Condoleezza Rice defends “enhanced interrogation” to Stanford students
By Michael Wilkerson | April 29, 2009 at 8:21 pmI already posted this over at The Stanford Review’s blog, where I’ve been guest blogging as a token moderate/left-leaner.
You can check out more of my thoughts at the Review, but here are some questions:
- How was this recording allowed? Rice’s people are usually pretty strict about such things.
- If this video makes ends up getting a lot of attention–I think it could go either way as there is no single damning sentence or Fox News-worthy clip–will Rice ever do another dorm talk at Stanford?
- Turning to substance, does 9/11, or preventing another 9/11, really change everything, as Rice asserts? Should public panic and demands for safety make it ok to undermine the moral and legal bases of our government?
- Was the “enhanced interrogation” legal? Rice seems to think so, but much of the furor over memos released argues that it was not.
Take it away folks.
Filed under: Current Events and Issues | Tags: "enhanced interrogation", Condoleezza Rice, torture, waterboarding | 6 Comments »
So, while there are obvious points to be debated relating to Rice’s views on “enhanced interrogation” rendition and the like, I’d like to point out something else I found, well, not so much troubling as intriguing: Rice seems stuck between wanting to go back to “just being a professor” and still dealing with questions like she’s talking to the Washington press corps.
It raises the question: is Condi going to be able to deal with being called back from the big leagues? She’s been playing pro-ball for eight years now, and I can’t imagine being called back to her AAA roots is all that satisfying.
She treated the first kid she speaks to in the video with an odd mixture of respect and disdain. The respect is impressive, she gets that he is mustering up quite a bit of courage to even speak to her, but the disdain comes hard and fast, as soon as the word “torture” is used in reference to Gitmo. She first tells him, “No, dear, you’re wrong,” before going on to undermine his credibility by pointing out what he does not know. He doesn’t know about an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) report about Guantanamo’s “model” status, nor does he realize that the Supreme Court, of all people, held up the trials of detainees! (forget that it was because the Court eventually found the proposed system to be unconstitutional). The whole exchange is from about 4:04 to 5:26, and it’s worth another look.
At the same time that I feel bad for the kid, I feel bad for Condi too. She seems much more human here, the emotion showing on her face and in her voice when she talks about the difficulty of the choices the administration faced after 9/11. She is a human figure, much easier to relate to, and perhaps harder to critique. I feel, ultimately, much less vindictive about her than I thought I might.
She’s almost a tragic figure, some kind of twisted Quixote who, though you want to laugh when they are finally taken down a notch—back into reality—the pathos of their suffering is tangible. A sad clown? No, that would be Bush—but seeing her now, so furiously trying to navigate the transition between her spotlit past and her back-lit future, I certainly wish I could have met her before she ever went to Washington. She must have been a remarkable woman.
On the issue of attention/damning sentences, see:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/condi-rice-pulls-a-nixon_b_193379.html
Lots of viewers think that she is embracing the line that Nixon took in his discussions with David Frost: that if President says it is legal, then it is legal.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30508377
Maybe not Fox News….but MSNBC
and then there is this:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004883
It continues…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/opinion/03dowd.html?_r=1
And this:
http://www.redstate.com/warner_todd_huston/2009/05/01/condi-rice-schools-a-college-punk/