Not surprisingly, Tim Russert took one of President Clinton's statements on Meet the Press about torture to "expose" some "disagreement" between Hillary and Bill in Wednesday's MSNBC Democratic Presidential Debate:
RUSSERT: I want to move to another subject, and this involves a comment that a guest on Meet the Press made, and I want to read it, as follows: Imagine the following scenario. We get lucky. We get the number three guy in Al Qaida. We know there's a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don't we have the right and responsibility to beat it out of him? You could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon. [...]
RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, this is the number three man in Al Qaida. We know there's a bomb about to go off, and we have three days, and we know this guy knows where it is. Should there be a presidential exception to allow torture in that kind of situation?
Senator Clinton's answer and President Clinton's actual statements are below the fold...
This is Senator Clinton's answer:
CLINTON: You know, Tim, I agree with what Joe and Barack have said. As a matter of policy it cannot be American policy period. I met with those same three- and four-star retired generals, and their principal point -- in addition to the values that are so important for our country to exhibit -- is that there is very little evidence that it works. Now, there are a lot of other things that we need to be doing that I wish we were: better intelligence; making...our country better respected around the world; working to have more allies...
RUSSERT: The guest who laid out this scenario for me with that proposed solution was William Jefferson Clinton last year. So he disagrees with you.
Curiosity led me to search for the transcript of the actual MTP interview. This is what President Clinton really said in the interview to which Russert was referring and, unlike Russert, I didn't snip any of it out):
MR. RUSSERT: What did you think when Colin Powell said, "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism"?
MR. CLINTON: I think he was referring to the, the questions that have been raised about the original evidence, which plagues him and in which he was, I think, unwittingly complicit. I don’t think—I think it’s pretty clear, based on what all the people that worked for him have said. I think he was most worried about the question of torture and the conduct of the prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And of course, he weighed in in this debate about the extent to which the CIA or others could engage in conduct which clearly violates the Geneva Convention.
Now, we—as you and I talk, and we hear that they’ve reached an agreement, the senators and the White House, and I hope they have. But Colin pointed out that, you know, we’ve got soldiers all over the world. If we get a reputation for torturing people, the following bad things are going to happen: We’re as likely going to get bad information is good, just for people to just quit getting beat on; two, we’re likely to create two or three or five enemies for every one we break; and three, we make our own soldiers much more vulnerable to conduct which violates the Geneva Convention. That is, we can’t expect our friends, much less our enemies, to accept the fact that because we’re the good guys, we get to have a different standard of conduct. And most people think the definition of a good guy is someone who voluntarily observes a different standard of conduct, not someone who claims the right to do things others can’t do.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you outlaw waterboarding and sleep deprivation, loud music, all those kinds of tactics?
MR. CLINTON: Well, I—here’s what I would do. I would figure out what the, what the generally accepted definitions of the Geneva Convention are, and I would honor them. I would also talk to people who do this kind of work about what is generally most effective, and they will—they’re almost always not advocate of torture, and I wouldn’t do anything that would put our own people at risk.
Now, the thing that drives—that, that gives the president’s position a little edge is that every one of us can imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number three guy in al-Qaeda, and we know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and the responsibility to beat it out of him? But keep in mind, in 99 percent of the interrogations, you don’t know those things.
Now, it happens like even in the military regulations, in a case like that, they do have the power to use extreme force because there is an imminent threat to the United States, and then to live with the consequences. The president—they could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon or could guarantee the submission of that sort of thing ex post facto to the intelligence court, just like we do now with wire taps.
So I, I don’t think that hard case justifies the sweeping authority for waterboarding and all the other stuff that, that was sought in this legislation. And I think, you know, if that circumstance comes up—we all know what we’d do to keep our country from going through another 9/11 if we could. But to—but to claim in advance the right to do this whenever someone takes a notion to engage in conduct that plainly violates the Geneva Convention, that, I think, is a mistake.
You can see President Clinton is only talking about what the Administration wanted the ability to do and what they could do. And the reason they were trying to obtain that ability is the possibility of that scenario. But he made it clear that such a scenario was very unlikely since torture doesn't work in 99% of cases--which is the same argument Senator Clinton and Biden made--and that he wouldn't support something that violates the Geneva Convention.