Selective Censure at Stanford

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Ambushed by a left-wing student at Stanford, the former Secretary of State gave two students a history lesson unlike any they are likely to receive at Palo Alto.

The video, captured by student Reyna Garcia, captures an argument between students and Condoleeza Rice over the human rights and foreign policy implications of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Taken at the reception segment of the dorm event, Garcia said she was unable to follow Rice inside to hear her formal speech.

“The most important thing [is] that you make a judgment [of] what’s right,” Rice told the first inquiring student, “and in terms of enhanced interrogation and rendition and all the issues around the detainees, Abu Ghraib is and everyone said Abu Ghraib was not policy, Abu Ghraib was wrong and nobody would argue in favor of Abu Ghraib.”

Rice went on to defend the Bush Administration’s waterboarding policy as not constituting torture because she argued it did not contravene the U.N. Convention Against Torture. She also said,

“But in terms of the enhanced interrogation and so forth, anything that was legal and was going to make this country safer, the President wanted to do—nothing that was illegal and nothing that was going to make the country less safe and and I’ll tell you something: Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans and I know a lot of people are second-guessing now, but let me tell you what the second-guessing that would have really hurt me: if the second-guessing had been about three thousand more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.”

On The Young Turks show, Garcia indicated that protests against Rice, who returned to Stanford this March, were pretty common and that CNN and ABC had contacted her to request the original video footage.

“Well, there was a protest outside, actually, like on the law of our building, so, there’s definitely a pretty strong feeling that she should be here by a lot of students, and there are protests held at most events she attends on campus and this one wasn’t an exception there,” Garcia told TYT’s Cenk Uygur.

Garcia said that Rice had indicated “she was planning on teaching a class Winter quarter next year that would be open to upperclassmen only, so juniors and seniors, and luckily I’m going to be an upperclassman next year so I think that I might take that class.”

Stanford Says No to War, a leftist pacifist group which opposes Rice’s presence on campus formed in March after it was announced that former faculty member Rice would return to the Stanford campus. As of this writing, the group’s Stanford Community Petition has 103 signatures, and many are from Rice’s fellow faculty members. (The petition grew from 65 signatures to 103 in the time it took to write this story).

One significant signee is Professor Philip Zimbardo, the infamous creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). “They are the Systems Managers that created evil-generating situations,” wrote Prof. Zimbardo in the comments.

As the administrator for the SPE, Zimbardo personally presided over abuses similar to those at Abu Ghraib; last June he drew a parallel between what he experienced at Stanford and this scandal, complete with a slideshow comparing the horrors of the two “prisons.”

“Our guards stripped prisoners naked. They put bags over their head[s]. They sexually humiliated them,” he said (emphasis added).

Prof. Zimbardo later added, “And then they got them to engage in humiliating tasks—cleaning toilet bowls out with their bare hands, stripping prisoners naked, sexually taunting them, and then it always descends halfway through into sexually-degrading activities, literally much like we saw at Abu Ghraib.”

Yet a visit to Prof. Zimbardo’s RateMyProfessors.com profile reveals mostly positive ratings.

As of this writing, at least 18 other Stanford faculty and staff had signed onto the community petition, which states, “We the undersigned students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other concerned members of the Stanford community, believe that high officials of the U.S. Government, including our former Provost, current Political Science Professor, and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, Condoleezza Rice, should be held accountable for any serious violations of the Law…through investigation and, if the facts warrant, prosecution, by appropriate legal authorities.”

Signees include:

• Todd Davies, Associate Director of the Symbolic Systems Program
• Paul R. Ehrlich, Professor of Biology,
• Thomas Wasow, Professor of Linguistics & Philosophy
• Ivan Sag, Professor of Linguistics,Elizabeth Tallent, Professor of English,
• Dmitri Petrov, Associate Professor of Biology,
• Rev. Geoff Browning, the Campus Minister,
• Maurice “Rush” Rehm, Professor of Drama and Classics,
• Carol Shloss, Professor of English
• Robert Crews, Assistant Professor of History,
• Sandra E. Drake, Emerita Associate Professor of English
• Alice Miano, Lecturer in the Language Center
• Janet Cooper Alexander, Professor of Law,
• Pamela M. Lee, Professor of Art and Art History,
• Hubert Marshall, Emeritus Professor of Political Science,

• Marisa C. Juárez, Administrative Associate in the African and African American
Studies Department,
• Sean Hanretta, Assistant Professor of History, and
• J.P. Daughton, Assistant Professor of History.