Condi Rice denies remarks about the president and torture as a "Nixon/Frost" gaffe
By John Amato Monday May 04, 2009 2:00pm
It's obvious that the marching orders have been given for Bushies to come forward and justify torture ever since we saw Dick Cheney do just that. This time it was Condi's turn, and she sounds just as wacky. Every time she opens her mouth she digs herself deeper in the muck. Here's her latest incoherent explanation over her remarks about the president's power to make waterboarding legal or not:
Rice: I said at one point that it was ahhh, given, right that if the president authorized it, it was legal. This was not a "Nixon/Frost" moment. What I ontended to say or what I meant to say about this is: The president said I won't authorize anything that is illegal. It's not that because he authorized it, it was legal...
And she has to even justify her position to a fourth-grader:
Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.
... Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?
"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."
Waterboarding is and always has been torture, so it was not legal. The above clip includes video of her talk at Stanford, which started this whole incident:
“[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.
And ended with her saying, again, that she didn't make a "Nixon/Frost" type gaffe.
Well, what should we call it then?
Andrea Mitchell said that she may have been bitten by an insect playing golf and was having a allergic reaction in her eye, so that's why her face looks swollen. But her words are just gibberish, and you can't help wondering if those words and their strangled reasoning are causing Condi's discomfort. Is their endgame to just try and move polling a few more points in their favor against torture investigations?
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Maybe Condi was bitten by the "truth bug"...
Looks like someone slapped some repuglican sense into Rice, or more lies to put it another way.
her left eye and cheek area look all swollen/puffy to me.
The joys of back-pedaling.
Condi, sweetie, honey, baby, darlin', even a fourth grader is not buying what you're trying to sell .
Ya, she might as well walk backwards into the nearest hedge and dissapear. Condi is a very yappy one. Let het talk. She will indict herself again we can be sure. Nixon also said "i am not a criminal", so i'm sure that's on her list - just wait...
In her words to the 2000 Republican National Convention, "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did."
So the Dixiecrats in Alabama (read current Repugs) were mean to her family FIFTY years ago, so she and her family are going to help destroy the country by helping those SAME people that were mean to her. Totally effed up.
That is FUBAR.
I'd pay good money to see that one.
Condi was probably blocking the green.
She ran back to the pro shop screaming "I got stung by a bee!"
The pro asked where she got stung. "Between the first and second hole!" she cried. "Condi", the pro said, "I told you your stance was much too wide!"
in so many ways. I'm stealing it.
:)
That'd work for Larry Craig, too.
At least her dancing skills are getting a full workout.
If she admits that waterboarding is torture, and she can prove she objected to the torture program, and she denounces buschCo and the republiscum without further delay, then i'd like to hear what she has to say, but ATM she's being impossibly defensive in posture, which makes her seem incredibly guilty of conspiracy to commit torture. And around she goes, down and around and down some more.
Anyone of the Bush clan could've bitten her because she walked outside the strict code that protects that dynasty.
My money is on Babs the Impaler. I saw her recently and her fangs looked sharper than ever.
I remember watching an interview with her some months after 9/11 when she was asked why she and others ignored the memos that warned of the possible terrorist attacks ahead of 9/11. She got this panicked look on her face like a kid who got caught raiding the cookie jar. She looked into the camera like a deer in the headlights and stuttered out "You don't really think we would have allowed the attacks to happen on purpose".
Well Condi, you cold-blooded sack of shit, I think that not only would you allow an attack, but you actually did. I think your entire career has been based on the Machiavellian logic of the ends justifying the means. Anyone who is so casual with torture would likely have no problem with allowing a disaster like 9/11 to happen is she felt it would be useful to achieving her aims.
Die in a fire, biatch.
They had the intel. They ignored it. I have nothing nice to say about Condi and the rest of the Bush crime family.
if she ever takes the stand the whole house of cards will fall.
9/11,deception to war, torture, election fraud all of it will come out.
So it's up to Condi to save the world? Go Condi! Slay the buschCo and save your soul. It's that or never enjoy playing the piano ever again... Condi!
You know what it means when your face and eyes are puffy and you can't speak straight?
It means your stoned!
looks like the work of a left upper cut... wasn't there at the school.
