Condoleezza Rice: It Wasn't Torture (Because the President Ordered It)

Two days ago, we flashed back to the 2003 legal framework for the Bush Administration's authorisation of torture (Mora: "Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”; White House lawyer John Yoo: "Yes"). In case you thought that was simply a rogue comment, consider this exchange between a questioner and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University (it begins at about 0:58 in the clip):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prxin-Lj5Ks[/youtube]

In case you didn't catch it, Rice says, "the president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal 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 other words, Bush's supposed word absolved his officials of any necessity to consider US or international law, let alone ethics and morality, in the discussion from waterboarding to sleep deprivation to confinement in small boxes to the throwing of detainees against walls.

And, incidentally, Rice is also splitting hairs in her other defense, "I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance." Set this against the recently-released findings of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor, said that, "In the spring of 2002, CIA sought policy approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida terrorists." Secretary Rice said that she asked Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to brief NSC Principals on the program and asked the Attorney General John Ashcroft "personally to review and confrrm the legal advice prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel".

Policy approval. If Rice and her colleagues say no in the spring of 2002 to the CIA's request, then the torture does not proceed. It was their approval, however, that launched the range of techniques that were first applied to detainees at Guantanamo Bay and, eventually, in Iraq in prisons like Abu Ghraib.

Obama Press Conference: Nailing Torture, Trashing the Pakistani Government

Related Post: Pakistan - Who's in Charge?
Video and Transcript: President Obama “Day 100″ Press Conference (29 April)

President Obama offered an excellent presentation in Wednesday night's press conference. He was in command, fluently moving from his opening agenda on swine flu and the economy to questions on foreign policy, the US auto industry, and the financial sector. He even dealt effectively with the puffball question, courtesy of a New York Times correspondent, "What has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?"

Obama said little about foreign policy and security in his initial statement, dealing with the immediate health crisis and the Federal Government's budget, but the third question put him on the spot over torture:

You’ve said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture....Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?

I half-expected the President, given the Administration's back-and-forth over the last 10 days on whether to press charges against any Bush officials, to flinch. He didn't. To use baseball language, he knocked the question out of the park.

What I’ve said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture.... And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

Yes, it was torture. And whether it had any effect is tangential, given the damage done to America's counter-terrorist efforts and its standing in the world.

Obama invoked Winston Churchill --- and who in the US could hate Churchill? --- who "said, 'We don’t torture,' when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat". The President avoided the trap of commenting on which Bushman "sanctioned torture", but he turned the main talking point of Bush defenders, "Torture helped win the War on Terror", against them:

[Banning torture] takes away a critical recruitment tool that Al Qaida and other terrorist organizations have used to try to demonize the United States and justify the killing of civilians. And it makes us — it puts us in a much stronger position to work with our allies in the kind of international, coordinated intelligence activity that can shut down these networks.

I am sceptical that Obama will be closing Guantanamo Bay this year. And I still have concerns --- serious concerns --- about other US detention facilities, such as Camp Bagram in Afghanistan. But, at least on the narrow issue of whether there is any rationale for "torture", the President signed, sealed, and delivered the appropriate response.

In foreign policy, two specific cases arose: Iraq and Pakistan. On the former, Obama easily held the line, despite the continuing bombings and political instability in and beyond Baghdad:

Athough you’ve seen some spectacular bombings in Iraq that are a — a legitimate cause of concern, civilian deaths, incidents of bombings, et cetera, remain very low relative to what was going on last year, for example. And so you haven’t seen the kinds of huge spikes that you were seeing for a time. The political system is holding and functioning in Iraq.

(The questioner, Jeff Mason, let Obama off the hook. The emerging issue is whether the US military will have troops in and just outside Iraqi cities well past the summer deadline for withdrawal.)

Pakistan, however, offered a far more serious exchange, the significance of which has been missed so far by the media. It started with a sensationalist, and thus potentially useless question:

Can you reassure the American people that if necessary America could secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and keep it from getting into the Taliban’s hands or, worst case scenario, even al Qaeda’s hands?

The President batted that scenario straight back, "I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure." Then, however, he offered two very clear signals.

First, his Administration is standing behind the Pakistani military and encouraging it to take the lead in the fight against insurgency. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is safe "primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands. We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation." What's more....

On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally. And you’re starting to see the Pakistani military take much more seriously the armed threat from militant extremists.

Second, while Obama and his advisors are placing their strategic chips on the military, they have little faith in the current Pakistani Government:

I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan....The civilian government there right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.

Obama's statement was not off-the-cuff. It was the next step, after statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, that Islamabad better get its act together to take on "the Taliban" and "Al Qa'eda" or its politicians can be put to the side.

If Pakistani President Zardari is not convinced, he will do well to consider Obama's concluding challenge:

We will provide them all of the cooperation that we can. We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.

Of course, Obama never said "coup", but as Washington ramps up the fight against insurgents in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, he sent out the message.

Zardari is disposable. The Pakistani military is not.

Video: US Public Diplomacy, Elizabeth Cheney, and the Denial of Torture

Last weekend Elizabeth Cheney, former Assistant Secretary of State in the Bush Administration (and, far from incidentally, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney), held the line on MSNBC against any criticism of the Bush-Cheney "extreme interrogation" policies: "It wasn't torture....Everything that was done in this program...are tactics that our own people go through in SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] training."

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AF9rV0tw6A[/youtube]

Cheney's appearance is part of the public-relations, Bush/Cheney legacy fightback against the confirmation of torture.She repeats the disinformation that waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubaydah provided "incredible important and useful information that saved American lives". She echoes the warning that "national security" is endangered by the revelation of "enhanced interrogation", referring viewers to other parts of the propaganda effort, such as the opinion piece by former Director of the CIA Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in The Wall Street Journal.

