Conservative Wanderer

“A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.” — Ronald Wilson Reagan

Daily Archives: 22 April 2009

Let’s All Act Like Rome In The Final Days

I don’t often agree with David Frum, but this time he’s managed to hit the nail squarely on the head:

Since Watergate, American politics has moved into a new era of the criminalization of politics. Special prosecutor begets special prosecutor in a cycle of reprisal that has by now embittered the lives of dozens of former administration officials in the two parties.

Until now, however, this revenge cycle has had one limit: It ends when the administration under attack ends. The Clinton administration did not prosecute Reagan and Bush officials; the Bush administration did not act against Clinton officials.

Now Obama is musing about extending the political reach of the criminal law. If he does so, he will find he has opened a new front of political warfare that will not soon end.

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush drew a curtain of oblivion against all the errors and mistakes that had led up to the attacks. There was accusation and counter-accusation in the media, but at the official level there was no recrimination against President Clinton’s decision not to kill bin Laden when he had the chance, no action against those who had failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers from entering the country.

If Obama proceeds to take legal action against those who did what they thought was right to defend the country, all that will change. Prosecutions launched by Obama will not stop when Obama declares “game over.” If overzealousness under Bush becomes a crime under Obama, underzealousness under Obama will become a crime under the next Republican president.

Revenge will be exacted for revenge, the costs of government service will escalate, mobilizing cross-party support will become practically impossible for any important action, and the political life of the American republic will take another step toward the play-for-keeps destructiveness of the last days of the Roman republic.

I would say that most of us know how the Roman republic (more commonly known as the Roman Empire) ended, but given the way schools teach history, perhaps that would be wrong. If you’re not familiar with that story, perhaps starting here or here.

Anyway, back to President  Obama’s apparent desire to criminalize political disagreement… it certainly smacks of certain unsavory regimes, such as Soviet Russia (and to some extent, modern day Putin’s Russia), North Korea, Iran, and so on. It also sounds a lot like opening Pandora’s box or even a simple can of worms; once it’s open, it will be nearly impossible to return to the way things were before. An argument could be made that Watergate was the first crack in opening that can of worms (to settle on one metaphor), but regardless of when it started or who started it, there’s no excuse for opening it any further just to extract political revenge for a difference of opinion.

Obama Administration Edits Interrogation Memos

This, folks, is what is known as a lie of omission:

WASHINGTON – President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

(emphasis mine)

What’s really surprising is that this appeared, of all places, in the New York Times, which can hardly be considered anti-Obama.

Essentially, there were two primary reasons for releasing those memos: to pander to Obama’s far left base, and to make George W. Bush look bad–and it’s not a coincidence that the second helps a lot with the first. In order to do that, however, they had to make it look like the interrogation techniques were useless, and thus, they removed part of what Obama’s own intelligence director had written.

Fortunately, someone who had seen the “before” and “after” memos had more honor than what appears to be the norm in this administration, and blew the whistle. I’d like to publicly thank that person for helping to expose another Obama lie, and will pray that they don’t lose their job because of it.

This is the second big bungle this week, and it’s only Wednesday. One wonders what the rest of the week will bring.