Pres Clinton:"You Don't Need Blanket Advance Approval For Blanket Torture"

[kpete]

"You don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture," Clinton said.

"The president says he's just trying to get the rules clear about how far the CIA can go when they're when they whacking these people around in these secret prisons," Clinton said in NPR's "Morning Edition" interview, recorded on Wednesday.

"If you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're going to be in real trouble," he said.

Like other critics, he said information obtained with harsh treatment may be unreliable and adopting abusive practices could lead to captured U.S. troops being subjected to the same.

Even if there were circumstances where such treatment is necessary to prevent an imminent attacks, Clinton said: "You don't make laws based on that. You don't sit there and say in general torture's fine if you're a terrorist suspect. For one thing, we know we have erred in who was a real suspect."

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20060921/2006-09-21T122805Z_01_N21305407_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-SECURITY-CLINTON-DC.html