A Brave New Prophetic Voice: Condi Speaks

“Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right.” Prov. 20:11


I was fascinated to hear former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s response to a question asked this week by a fourth grader.


The former Secretary of State was taking questions from a group of students at a school in Washington D.C. According to the Washington Post, the questions weren’t screened (oopsy…) and after several ‘innocuous’ questions (language used by the Post) a 4th grader then asked this:

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?


And her response, after first explaining she didn’t want to criticize the Obama Administration, was quoted in the Post as this:


"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. 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. I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."


Let me add, here, that I am:


--An Evangelical Christian

--Generally a Moderate Conservative

--Traditionally a Republican Voter

--In the 36 to 64 demographic

--Middle Class

--A Midwesterner


…and her response makes the hair on my neck stand up, and it gives me a sense of dread in my stomach.




I won’t make a comment on whether or not we should be waterboarding people to get information -- it isn’t productive, in my opinion, at this point in our history and the past is the past; I won’t comment on whether waterboarding meets the technical definition of torture as outlined in the standards of the Geneva Convention we’re supposedly adhering to, because that isn’t the point of this blog post; and I won’t even comment on how hypocritical Rice’s words are, especially in light of the fact that our actions were so disgraceful that we invented a new term – “extraordinary rendition” – to allow other countries to do what we didn’t want to be accused of doing on American soil.


Beyond all of these things, though, let me say that with regard to any and all of the detainees we took into custody under the Bush Administration – from the people being held at Guantanamo Bay to the Abu Ghraib prisoners to any of the foreign nationals we hauled all over the globe – to suggest that what we did to these people was necessary because of the fear Americans held after 9-11 is perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice created by the Bush Administration.


We were in essence being told that we were spineless; we couldn’t make our own decisions; we needed the government to take care of us; we didn’t have the courage to return to the normal routines of our lives.

Because approximately 3000 people died in a series of terrorist attacks.


For reference, about 40,000 people die each year – 100 each day – from car crashes. This month alone, more people will die from car accidents than were killed on 9-11.


And there are still many cars out there on the road; should we be terrified of them? We are much more likely to die from a car crash than a terrorist attack, and the men who carried out the attacks of 9-11 are all dead.


This all brings to my mind what we did to Asians during World War II in the name of ‘fear’; we couldn’t have a bunch of Asian people just wandering the country, could we? After all, we were at war with Japan. So in the name of protection, we locked up thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps around the United States.

Perhaps most ironic of all, for me at least, is the method the U.S. used to create
internment camps: The Executive Order.

And this was exactly what George Bush used throughout his presidency to side-step the guarantees, the checks and balances, that the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up.

So was it right to send the Japanese to internment camps? Was this fair? Was this justice? I’m sure at the time, being asked these questions, people were responding with answers about necessity and taking 'extraordinary measures during extraordinary times'…and that this was only temporary.


And yet if we just repeated these types atrocities, these types of human rights violations, under George Bush, were those 'extraordinary measures' really temporary? If the Bush Administration got to do whatever it wanted to in the name of protection, have we made any progress???

Since 1944???


Oddly, I feel a sense of relief. Not that we, the United States, tortured, of course, and not that we won’t do it again. And the fact that these things are out in the open doesn’t really make me feel any better either.

Rather, I’m glad that with the Bush Administration hopefully behind us (and getting farther every day) we can finally begin to move into a new phase in which the international community doesn’t despise us for saying one thing and doing something else.

And hopefully get past using 'protection from terrorism' as a justification for our actions...