I’m guessing that along with the latest last minute rewrite of Reagan’s communication “skills” and it’s alleged effectiveness, Rice remains steadfast and stupid against all things reality based, i.e., based on actual attestable facts, as the thoughts of missing out on all the previous birthday cake and chocolate ice cream laying in the bottom of her pig trough is too drool inducing to acknowledge what each of us faces every morning now as the result of 8 years of Boosh based “Reaganomincs” - sunny happy-face painted visions of party favors, bobbing for apples, and Chuckles the clown getting a might too familiar with your red state senator’s or representative’s package. Face it: Bush lickers just couldn’t resist the lure of ingesting too many conservative hot dogs and the aural flatulence assault and obligatory vomiting of seemingly thousands of over-indulged red-state brats screaming Hosannas of glee as they hop like retard bats in one of those inflatable trampoline jump thingys. Yeah, she still talks a mean game but underneath, she's just a weak-kneed, pencil-necked geek for discarded, retarded GOP dulled talking points, and in the past she never missed a chance for a little one-on-one with Chuckles, not to mention her unnatural fascination and troubling affability with the leather saddle horn on the Cheney’s Express pony ride. I heard Cheney saying the other day on some Fox wank-off show that the old White House glory hole hasn’t been the same since the real adults showed up and he had to pick up his stinky toys and go home. He was complaining how he developed this strange scent of latex in his nostrils, his breathing got labored, even after Hannity unbuckled his tight pants, and I’m sure if asked, he’d claim he remembered little of what transpired. Glenn found him later that day, after his meds wore off, face down in the salmon eggs. But I’m concerned about Glenn, as he seems to have turned over a new “leaf”, a peculiar nuance, if you will, that has rather disturbing undertones.
Condi says: I've been very clear that I refuse to refute the statement that I didn't authorize anything that isn't illegal. I'm not saying that it isn't a refusal to deny the statement, I just don't agree that you can't claim that I didn't say it.
I can't be anymore clear than that.
that it's a foaming beef enema,
then it isn't rape. Amen.
"foaming" in particular?
;)
What'd I step in?
Because the President said so.
n/t
"Allergic reaction"? I think not.
She looks like she went 15 rounds with the truth and got thoroughly whupped.
If she fought the truth it wouldn't go one round. Chances are it would have been a TKO a minute into the first round.
Perhaps she's allergic to the truth.
Justice will not be served until Condi is in prison garb and locked up....
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
Because it's torture, and it`s WRONG!!!
If I looked like that you couldn't drag me out in public. Did she think they would have mercy on her if she looked like a Macy's parade balloon?
Not surprised how she looks.....stress can do funny things and there isn't any stress like the stress of being caught committing a crime.
can play hell with your looks.
I think she's full of it but I don't think she was trying to say "if the Prez says it's legal then it's legal." Maybe the truth got in the way of the lie she meant to tell.
on CNN with the same angel bite.
LIAR!!!!! You said it bitch now own up to it. You made the claim that since the President approved it, it was legal.
Madeline Albright's dad, Josef Korbel, is really disappointed in you. He taught you better than this.
Oh, not only would George W. Bush NOT do something that was illegal, he wasn't doing said illegal thing TO SAVE AMERICANS!
Next, they'll push the you-would-have-done-the-same meme.
Nixon said "if the President does it, it's not illegal"
Rice said "If the President does it, it's not illegal".
However there's a big difference, she points out, because in his case President Bush PROMISED.
How is that hard to understand?
President Bush authorized torture, and torture is illegal, but Bush promised that he wouldn't authorize anything illegal, so by definition, he didn't!
If only Nixon had remembered the promising part, everyone would be calling him a great leader now.
Rice and Ari Fleicher have the same look. Is it some new kind of Cheney face art?
Well...the Dark Side WILL do that to you.
Did she try the lightning thing and some passing Jedi deflected the bolt into her face?
It sure didn't help Emperor Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker.
Ari, the ultimate liar for the bush administration, Maybe Rice and Ari were playing in the same meadow?
No matter what the rest of her face was doing, her eyes were as flat and dead as a doll’s. From her actions it seemed she has no moral compass whatsoever. If I were to ever find out that she had pulled wings off of flies for fun, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I bet when she enters a room she lowers the room temperature!!
Pure evil, I say.
Even if you had a valid legal defense, we're to believe that NO ONE in the Bush Administration and NO ONE down the chain of execution had any moral or ethical issues with this?
Come on. Misbehaving kids have better developed ethical concepts than this.
huh.
when she had Bush's cock jammed down her throat.
it shut her up.
her teeth flossed...
The Bug Fucker!
(ref: see Repub Sex with Mule thread)
I'll say it again. Condi had her knee pads on, so Bush should have been impeached.
Unfortunately, Pelosi had hers on too...
Nancy was busy on the other side.
The president paid a lawyer to give him the answer he wanted. Since we live in a for profit world and the president paid the lawyer with taxpayer money, that means that the president is not responsible for the answer he paid the lawyer to give!
