Dan

Calabrese

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April 23, 2009

Yes to Torture; No to Obama’s Self-Righteous Moral Preening

If there is a more ridiculous news storyline in America today than “torture,” you’d be hard-pressed to come up with it.

This week, President Obama declassified memos from the Bush Justice Department explaining the legal rationale for any number of aggressive interrogation techniques. Why declassify information that gives away secrets to our enemies? Because the political bludgeoning of George W. Bush never gets old, and if Obama ever takes a break from preening about his own superior virtue, he might actually have to govern or something.

But thank God for Dick Cheney. You hated him when he was vice president, and he didn’t care. Now you think he should shut up and go away, and he still doesn’t care. Even better, he is one of the few people who a) knows what he’s talking about on the subject; and b) isn’t afraid tell it like it is without regard for how it will be portrayed by intellectual misfits on the nightly news.

Cheney this week challenged Obama to go farther. Since Obama has already released the memos explaining the legal justification for harsh interrogation methods, particularly waterboarding, Cheney said Obama should go ahead and declassify another set of memos – the ones that outlined the Bush team’s success at using torture to prevent further attacks against the United States.

Surely Obama will get right on that, as soon as he balances the budget and stands up to the Iranians.

Why doesn’t anyone call this storyline what it is – the most idiotic thing in recent memory? “Who approved torture?” asks the media in its solemn tone of self-importance. “How will America recover its moral standing in the world? Who will be held to account for this? What did Bush know and when did he know it?”

What a bunch of crap. Here is the truth: It’s a damn good thing we tortured those detainees, and if Obama puts a stop to it, he is jeopardizing America’s security for the sake of a bunch of worthless good-world-citizen plaudits from people who don’t lift a finger to help the U.S. when it really matters.

Many on the left hate when we talk about 9/11, because it reminds Americans of reality. So let’s talk about 9/11. When 19 radical Islamists hijacked four American planes and used them as flying bombs to kill more than 3,000 innocent Americans, the nation woke up from a slumber of self-delusion to realize that terrorism was real, that terrorists were unabashedly evil and that the only way to deal with these people was to destroy them.

Fortunately, we had a president who did not try to hide his eyes and ignore this reality. George W. Bush refused to subject the United States to the fruitcake rules of engagement that had left us vulnerable to such an attack. He rejected idiotic notions like “proportionate retaliation” and responded with massive retaliation. He rejected the notion that you can’t hit unless someone hits you first, and seized the strategic initiative to take out problems where we decided they should be taken out. He rejected the notion that you’re not allowed to go anywhere or do anything unless the United Nations gives you a hall pass.

And he rejected that abjectly ludicrous notion that terrorists are entitled to protections under the Geneva Convention – an agreement they never signed and would never observe.

Back then, Americans were cognizant of reality. If it wasn’t the 9/11 attacks, it was the murder of Daniel Pearl or the beheading of Nick Berg. We understood that we could not defeat this enemy by acting like a bunch of peacenik, moralizing wimps. When terrorists were brought to Camp X-Ray and left outdoors in the rain, Americans said, “Good, those are the bastards who murdered our fellow citizens.” When our guys sent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to hell, Americans thought it was awesome. Because it was.

That was when we still understood what was going on. But Americans have short attention spans, and while Bush never tired of treating the battle as the all-out war it needed to be, far too many everyday Americans just got sick of the whole thing and wanted to play with their Wiis.

So “torture” became a scandal, and when a smooth-talking charlatan actually promised to cut it out and be nice to the brutes who want to blow us up, we had so completely lost our sense of reality that we went ahead and elected the guy.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company did the right thing by torturing terrorism detainees. They got information that saved lives, and they made it known that the United States would not be made a fool of by maniacs who insisted we follow rules they would laugh at if anyone tried to apply said rules to them.

But this was when America was still serious. Now we’re back to mush-brained self-delusion, part of which is to treat those who did their duty as suspects. Sigh. It was nice while it lasted.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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