’t approve of the techniques if they were torture. (He had assured all parties involved that he would check with the lawyers that the techniques adhered to relevant laws.)
2. So, “by definition” — that is, in virtue of premise 1 — if he approved of them, they weren’t torture.
She isn’t saying the Nixon thing, so understood, though the way the language came out certainly was unfortunate. It’s a little like the difference between saying God wills something because it’s good, vs. Something is good because God wills it.
Now of course her premise 1 was false. And she was under a profoundly important independent responsibility to look at those procedures and determine for herself whether they could plausibly be claimed to be torture. She did not do so.
In another kind of issue, her acquiescence to Bush’s decision on whether something was legal might have been adequate. Not here, emphatically.
That would sort of make her signature on anything utterly worthless as indicating that she had any role as an advisor at all…she might as well have been replaced by a UPS delivery man. “My signature only means that I took an authorization from the President to the CIA…my major thinking job was serving coffee.”
I think you deserve a Pulitzer, Marcy. In a BIG way. I’m not sure about the fine print requirements for the Pulitzer (like whether or not it has to be a print publication), but you deserve one.
Does everyone else who reads Emptywheel feel as strongly about her exceptional work as I do? Can we get her a grant or a fellowship or something that pays real money? If I had it I would put it up…
Think the window for Pulitzer applications has already come and gone, but definitely, Marcy should look at submitting content for online reporting next year’s round.
Pulitzer finally had an online reporting award this year for the first time, by the way.
Shorter Cenk….
These people are in deep shit if anybody has the balls to prosecute them.
Enjoy.
Has anybody charged Ann Coulter yet?
Has anyone charged Rush Limbaugh yet?
Has Tom Delay gone to court yet?
We have some problems in our political/judicial system.
Wow. That was astonishing.
And yeah, I’m sure the Villagers will be all over this. NOT.
Will this appear on any of the 3 nightly news shows? I can’t imagine that it will. After all, they’ve got swine flu and Chrysler to cover. Torture can’t possibly compete with that.
And see Ackerman’s post today on this.
So if President Obama tomorrow declares that rounding up Bush neocons in America, torturing them, and then leaving them for dead is legal, then that means it is? Huh. Wow. Terrific!
When is someone going to arrest these thugs and cronies for torturing other human beings? When? And when is the citizens of the United States going to wake up and actually demand enforcement of the law. Oh yeah, I forgot, they were hiding in their homes all of a sudden from the swine flu potential pandemic. Basically, the treason continues. The idea that folks were swearing allegiance to the President instead of the Constitution should be sickening to anyone who has studied where the United States get their federal form of government from. But, hey, there are monarchists in every country…patriotic monarchists I’m sure. But how many of those monarchists are into torture?
All this aside, why were the CIA tapes destroyed? And, yeah, how come students are asking tough questions when the nations “professional” journalists are not asking those same obvious questions? It’s sickening and the Republic is sick.
May the cure be legal enforcement of the laws and the Constitution, under our legal treaty obligations…instead of the toadyism and thuggery we’ve had of recent. If not, then a land with out law becomes more lawless as time goes on…if there is no serious attempt to actually strengthen the rule of law in the United States we will slide into dictatorship…or, maybe, we already are? For the “secret laws” that John Yoo and the Bush cabal were hatching seem to be seen as fine by the nation’s most prestigious universities, by the managers on Wallstreet, and what about the average citizen? Do we really matter that much any more?
Hey, if Pinochet can torture. It can’t be so bad and illegal..
Banana Republicans. They are really going to defend the use of torture?