I think that about sums it up in bizzaro world!
Cheney has a nasty left hook.
this is the second bush official to show up with swollen eyes. if you remember, when Gonzales got off of the plane on his trip back to texas with bush, his left eye was all sorts of messed up. i am thinking both of them were smacked around a little bit to get them to toe the party line. either that or its the weed.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/21/gonzales-...
Could only watch 5 seconds of this a-hole
It's those grasshoppers with their 5 irons, I tells ya!
...has Condi ever "explained herself well"? She has always, ALWAYS, sounded like a gibbering 3rd grader caught in a blatant lie. Man, she is so overrated as some sort of colossus of intelligence and debate. I don't get it at all.
... the CBS interview where Katie Couric gushed about how Condi was 'scary smart'.
Well, Katie got it half-right.
Feels like i am alone in that opinion sometimes.
Then I have people tell me that, "Well, she's a concert pianist, so there! Myeh! Myeh! Yer mean!"
Yeah, well what's better than one rose on your piano? Tulips on your organ. Meaning: what the fuck does playing a piano have to with the responsibility of being Sec'y of State and the REASONING skills that might be useful in doing that job, skills that Condi clearly never had? Sheesh!
"Concert pianist" my left eye. I'll be the first to toss a 50 note tip in her brandy jar if she just stays out of politics forever and keeps her stuttering, yammering, inarticulate opinions in the piano lounge.
I'm surprised ol' Alberto didn't pop up playing a musical instrument. There was John Ashcroft singing that smarmy song about the eagle (and I suspect it's not patriotic, but evangelical), then Condi playing the piano.
What, and people who play musical instruments can't be incompetent in other areas, or be corrupt, torture-enabling war criminals?
We're listening, really we are. And soon we shall be comparing all your public pronouncements to written evidence.
For a former Stanford provost, national security advisor and secretary of state, Condi isn't very eloquent. Her sentences never seem to say what she means.
condi your name may be Mudd as in Mary Mudd.
You know your history as that's your major right?
After John Wilkes Booth was tracked down and burned in a barn (?) there were TREASON trials with THIRTEEN co-conspirators convicted to be hanged. There were gallows built for equal justice before the law, the thirteen hung in unison. Among them was the only woman hung for TREASON a one Mrs. Mary Mudd whose only offense was renting out the room in her boarding house where the PLANS were hatched. It's a pretty low bar of justice hun condi?
If it's good enough for the Nazi's it's more than enough for all these clowns.
Those traitors on the Supreme court who gave us bush
The press that boosted the war
The CIA
The torturers down to the guy that mopped up the blood ALL OF THEM !
Many in Congress
GEORGE W.BUSH
Blackwaters secret police
And you can add your human being devoid of any empathy......
Wouldn't it be amazing, in a horrible way, to live in a time where the entire US government was arrested, tried, convicted and put to death for treason? I'm not sure how I'd react. Not gonna happen, but WOW, it'd make a heck of a film.
We're better than that life w/o parole or pardons.
Violence to answer violence never works.
I agree though, a nice long natural life of humiliation behind bars is fine with mean. They could repair the budget quickly by selling tickets, like going to the zoo.
Maybe stripping of all titles, and stripping of all ill gotten profits is a start. The bush Library can be dedicated to the folly of torture. Nobody needs to go to prison if they can be adequately punished without prison time.
The Bush administration is the first administration to go totaly rouge as far as i know, so maybe they should go easy on bush because it's his first offense. If they do it again then they will be in big trouble... something like that - a kind of "three strikes and you're out" policy for torturing fascist regimes.
that a pardon is just one jackass election away.
Is this the work of a drunken president oops I meant to say boyfreind who was president but not a president at the time but may be still leagal since he was a president and so it has to be legal abuse Cant be any clear than that
objective for these MoFo's.
that's the second Bushie I've seen that's had a droopy right eye (the first being Ari Fleischer a couple weeks ago).....for some reason I always thought that was a stress related condition or something....Hmmmm......
See comment at 15:48 and 16:07......strange. Unless it's those damn golf playing bugs again.
....from guilty conscientious one would hope.
What is wrong with these schools that they would bring such evil people so near the children?
I noticed that. they are out of office. what are they doing?
It's the DOJ Condi has to convince that she is innocent, not school kids. Unless it's important to imprint the republican stamp early before the children are capable of nuanced and moral thought, she has no reason to be there. crazy! BuschCo is still out there creeping around, looking for weekness. Condi and Ari are just part of a seething snake pit of activity. We live in interesting times.
choke on a pretzel, fall down, and get a boo-boo? She looks like someone decided they had enough of her lies. Or maybe she fell off a pair of high heeled shoes while spanking Georgie in the dungeon?
