Michael Sheuer: Bammy's Narcissism and Naivete Are Going to Get People Killed

All worth reading. I'll just quote a few choice paragraphs.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

...

Americans and their country's security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party's left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America's defense and -- like Obama -- naively believe that the West's Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

A point that never gets mentioned: Liberals try to reassure Americans that in a ticking-time-bomb scenario, of course they'd do the rough stuff required.

Um, how? Given that liberals are branding all of this unconstitutional, unamerican, and wholly illegal, how do they carve a special ticking-time-bomb exception? An illegal act does not become legal just because you really need to do it. A theft is not blessed as legal simply because the thief really needed the money.

So what exactly is the legal theory that makes Ticking Timebomb Torture a special legal version of torture? Where are the legal memos to support this? Would anyone compose such a legal memo now, knowing he risks prosecution and jailtime for the crime of writing an opinion?

And if there is some strange theory to support such a "when you really have to break the law" exception, one wonders why it does not apply, say, in the months following September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda had follow-up attacks planned.

posted by Ace at 01:11 PM

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