Torture. FISA. Civil liberties. The Constitution - those issues have stirred up more passion than any other issue I've seen in my year or so on Daily Kos (yeah, more than Obama vs. Hillary or the I/P diaries).
Given that passion, it's probably inevitable that once in a while, a nontroversy gets on the rec list, where a handful of people get overexcited about a story and read something into it that isn't there. With all the shifting rationales that have been thrown around for torture under the Bush administration (including such classics as "it's just a little water", "i'm a complete branch of government unto myself", "sure it's evil but it works", and "WHAT IF YOUR BABIES WOULD DIE IF YOU DIDNT?"), it's totally understandable that we'd jump on a moment that might shake a lot of apolitical people out of their stupor and be a "fundamentals of the economy are strong" moment on our relationship to torture.
It truly pains me to have to stick up for Condi Rice, but her Q&A at Stanford... is not that moment. Below the fold.
At Stanford, Secretary Rice was asked a few questions about the administration's policies on "harsh interrogations", whether she thought waterboarding was torture and how big of a role she had in authorizing the techniques used. Cenk nails that she's trying to get as faaaaar away from Bush as she can on this one, but as somebody with a lot of experience in the law, he should know that the way you parse someone's words have a big impact on the way you read them. In her answer, she 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."
However, this does not mean that the president's authorization somehow makes it legal! She's saying that Bush's order expressly said not to violate existing laws. I'm not a lawyer, but it looks more like her argument is : the president said "don't torture" in his orders, so nothing that was actually done can be classified as torture. Any torture done as a result of his orders would be, by definition, a violation of those orders. That seems kinda bass-ackwards, but that's Republicans for you.
In our rush to create a sort of Frost/Nixon moment, we might have missed something just as important. If Bush wrote a memo to the effect of "Waterboard, but don't torture", then suddenly all of the legal hullabaloo surrounding an argument that's been settled for years in most societies can be seen in a whole new light. Remember, that while we don't have access to those memos and the legal wrangling going on inside the Bush administration, the principle players do: Rove, Cheney, Rice, and others - and just like a game of football, the offense has the advantage because they know which direction they're going.
It's up to the defense to stay on their toes - and to remember that jumping at the wrong thing could leave them out of position.