Monday, August 04, 2014

Interrogative Enhancements

There's a report that will be issued soon from the Senate Intelligence Committee. In it, the truth will be revealed. According to our president, we may have "tortured some folks." Well, ain't that a fine how'd'ya'do? In his briefing this past Friday, Mister Obama said, “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe, and I think any fair-minded person would believe, were torture. We crossed the line.” That line would be the one between being the good guys and being the bad guys. The line would be this one, in case you haven't read the memo: Good guys don't torture. Bad guys do.
Then there's the whole matter of euphemisms. "Enhanced interrogation techniques?" "Pretend drowning?" "Checking your battery with someone else's body parts?" You know, for kids. Really bad kids who may have been hiding secrets from our government and therefore deserved to have their secrets extracted from them in enhanced ways.
The reason for our president to get out in front of this report was to explain how this could happen, how we could have been involved in such nefarious activities. “And that needs to be understood. And accepted. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.” Maybe this is because he feels confident that there was nothing he could do about it since it wasn't on his watch. It was that other guy. The guy who hired John Brennan as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. If you want to point a finger at someone, point it at that guy. Mister Brennan is now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Whose idea was that? Oh. That would be Barack Obama. The same guy who would rather that we not point fingers at anyone. Or ask for anyone to resign. Or fire anyone. That would be inhumane, right? “It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” Obama said. Don't get sanctimonious. Check. Responsible. Check. Forget? I don't think so. The question isn't whether or not we abused some of the prisoners we took into custody just after September 11. We did. But you can't hold a whole intelligence community responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole CIA? And if the whole CIA is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our law enforcement institutions in general? I put it to you,  isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You make a good point. Tim Matheson must be located and hired immediately to manage Obama's PR.