Send in the students to ask the tough questions

The torture thing just won't go away. More and more is coming out, including this video clip of Condi Rice being questioned by students at Stanford following a speech.

You can view the clip at this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/condi-rice-pulls-a-nixon_b_193379.html

She was the National Security Adviser, but she portrays her role as simply that of a "conveyor" of information. Unfortunately, that is apparently what she was. Rather than being the one person to help the president keep perspective on national security and without being unduly swayed by competing interests, she seems to have told dubya what he wanted to hear, kept bad news from him, and conveyed his wishes to those charged with carrying them out.

One could argue that she was too close to him personally, was too ga-ga in love with him (cf her Freudian slip when she referred to "my husband, er President Bush") to give him the objective advice he needed.

She was apparently no match for Rumsfeld and Cheney -- perhaps one of the greatest failings of this administration. Here's Condi's defending herself when a student mentions her having "authorized" waterboarding:

"I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency [presumably the CIA], that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did."

And, like all the rest of that crowd, she hides behind the cover of the Office of Legal Counsel's opinion, the Bybee report:

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

I think she means that they were told by bush himself, 'don't worry; we've got it fixed so it's not illegal.' But that really gives him license to do anything and simply declare it's not torture.

And the subject under discussion is specifically waterboarding, for which we tried Japanese as war criminals, which is specifically declared torture in the Geneva Conventions, and which President Obama agreed Wednesday night in his press conference "is torture."

And here's the zinger quote from Condi:

"[B]y definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

It doesn't get much closer than that to Richard Nixon's notorious admission to David Frost:

"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

Little george w. bush said "we don't torture." Therefore, by definition, nothing we do is torture and nothing we do is illegal.

Appalling.

And we the people re-elected him in 2004.

Ralph