Isn't it telling that some of the top political, investigative reporting of the year was done by teenagers?
No current or former US president would be stupid enough to say that the president dictates the law. When Nixon said that ``When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,'' I'm sure he meant to say that in the same way that Rice meant to say what she said.
I'm sure that Nixon meant to say that presidents follow the law, and since he was the president, he was following the law.
Doesn't matter. Torture is illegal, regardless of the opinion of the president.
Grab someone at random off the street, put a hood on their head and throw them into a van.
Drive them out to an abandoned farmhouse.
Chain them up in the basement for a month.
Waterboard them three times a day.
Declare yourself to the police.
If you are charged with a felony relating to the waterboarding, then waterboarding is illegal.
There is no question that the act of waterboarding someone against their will would result in at least an assault charge.
Whether you get your hands dirty or hire some sociopath to do it for you, these crimes should be actionable.
You want to put the Bush crime family behind bars? Pursue them like the felonious criminals they are.
They ARE actionable!!! All we need is for the rule of law to be returned to this country! And those that stand in the way of that need to get the hell out of OUR government!
Speaking of history, it was Mary Surrett, not Mary Mudd. And, she was hanged with three co-conspirators, not thirteen, on July 7, 1865, on what is today the tennis court at Fort McNair, Washington. Looks like Condi isn't the only one who doesn't know his/her history.
How bad does Rice want her hand removed from Cheney's torture machine?
Why is Rice defending Cheney's torture machine?
Does Rice know Cheney's torture machine murdered captives?
Does Rice not know that being terrified by bin laden is not an excuse to commit torture.
So Bush, Cheney, and Rice were terrified. the picture gets a little clearer. they were indeed paraniod and dilluded.. There, there, little Cheney.. That was almost eight years ago, Darth. Long before you constructed and perfected your massive organ of torture - presumably your fabled seperate but equal part of the government is this new torture division of yours?
Darth has allowed her out to speak in public. Dubya is busy with his social life and raisin' money for his new book...er' librury, so he's not likely to say anything too stupid.
But, Condi seems like a real threat to all of them there neo-cons - and her last 2 little interviews reveal her utter incompetence at keeping her comments to the exact party line, exactly like Darth told her. She'll be the one who brings 'em down....I can hope.
of explaining herself here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAwb2H-ZWJY
"And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
The construction she now puts on it would have been phrased as, "If it violated our obligations, then the president would not have authorized it."
In an "if-then" construction, the "if" clause is generally taken as given, implying the "then" clause... of course, this is logic 101, so Condi may have missed it.
...except that you didn't mention that the first sentence was a continuation/repetition of what she had just said a few sentences back, which was closer to the construction she used in your second example.
This whole issue is a classic example of taking a sentence out of context. I think Rice is lying that they took for granted that the president would not violate their obligations; I think she's intelligent enough to know that the administration's lawyers were trying to find a way to allow them to redefine those obligations, so as to make it appear that what was once clearly prohibited action, now could be argued to be allowed. But I don't think for one second she "slipped" and said the president's actions are legal just because he's the president.
Finally, the "if" clause, while taken as given, can be taken as given in the hypothetical context, which is how Rice used it, and is fully consistent with her stated meaning.
.
If she didn't mean it...
... The thought wouldn't have crossed her mind.
.
like a bee and it looks like someone pucned her in the face.
Stuttering, uttering, muttering, lying ass bitch. Only waterboarding will get the truth out of this confused, under-qualified skank.
A fourth grader armed with nothing but the truth - destroys a fascist. Priceless!
Better not let W near anymore kindergarteners, his circuits would probably fry.
is having Obama say it when he says we shouldn't prosecute terrorist torturers because they were just "following policy".
Who believes Dumbya's Sex Kitten wouldn't lie and coverup for the moron?
It was obvious to me listening to the first Stanford comments that Rice meant exactly what she says, that she and her staff were told that the interrogation techniques would not be torture because the president would not authorize torture. Not that it would not be torture because the president authorized it, but that the president would not authorize torture.
When I read you criticism, John, I had to listen again to her comments, and I've reached to same conclusion. I think you're reaching here and claiming to discover something that doesn't exist. This is in no way meant to absolve Rice of blame for lying that she took the president's word for it that the interrogation techniques were not torture. But in these comments, she is in no way saying that the actions weren't illegal simply because the president took them, or allowed them, a la Richard Nixon.
I think you need to get back to the more important line of criticism and let this one tiny canard fly away.
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