I was going to get awesomely cranky about how suddenly Barack Obama is nostalgic about campaigning against that nice John McCain, but then I realized: feeding a man’s narcissism by writing, long involved posts about him helps neither you, nor the narcissist. So in the interests of Obama’s own mental hygiene, let me be brief: In 2008 the Obama campaign released an ad that mocked | Read More »
Thanks to CPAC, I completely missed covering this (Glenn Reynolds reminded me of the story this morning): Authors of waterboarding memos won’t be disciplined Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics “exercised poor judgment” but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday. I would | Read More »
This pretty much encapsulates the intellectual, and I use the term extremely loosely, rigor of the antiwar movement when it comes to the GWOT: How did he do it? It’s a question John Yoo has been getting a lot lately. How did he manage to outwit Jon Stewart? (“He slipped through my fingers,” Stewart recalled after Yoo’s recent appearance on The Daily Show. “It was | Read More »
I think that Allahpundit is over-analyzing the reasons why support for ‘torture’ is currently polling at 54/41 in favor (God help us all). It looks fairly simple to me: the antiwar movement has spent the last five or six years attempting to equate waterboarding to torture. They even more or less succeeded – but then they made a classic mistake: they assumed that stigmatization would | Read More »
(Via Hot Air Headlines) Explicitly, and as part of the pushback to the Cheney interview where the former Vice President weighed the current President in the balance, and found him wanting. Democrats hit back just minutes after Cheney’s interview aired. The Democratic National Committee fired off an e-mail to reporters disputing Cheney’s argument that the CIA records released last week showed the enhanced interrogation techniques | Read More »
(Via Instapundit) My first reaction to this piece of news: Administration officials have stated that they do not plan to suspend the policy of extraordinary rendition but that they will instead introduce stricter measures to prevent torture and will no longer send prisoners to countries with histories of abuse. Bolding mine, and let me translate: the Obama administration has decided to institute a policy of | Read More »
I’m sorry to have to tell you folks at The Gawker this, but it’s over. You’ve been tagged by the guy from the cow college as Outside the Pale, and you’re not coming back from that. It’s like this: you were fine with this post, for a given value of fine: you took precisely the line that was expected of you with the Mancow narrative. | Read More »
…because now they have an acceptable devil figure to blame it all on. Via @vermontaigne (and Protein Wisdom): Cheney’s torture trap for Democrats [Note: Salon defines 'waterboarding' as 'torture' throughout this article. Please calibrate your semantic filters accordingly. - ML] You might have thought getting torture back in the news would be a bad move for any Republican; after all, it was the Bush administration | Read More »
[UPDATE] You’d think that they thought that none of this would ever come out. —– (See also Aaron Gardner’s RedHot on this topic.) Pelosi knew about the waterboarding. She knew all along. According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu | Read More »
And objectively speaking, the refs should have stopped the fight about halfway through. Not that either I or Brutally Honest would have thanked them for that: this was just too choice for words. If you’re wondering who won this exchange, either you haven’t watched it yet or you’re not willing to admit the answer. When the room shuts up to listen to one person over | Read More »
Rep Peter Hoekstra of Michigan would like to remind people in general – and the White House in particular – that the events of the last eight years didn’t actually occur in a vacuum: Congress Knew About the Interrogations Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair got it right last week when he noted how easy it is to condemn the enhanced interrogation program “on a | Read More »
(Via Andrew Malcolm) Former Vice President Dick Cheney has indicated that last week’s disclosure / distraction involving four CIA ‘torture’ memos is critically incomplete, as it fails to give results. He wants the full story released: “One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure,” Cheney tells Hannity, “is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the | Read More »
Via Hot Air (and I love the name Ed came up with for this one), the AP does everything it can to keep the dream from dying, but they’re up against some tough objective reality, here: Spanish AG says no torture probe of US officials MADRID – Spanish prosecutors will recommend against opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror | Read More »
If only. While the foreign affairs part of this video is largely true, I have to disagree with it on two key points: First off, the Obama administration has not “stopped torture.” They’ve started it back up again, only they’re going to be handing the job over to countries, in an essentially deniable fashion. And go read up on counter-terror operations conducted by, say, the | Read More »
Here’s the thing: I’ve met Michael Barone. I know that he’s smart. Frighteningly so, in fact. And I know that he pays attention to details, in ways that usually startle the living life out of people who aren’t used to it. In other words, this is an aware guy that we’re talking about. So why the surprise, here? All of which brings to mind the | Read More »
Not being content to embrace and expand a program of deniable third-party torture as a viable counter-terrorism tool, the Obama administration has apparently decided to try to mend relations with the nation of Uzbekistan (H/T: Instapundit): Sources: US considers Uzbekistan as backup base WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is considering resuming military cooperation with hardline Uzbekistan as a potential backup plan given the uncertain | Read More »
Good term, Wizbang: I like it. Anyway, via Dissenting Justice (via Instapundit) we can see in miniature the… ah, evolution of our opposite numbers on the Online Left’s stance on Obama’s reversion to rendition. Our hypocrites for the day are Human Rights Watch*: April 7, 2008 to at least January 19, 2009: The US government should: ·Repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a | Read More »
I told you. I damned well told you. Rendition is back, you pro-torturing, posturing, hypocritical Leftist fools: Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool The role of the CIA’s controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say. Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that | Read More »
I’m not nearly as sanguine about this as Ed was: EXCLUSIVE: Loophole allows terrorist detentions President Obama’s executive order closing CIA “black sites” contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad. [snip] Current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition that they aren’t identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said such temporary | Read More »
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