Matt Ortega

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) received plenty of flack from bloggers for her “we don’t know” dodge on torture that made it into the pages and pixels of the Washington Post this morning. Greg Sargent provided the full context that did not make it into the article.

Well I think I’ve been very clear about that too, we should not conduct or condone torture and it is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing, we’re getting all kinds of mixed messages. I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new President. I think once you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know. I was very touched by the story you guys had on the front page the other day about the WWII interrogators. I mean it’s not the same situation but it was a very clear rejection of what we think we know about what is going on right now but I want to know everything, and so I think we have to draw a bright line and say ‘No torture – abide by the Geneva conventions, abide by the laws we have passed,’ and then try to make sure we implement that. [emphasis added]

Matthew Yglesias, citing Mark Kleiman, poked a hole in Clinton’s “we don’t know” raft.

As Mark Kleiman says, this doesn’t really wash and seems to indicate that she accepts the view that, for example, waterboarding which we definitely do know is happening maybe doesn’t count as torture.

At any rate, Clinton has long distinguished herself as unusually friendly to executive power for an opposition party legislator, so there’s little reason to believe that if she becomes president she’ll be eagerly rolling the boundaries back from where Bush pushed them. I wonder if conservatives will be happy about the idea of HRC-administered torture, on the grounds that they just really love torture, or, maybe, once it’s being done by a politician they don’t admire they’ll start to see that there’s a problem here.

Former President Jimmy Carter, however, doesn’t share Senator Clinton’s wait-and-see approach to the interrogation tactics used by the Bush administration in the name of “national security.”

I don’t think it. I know it, certainly.” the former president told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when asked if he thinks the United States commits torture.

“Our country for the first time in my lifetime has abandoned the basic principle of human rights,” Carter continued. “We’ve said that the Geneva Convention does not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused.”

Carter’s comments come on the heels of a New York Times report that disclosed the existence of secret Justice Department documents supporting the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” including, according to the Times, “head-slapping, simulated drowning, and frigid temperatures.”

Senator Clinton, apparently, doesn’t read the New York Times. It does not appear that anybody with the Sunday morning talk shows on all of the major news networks do, either.

In the next presidential debate, which appears to be in Philadelphia on October 30 hosted by NBC News, it would be insightful if the moderator would ask Senator Clinton if she believes waterboarding is considered torture, and if so, why she refuses to come to the same conclusion as former President Carter?

Watch the CNN video of former President Carter here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The views expressed are of the author, and the author alone, and do not reflect the views of the Democratic National Committee.