What Bush Knows

Below is a great exchange between Jane Mayer, author of the recent explosive New Yorker CIA black site expose, and Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman about what Bush means when he says his favorite three word mantra: "we don't torture":

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of [President Bush's] statements, “We do not engage in torture”? Or what do you make of the Presidential Scholars, the high school kids, who went to the White House, met with President Bush, handed him a handwritten note signed by more than a third of them, more than fifty of them, saying not to participate in extraordinary rendition, not to participate in torture -- he looked up at them and said, “We do not torture”?

JANE MAYER: Well, I think he believes that. I mean, it's a matter of definitions here. You know, and the way that his administration defines “torture,” he's arguing that this doesn't meet that standard. Now, it happens that one of the most conservative and credible organizations on human rights in the world, the Red Cross, disagrees with him. But the lawyers in his administration have told him that what they're doing is legal. In some ways, I think you’ve got to fault the lawyers for not telling him such things as that waterboarding was always illegal before they okayed it.

And, you know, it's very hard to know really what level of knowledge he has. I mean, you certainly read in Ron Suskind's book, for instance, that he was following these interrogations closely and asking daily, you know, “What have we got? What are we getting from these guys?” He was saying, according to -- I think it was in Suskind’s book -- that Abu Zubaydah, when he learned that he was put on painkiller, he sort of scoffed and said, you know, “Why did they do that?” And this was after Abu Zubaydah had been shot in the groin and other places.

And, you know, it's hard, I have to say -- I’d like to be really careful. The New Yorker is a very careful news organization, and we try to stick with the facts. And I really do not know exactly what the President knew in this and how closely he was following it. And, you know, again, it's why I really think it would be great for the country if there was a little more transparency in all this and a little more debate.