I think this is pretty much the purest distillation of what the GOP’s primary defense will be against claims that members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes for authorizing torture.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was recently speaking at Stanford University when a student asked her a question on waterboarding and torture. Here’s her response:
The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture…
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 Convention Against Torture.
Hear that everyone? Because the President authorized torture means that whatever the United States did pursuant to that authorization wasn’t illegal.
Sound familiar?
“When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” — Richard Nixon