It was probably the most memorable portion of last night’s Democratic debate. Tim Russert said a guest on Meet the Press posed a hypothetical about torture: “Imagine the following scenario. We get lucky. We get the number three guy in Al Qaida. We know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and responsibility to beat it out of him? You could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon.”
Russert posed the question to Obama, who immediately ruled out sanctioning torture. Biden did the same. The question went to Hillary Clinton who agreed with her colleagues. Then Russert hit the “gotcha” button.
RUSSERT: The guest who laid out this scenario for me with that proposed solution was William Jefferson Clinton last year. So he disagrees with you.
CLINTON: Well, he’s not standing here right now. (APPLAUSE)
RUSSERT: So there is a disagreement?
CLINTON: Well, I’ll talk to him later. (LAUGHTER)
It made for some entertaining political theater, and it was a valuable opportunity for the senator to differentiate herself a bit from the former president. But there are two main problems with the basic premise behind the question itself.
First, as Greg Sargent explained, Russert seems to think it’s terribly exciting to find Democratic candidates disagreeing with Bill Clinton, especially when one of those in disagreement is Hillary. “This idea is premised on the notion that Hillary’s views should be evaluated relentlessly through the lens of what Bill thinks,” Greg note. “And this, of course, is an outgrowth of the larger conceit that the Beltway punditocracy has tried to foist on this race for months: Namely that voters should, and will, feel the cold shadow of Bill and his Presidency as they decide whether to vote for his wife.”
Quite right. But there’s another problem: Russert misconstrued what Bill Clinton actually said. The “gotcha” wasn’t just foolish, it was also factually wrong.
Reader fercryinoutloud emailed me today after checking on the original transcript to see what the former president actually said about torture. Did Clinton actually endorse an exception to U.S. policy against torture? Or did Russert take the quote out of context? Here’s the whole thing, from September 2006:
MR. RUSSERT: Would you outlaw waterboarding and sleep deprivation, loud music, all those kinds of tactics?
MR. CLINTON: Well, I — here’s what I would do. I would figure out what the, what the generally accepted definitions of the Geneva Convention are, and I would honor them. I would also talk to people who do this kind of work about what is generally most effective, and they will — they’re almost always not advocate of torture, and I wouldn’t do anything that would put our own people at risk.
Now, the thing that drives — that, that gives the president’s position a little edge is that every one of us can imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number three guy in al-Qaeda, and we know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and the responsibility to beat it out of him? But keep in mind, in 99 percent of the interrogations, you don’t know those things.
Now, it happens like even in the military regulations, in a case like that, they do have the power to use extreme force because there is an imminent threat to the United States, and then to live with the consequences. The president — they could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon or could guarantee the submission of that sort of thing ex post facto to the intelligence court, just like we do now with wire taps.
So I, I don’t think that hard case justifies the sweeping authority for waterboarding and all the other stuff that, that was sought in this legislation. And I think, you know, if that circumstance comes up — we all know what we’d do to keep our country from going through another 9/11 if we could. But to — but to claim in advance the right to do this whenever someone takes a notion to engage in conduct that plainly violates the Geneva Convention, that, I think, is a mistake.
Russert thought it was exciting to try and catch the Clintons contradicting one another. But the reality is a) it doesn’t matter if the two occasionally disagree; and b) Russert fudged the quote to get the outcome he wanted anyway.