Rice: When the president approves it, it is not illegal
When Stanford University students recently asked former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about waterboarding and torture, her response was uncannily close to Richard Nixon’s infamous claim, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Students toting a video camera approached Rice and asked her about a new Senate Intelligence Committee report which states that she gave the CIA its go-ahead for the use of waterboarding in July 2002.
Rice responded by saying, “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”
“I didn’t authorize anything,” Rice insisted. “I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
“By definition,” she repeated, “if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”
The video was caught by Young Turks radio host Cenk Uygur, who blogged about it early Thursday.
“A violation of the law,” Uygur remarks, “is of course, a big deal, especially on something this grave and important. This is not a jaywalking ticket. There were 34 suspected or confirmed homicides of detainees, some clearly due to torture. It does not get any more serious than this.”
Uygur adds that “the precedent does more damage than the law breaking because it sets the new boundaries and rules for our government. It confirms what Rice and Nixon argue for: When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. Allowing that idea to stand unchallenged does far more damage to the republic than any one crime committed by any one person (or the prosecution thereof), even if that person is the president.”
This video is from The Young Turks via YouTube, broadcast Apr. 30, 2009.
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