Our new president once promised to unite the country. Any hope of that occurring has gone out the window. Over the past week team Obama has initiated a firestorm that must be stopped. Obama’s actions on interrogation techniques are dangerous, partisan, and ignorant. I have never addressed the “torture” issue directly here because it’s a non-starter. It’s the fueled delusion of a Bush hating mob on the left. To get some perspective let’s think back to 2001. The angry mob on the right demanded that Bush investigate the Chinese influence on the Clinton administration, especially in the area of weapons secrets. To be frank there were a whole list of things Bush could have investigated about the Clintons, but he didn’t for good reason. It doesn’t accomplish anything except serve as a distraction.
There will never be prosecutions over interrogations. Obama knows this, Bush knew this, and everyone who has any common sense knows that no laws were broken.
Contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” wrote then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005 memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then Assistant Attorney General (now federal Judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that “the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm.”
The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other “high-value” detainees, that “an improvised thick collar . . . was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls.”
As the Bybee memo notes, the “wall” was a “flexible false wall . . . constructed to create a loud sound”; that “it is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall”; and that the purpose of the collar was “to help prevent whiplash.” If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.
Obama is doing this because he’s still running against Bush. Obama was elected due to Bush, he blames the economy on Bush, and he goes around the world blaming Bush for everything. This isn’t the hopeful, unifying, or forward looking Barack Obama from 2008. He’s a divisive, stuck in the past, and borderline incompetent. What sense does it make to release our interrogation techniques? It’s woeful inept act by a president who doesn’t seem to get it.
Obama wants this issue to go to hearings where nothing will be done. The sole purpose is to keep this in the news, to keep Bush in the news, and to keep Obama’s approval rating from sinking like the Titanic. It’s time for this whole thing to be exposed. Since the president caved to the delusional mob the truth needs to get out about how these interrogations kept the nation safe, how key Democrats signed off on them, and why Obama has made a terrible mistake releasing the information.
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