Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been making statements in the past few days justifying the use of torture and her knowledge of this as legal, because President Bush would not do something illegal and would always keep all agreements under international law.
She said, when questioned by students informally at Stanford University, that if the President authorized anything, then it was legal, and that she was just doing her job to transmit presidential authority on to others in her positions as National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State.
This sounds too close to what President Nixon told David Frost in the famous interviews on television a few years after he resigned the Presidency, when the former President said, that if the President authorized something or ordered something to be done, then it was legal.
It made it sound under Nixon, and now again under Bush, that the mentality is that the Presidency has no limits and that the Presidency could be seen as almost like an absolute monarchy.
Needless to say, that is an unacceptable view of the Presidential office and MUST be repudiated by all who believe in American democracy and Presidential accountability for their actions in office, whether Nixon, Bush or any other President, past or future!