Former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was confronted last week by students from Stanford University, who were questioning her about certain actions from the Bush administration.
Rice upholds that certain policies carried out by the Bush administration were not policies at all. The abuses from Abu Ghraib, in which Iraqi prisoners were tortured, is said by Rice not to have been a policy, according to Harper’s Magazine. A report from the U.S. Senate says the policy decisions made came from the National Security Council, which at the time were run by Rice.
As for al-Qaida, Rice feels they were a greater threat to the U.S. than World War II. Their Sept. 11 attacks posed a greater threat to the country, in her mind. A Stanford student challenges her with the fact that the U.S. death toll for World War II was 405,400. The student reasons that though the fatalities were greater, the U.S. did not resort to torture.
“Let me tell you something: unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that we faced in trying to protect Americans,” Rice said in response to the student’s charge. “A lot of people are second-guessing now, but let me tell you the second-guessing that would have hurt me more is if there had been 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.”
U.S. combatants were captured and detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba after the Sept. 11 attacks. It has been said that torture went on there. However, Rice claims that the camp was a “model medium security prison,” as also said in a report by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe. The same OSCE report deemed what happened at the camp “mental torture.”
The Red Cross performed two studies about the camp, concluding in the first study that the treatment of the prisoners was “tantamount to torture.” In the second, they observed the use of the Bush Program and determined it was torture.
Rice maintains that waterboarding is not torture and not illegal, because President George W. Bush allowed it.
“[President Bush] was also very clear that we would do nothing – nothing – that was against the law or against our obligations internationally,” Rice said May 3rd at a Washington school.
A Senate Intelligence Committee report from April confirmed Rice as a top adviser who approved of the CIA’s utilization of waterboarding, according to CNN. “I didn’t authorize anything,” Rice said to this. “I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
“I hope people understand that it was a struggle, it was a difficult time,” Rice said. “We were all terrified of another attack on this country, because September 11 was the worst day of my life in government – watching 3,000 Americans die because these people attacked us. Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal.”
Bush administration torture memos that were recently released alleged that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other forceful practices do not violate U.S. laws opposing torture.
Rice has not criticized the release of the memos, though former Vice President Dick Cheney has.
“I have said many times that the Obama administration is now in power, and he’s my president, too,” Rice said. “And, I owe him my loyalty. I will not agree with everything that they do. I will not agree with everything that they say.”
Waterboarding, which President Barack Obama believes to be torture, is now banned from use.
Watch full video of the confrontation here:
Our Take:
What truly is done or said in politics always seems to remain a mystery. It appears to be a continual he-said, she-said ping pong game. Who knows if Rice is telling the truth? Who knows if the students actually did legitimately call her out? It probably won’t make much difference, anyway, what the truth is; what’s done is done.
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