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”.

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