May 4th, 2009:

via Think Progress » 4th grader presses Rice on waterboarding..

Speaking to students at Stanford University last month, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, saying that they did not constitute torture and were legal “by definition” because President Bush authorized them.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

During a Q & A session with students, a 4th grader named Misha Lerner asked Rice about “the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees”

(snip) “Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country….So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”

What Rice is not saying here that the legality of the interrogation methods was announced in secret memos from the Office of Legal Council and backed by some at the Justice Department but the legality of the methods was not unanimous. There were some in Justice that opposed the methods. She fails to mention all the back-filling the administration went through to try to make it all legal.

In a report in 2004, prepared for President Bush, the Defense Department force fed the legality of presidential power to order torture down the chain and the rest of his administration was forced to justify torture. It was a game of turning the illegal into something legal-sounding so the public would swallow it. From Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

Through these memos, Justice Department lawyers authorized interrogators to use the most barbaric interrogation methods, including methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes. The memos are based on legal reasoning that is spurious on its face, and in the end these aren’t legal memos at all – they are simply political documents that were meant to provide window dressing for war crimes.

Rice is on a tour to try to clean up Bush’s legacy. Lame.