I haven’t been writing about the torture stuff because I’m not sure what to say that can’t be summed up pretty easily. Torture is bad. We should not do it. We should not allow our leaders to condone it or come up with justifications for it.
But two things I ran into today were particularly bad and if you didn’t know about them, you should.
Because we don’t learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it or how Condoleezza Rice uses the Nixon approach to defend our breaking of the Geneva Conventions
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the relevant highlight:
Student: I read a recent report, recently, that said that you did a memo, you were the one who authorized torture to the — I’m sorry, not torture, waterboarding. Is waterboarding torture?
Rice: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against torture. So that’s — and by the way, 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. That’s what I did.
Student: Okay. Is waterboarding torture?
Rice: I just 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 Conventions Against Torture.
So to sum up, the Secretary of State — a woman of incredible intelligence and learning — believed that the president was, if not the law himself, above the law. The last time a president believed that, he resigned in disgrace right before he was about to be impeached. Man, how quickly people forget.
And on a side note, who asked this question? A Stanford student. No wonder traditional journalism is dying in this country.
Jesus wept, or what the hell is wrong with Christians in this country.
White evangelicals support torture more than any other group in America. Overall, Americans are way more supportive of torture than we should be but wow, that’s a damning indictment against people who you would think would take the whole “love your enemies” a little more to heart.
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Sad, sad, sad! Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Makes me wonder about our (devout, church going folks) collective intelligence, spirituality, and even common sense. Since it – torture – doesn’t work anyway. What have we become? Just as mean and callous as those we accuse of being mean and callous. Surely we must realize that we are breeding more enemies than friends.