Rice the Nixonian?
Not Likely

There's some unfair gotcha-ing now aimed at Condoleezza Rice. Apparently at some high school, she had the following exchange with a student (my transcript from video here):

Student: [I read that you authorized waterboarding] “Is waterboarding torture?”

Rice: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations under the convention against torture. So that’s…and, by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed [?] the authorization of the administration to the agency…that they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department’s [clearance? (Unintelligible)]”

Student: “Is waterboarding torture?”

Rice: “I just said 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 violated our obligations under the convention against torture.”

The accusation floating around is that she is expressing the Nixonian view that if the president does it, it's not illegal.

It's not clear what she means--she's speaking off the cuff, and she seems to be a little annoyed, flustered, defensive. But she doesn't seem to be expressing the Nixonian thought. Rather, my guess is that she's saying something like:

The president told us that we would not violate our obligations under the convention against torture. I told the [Central Intelligence?] agency that they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department’s clearance [?]. The president told us not to do anything that violates our obligations under the convention against torture. And so the president only authorized actions that did not violate those obligations.

That is:

The president only authorized actions that did not violate the convention on torture. Therefore "by definition" he didn't authorize anything that did violate the convention.

If I say to you "I authorize you to do only things that do not break the law," then one could say that (so far as this particular act of authorization goes, at any rate) necessarily I have authorized only legal actions.

Now, it goes without saying that Rice could be lying, or that there could be some other type of trickery hidden in her fractured sentences. But it seems uncharitable to say the least to interpret her claims here as Nixonian.