(As for Cheney's explanation of "it's not torture": SERE training was developed for US troops in preparation for the torture that they might undergo if captured. The techniques and punishments they endured were adapated by Bush officials for use upon detainees.)

So why focus on this particular interview? Well, in 2002 Elizabeth Cheney was put forth as the State Department's official to lead public diplomacy's engagement with the Middle East. Press and web releases heralded her leadership of the Middle East Partnership Institute to "strengthen civil society and the rule of law": "We all – every one of us-- want to live in freedom. Not because we are American or Iraqi or Afghan or Egyptian or Saudi or Kuwaiti or Iranian."

Thus, when MSNBC interviewer Norah O'Donnell quotes the comment of current Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image in the world," it speaks directly to Cheney's supposed mission in the Bush White House.

Cheney's response? She merely recycles talking points about "the effectiveness of these programs". There is not a single word responding to the wider (and perhaps more important) challenge about how "the programs" affected the view that the rest of the world has of the US Government and its policies.

How was American partnership with other countries and peoples advanced by the breaking of international law and the exposure of US values as disposable, if not hypocritical? And how are current US efforts in and beyond the Middle East advanced by the wilful denial that there was any improper, let alone illegal, activity in the Bush War on Terror? How do Cheney's words dispel the suspicion that torture has not been put outside the boundaries of American politics and society but merely hidden away?

No doubt Elizabeth Cheney got a Thank You card from her father for her personal diplomacy on his behalf. I'm not so sure that the present State Department, putting in a great deal of effort to raise its public diplomacy profile with social media to complement high-profile initiatives by Hillary Clinton and other officials, pubt one in the mail.

Flashback: The Bush Administration Knew It was Torture

Just compiling notes for the book and came across this account from Alberto Mora, who was General Counsel for the United States Navy in the Bush Administration, of a conversation with John Yoo of the White House Office of Legal Counsel:

On February 6th [2003], Mora invited Yoo to his office, in the Pentagon, to discuss the opinion. Mora asked him, “Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”

“Yes,” Yoo replied.

“I don’t think so,” Mora said.

“I’m not talking policy,” Yoo said. “I’m just talking about the law.”

“Well, where are we going to have the policy discussion, then?” Mora asked.

...Yoo replied that he didn’t know; maybe, he suggested, it would take place inside the Pentagon, where the defense-policy experts were.

The draft [Pentagon] working-group report noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice barred “maltreatment” but said, “Legal doctrine could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.” In an echo of the Torture Memo, it also declared that interrogators could be found guilty of torture only if their “specific intent” was to inflict “severe physical pain or suffering” as evidenced by “prolonged mental harm.” Even then, it said, echoing Yoo, the Commander-in-Chief could order torture if it was a military necessity: “Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Enduring America Special: Why Torture Matters

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, "Dick Cheney's Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture": "Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney's face on EA again."

While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably "go away". The barrage of news stories and commentary --- now that many in the American "mainstream" media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed --- brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on "enhanced interrogation", I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down.

Meanwhile, beyond the shrillness of knee-jerk comment on torture protecting us from another 9-11 and the silliness of "what's wrong with putting man in a box with a caterpillar?", those who claim a bit of knowledge are spinning the reasons why we should just walk away. It's not just the former Bush Administration officials --- now Porter Goss, the former (hapless) Director of the CIA, is writing, "We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets", when the only secret in danger is who in the Bush Administration authorised torture and when.

David Ignatius in The Washington Post plays sage referee, "[The Obama Administration] needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn't blind its shadow warriors", even though the exposure does not threaten our "shadow warriors" but those who have now left office. Walter Pincus, the long-time intelligence beat reporter of The Post loses both the plot, "The CIA Will Pay the Price", and his grip on facts, spreading the implication (discredited by his own newspaper) that torture provided valuable intelligence:

The pages of the Justice Department opinions contain many references to important information learned from Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And David Broder, in a piece that should stand as a reminder of why eminent journalists are not toothless but complicit in the
activities of the Government they claim to watch, reduces the quest for answers and, yes, justice to "an unworthy desire for vengeance".

It's enough to make me throw up hands and settle for the complications of a policy on Iran or Afghanistan or even a light-hearted look at the latest escapade in the Culture Wars. Then, in the midst of this growing depression, I remembered that I wrote last October:

How did an American government, in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", sanction these activities?

The demand for that answer should never be given up. By coincidence, a book titled After Bush is being formally launched in London today. Amongst its many egregious errors, distortions, and distractions is this sentence: "'Prisoner abuses’ were aberrations --- recurrent in every war --- rather than the logical consequence of the authority under which Bush acted.”

These were abuses --- without the quote marks. They were not aberrations. They were not just the logical outcomes, they were the intended outcomes of a policy developed from September 2001 by the Bush Administration, led by a Vice President dedicated to the expansion of his personal power and that of the Executive, supported by second-level officials like John Yoo happy to promote their own perversions of legality, and abetted by colleagues from Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell to George Tenet who were either too cowed to fight back or too intent on covering their own backsides.

Any attempt to pretend otherwise, that we can just whisk away torture as a silly little aberration, is a disgrace to those of us who believe that "America" should stand for something beyond the expedient and the power-hungry.

I still believe that. So today Enduring America features three opinion pieces and analyses --- by Frank Rich of The New York Times and by historians Mark Danner and Andy Worthington, that offer both answers and reasons why we should never forget.