Soccer Dad

Krauthammer: froomkin's stupid

Or at least he says stupid things.

In his column today Charles Krauthammer takes aim at two targets, Dan Froomkin and Nancy Pelosi. Krauthammer does a nice job of showing that torture, or, at least, "enhanced interrogation techniques" may be necessitated by circumstance.

In the case of Froomkin, Krauthammer dismisses Froomkin's baseless assertion that EIT's don't get good results.

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held." ad_icon

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Claiming Rabin's Noble Peace Prize as proof of his correctness is weak though. Arafat was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and no one's going to claim that invested Arafat with any moral authority. And as we've noted before Israel learned the hard way that harsher interrogation techniques get results accurately and quickly.

I'm disappointed to learn that Krauthammer never watched 24, but no one's perfect.

He also calls Speaker Pelosi a hyporcite:

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

(Please also see Wolf Howling.)

Victor Davis Hanson makes a similar point at the end of his article on political opportunism:

Opportunism, not principles, guides most in Washington. Almost no proponents of the Iraq War withdrew their support right after the successful three-week effort to remove Saddam. Had there been little Iraqi violence during the transition to democracy, former supporters would probably still be vying to take credit for the war's success.

Consider also the dexterous Obama administration's own about-face. It still finds it useful to damn the old Bush government's embrace of wiretaps, military tribunals, and renditions -- even as it dares not drop or completely discount these apparently useful Bush policies, albeit under new names and with new qualifiers.

What does this political opportunism teach us?

If we get hit again by a major terrorist attack, you can bet that today's cooing doves will flip a third time and revert to the screeching hawks of 2002 -- and once again scream that their president must do something to keep us safe.

And the Wall Street Journal lets Senator Feinstein make the call:

Asked this week about Mrs. Pelosi's variable recollections, Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, responded: "I think it's a tempest in a teapot really to say, Well, Speaker Pelosi should have known all of this, she should have stopped this, she should have done this or done that. I don't want to make an apology for anybody, but in 2002, it wasn't 2006, '07, '08 or '09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks."

In addition to the fact that she's now on her third story about when she knew about enhanced interrogation techniques, Michael Goldfarb asks why she waited so long to complain? (h/t Jules Crittenden via memeorandum)

Just so we can get this straight, it's only now that Pelosi has decided the CIA lied to her, years after the controversy began and weeks after this particular controversy began? Or even giving Pelosi the benefit of the doubt about that first briefing, Sheehy still told her just a few months later, in early 2003, that she was lied to, and as minority leader, she did nothing? She didn't look into it, didn't raise it with George Tenet, didn't even write a letter protesting the CIA's conduct? It's ludicrous.

The Washington Post captures what the Speaker's doing very well:

But in attempting to defend herself, Pelosi took the remarkable step of trying to shift the focus of blame to the CIA and the Bush administration, claiming that the CIA accounts represented a diversionary tactic in the real debate over the interrogation policies. That amounted to a virtual declaration of war against the CIA at a time when the Obama administration already has rattled morale at the agency with the release of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogation techniques.

(The article, for the most part, attempts to balance the political considerations of both parties a bit too much. But still as Instpundit noted, it calls attention to

"Troubling new questions" about Nancy Pelosi's credibility.

So is Speaker Pelosi lying, a hypocrite or was just not paying attention when she was briefed in 2002? Perhaps all of them?

What would Instapundit say?: The country's in the very best of hands.

Posted by SoccerDad at May 15, 2009 2:44 AM