Reminder #12312978 of the bankruptcy of politics: people that write garbage like this aren’t laughed into obscurity…:
If ever there were a time for President Obama to trust his instincts and stick to his guns, that time is now, when he is being pressured to change his mind about closing the books on the “torture” policies of the past.
Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.
He was right to do this. But he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government. And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices. (emphasis mine)
As I’ve mentioned before, the likelihood of prosecutions was, is and will be zilch barring an absolute miracle. There’s generally been two views shaking out over this:
- Right-wingers say that the entire thing — disclosure of the memos, criticism of the interrogation methods, all of it — is stupid, the techniques INCLUDING waterboarding aren’t torture, and it doesn’t matter anyway because they were only applied to the worst of the worst and great intel came from them. All of these are verifiably false, but at least it’s internally consistent with their ends-justify-the-means ironically relativist worldview.
- Pretty much everybody else approves of the releases, and if they don’t openly call for prosecutions (though, as Glenn recently pointed out, polls have shown approval for such) they at the least think the tactics were a dumb and/or disgusting idea.
In contrast, David Broder’s view is effectively “nice to know, yeah it sucked, but who cares?”. How original of him! His reasoning for this is ________?
[...]having vowed to end the practices, Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats.
This is not another Sept. 11 situation, when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. We had to investigate the flawed performances and gaps in the system and make the necessary repairs to reduce the chances of a deadly repetition. The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places — the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department — by the proper officials.
This sounds like Broder is trying to argue that torture was, possibly, the only thing standing between us & another attack, only w/o coming out and actually saying it. Either that, or he’s justifying wild half-assed panic in response to failure. How he figures waterboarding and slamming people into walls was just another allegedly carefully agreed upon tactic switch for Defending The Homeland purposes and not feel-good vindictiveness (and, as we now know, fishing for that al-qaeda/Saddam tie that never materialized…) puzzles me. No, seriously David, what’s your argument?
Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms. Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me. Is that where we want to go? (emphasis mine)
Words fail me…
(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)
