Condoleezza Rice on waterboarding: "I did not authorize anything … "

On 1 May, Scott Horton, a New York attorney with an interest in international law, especially human rights law, and a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, posted an extraordinary recent amateur video, taken from Youtube, on his No Comment blog (located on Harper’s website).

Horton’s post is entitled “Condi’s really bad day“, and can be read in full here.

The Youtube video (uploaded by reynagarcia621) that Horton dissects in his blog post shows former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking with Stanford University students on 27 April — and denying that she had authorized … well, yes, torture.

“We did not torture anyone”, she said (at 4:07 minutes into the video).

In this video, taken by a student, Rice said that “in terms of enhanced interrogation, rendition, and all the issues around the detainees, Abu Ghraib was not a policy … and it was wrong”.

But, she went on about “enhanced interrogation”, saying that “anything that was legal and that was gonna make this country safer, the President wanted to do — nothing that was illegal and nothing that was gonna make the country less safe … You cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that we faced … foreign policy is full of a lot of tough choices, very tough choices”.

Horton wrote in his post that: “For eight years, Condoleezza Rice dealt with the Beltway punditry and the access-craving White House press corps. The reception she got, with a handful of exceptions, was fawning. Which leaves her totally unprepared for a return to an academy populated with the Daily Show generation: bright young minds with a very critical attitude towards the last eight years. In a meeting with Stanford students at a dormitory reception on April 27, the school’s former provost got off to a shaky start and ended in a train wreck. She may in fact have her last words in the exchange quoted back to her some day in a law court”.

In another Youtube excerpt from a MSNBC TV program, Countdown, the host, Keith Doberman, interviewed former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon about videotaped exchange between Rice and the Stanford students. Doberman said in his introductory remarks that Rice “may have also admitted to a crime” John Dean said that in the student’s video Rice had “said that indeed passed orders along to the CIA to engage in torture if it was legal by the standard of the Department of Justice”. According to John Dean, “This puts her right in the middle of a conspiracy as its known under American law and this indeed is a crime if it happened the way we think it happened”.

Dean added that at the moment this may matter more outside the U.S., because there are now investigations going on abroad — he mentioned one underway being conducted by Judge Garzon in Spain, a country which does (as Col. Pat Lang recently wrote on his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis) have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Here is a transcript of some of Rice’s remarks in the student’s video:

Student: Even in World War Two, as we faced Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced … we did not torture the Prisoners of War
Rice: “With all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States … No, wait, Just a second, just a second … We didn’t torture anybody here, either”…
Student: 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 [sic- she stops and changes direction.] And by the way I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the Administration to the Agency that they had policy authorizations — subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did … 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 under the Convention Against Torture”.

In the Youtube clip of the MSNBC program, John Dean commented that it’s not clear what Rice had said, exactly: “It’s a little fuzzy what she was saying. She was obviously trying to extricate herself, and keep herself at a safe distance, that she was only operating under some general guidance of the President, making things legal … It’s not clear if this is a full-throated Nixonian-type defense. or whether its a lot of confusion of the facts and throwing things up there to try protect herself … [But] There are no exceptions with torture [under the Convention Against Torture]. There are no real things like ‘Torture-lite’

The current U.S. President Barack Obama said at a recent news conference that waterboarding is torture. If so, Dean noted, the U.S. then does have an obligation under the Convention Against Torture to conduct an investigation and ultimately prosecute if necessary. Obama has handed the matter over to his Attorney General.

Rice also said, in the student’s video, that representatives of the Organization For Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) who went there to see it, considered Guantanamo Bay “a model medium security prison”. And she added that *The ICRC also had access to Guantanamo and made no allegations about interrogations at Guantanamo. What they did say is that they believe that indefinite detention … which is why we tried through the military commission system to let people come up for trial, but those trials were stayed… by whom?” (The Supreme Court, she said as a later aside…)

Both MSNBC’s Keith Doberman, and Harper Magazine’s Scott Horton made corrections to some of Rice’s assertions:

According to Doberman, Nazi Germany did attack the homeland — and even had a known nuclear weapons program. Doberman also pointed out that World Trade Center Twin Towers buildings were 110 stories high, not 80 stories (as Rice had stated).

According to Horton, on the Guantanamo Bay detention center, “as the report’s author stressed, this was a characterization of the physical facility. How about the treatment of the prisoners? On that score, the OSCE had a different conclusion: it was ‘mental torture’. The Red Cross did complete two studies of detainees at Guantánamo, and Condi’s characterization of them is false. The first report concluded that the treatment of prisoners, particularly isolation treatment, was ‘tantamount to torture’. The second examined the use of the Bush Program and concluded it was ‘torture’, no qualifications. Rice was furnished copies of these reports. Did she take the time to read them

[In the video, she admonishes one of her questioners, “Do your homework”.]

Horton also wrote that “Rice claims that the Bush Administration’s efforts to try the Guantánamo prisoners were blocked by the Supreme Court. In fact, the years of delay in bringing charges resulted from the Bush Administration’s own policies. The Supreme Court concluded that the jury-rigged military commissions system the Bush Administration put in place without Congressional authority violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—the view that the overwhelming majority of legal authorities in the United States advanced. Had the Bush Administration followed the recommendation of career military lawyers and proceeded to military commissions based on the U.S. court-martial system, no Supreme Court review would have been necessary. So the cause of the delay rests squarely with the Bush Administration, not with the Supreme Court”.

And there is more.

Horton’s post can be read in its entirety here.