If Rice Approved Torture - What Was Zelikow Trying To Do The Other Night......

on Rachel's program? Didn't he say that Rice wasn't for the tactics either?

it's possible that he wrote the opposing memo and that when Rice saw how soundly they rejected (and then tried to destroy the evidence that it had ever existed!) she may have had a change of mind.

Good nazis are like that.

I think Republicans are offering up Rice to see if that will be enough of a scapegoat. I'm sure they have all kinds of documents Cheney drew up with her signature on them.

I say if they take her down, the rest of the Bush administration should go with her.

I think if they try to scapegoat or sacrifice Rice to protect themselves - that Rice will not sit back and take it. I think she'll turn on them.

But as another DUer pointed out in another thread, The 9/11 Commission Report used evidence obtained by waterboarding.

They admit in their own document that they submitted the questions to the waterboarders, with the intent of using this information as evidence in their official report. Under the Nuremberg principles, any claims that those Commissioners make now, that they didn’t know about how the info was obtained, is completely irrelevant. This act of including information obtained by torture in an official proceeding is strictly verboten by all modern jurisprudence.

It stinks to high heaven, and you only have to be fair-minded to see that it all stinks. It’s just plain wrong!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2841686#2841967

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm

that is his exact quote from Rachel's interview. He is trying to protect his own ass, first and foremost, imo, but wasn't going to throw Rice under the bus....at least not yet.

but I could be wrong.

he makes that very clear in the interview.

It was clear to me that Z was at State, but I had the impression that he served at State while she was still at the NSC.

If Z was objecting to the memos, that would have been during Bush's first term...sense the memos were rescinded around December of 2003.

Z is a hard guy to keep track of.

National Security Advisor and, it seems, Mr. Zelikow was working for her in re-drafting "an overview of America's national security strategy":

In Rise of the Vulcans (Viking, 2004), James Mann reports that when Richard Haass, a senior aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell and the director of policy planning at the State Department, drafted for the administration an overview of America’s national security strategy following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Dr. Rice, the national security advisor, "ordered that the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder, something that would represent a more dramatic break with the ideas of the past. Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, University of Virginia Professor Philip Zelikow." This document, issued on September 17, 2002, is generally recognized as a significant document in the War on Terrorism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zelikow

From the Washington Post article yesterday:

Condoleezza Rice, John D. Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials approved as early as the summer of 2002 the CIA's use at secret prisons of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, a technique that new Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has described as illegal torture, according to a chronology prepared by the Senate intelligence committee and declassified by Holder.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR2009042203141.html?hpid=topnews

Looking at the dates when Mr. Zelikow was doing the re-write and when Ms. Rice approved the torture, Mr. Zelikow would have been working for Ms. Rice at the time she okayed it.