"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Friday, January 4, 2013

Where Does George Bush Go For An Apology?

Hmmmm... one way way to intepret the fiscal cliff deal is that 98% or more of the evil "Bush tax cuts" were actually good things that liberal Democrats were happy to support almost unanimously, i.e., the "cuts" to taxes for people making under $400,000 a year.

Couple that with the fact that Obama hasn't closed Guantanamo, and recently signed a law extending Bush's anti-terror measures, including for indefinite detention without trial for terror suspects.

Now consider that news reports (and even the touted-for-an-Academy-Award movie Zero Dark Thirty) support the conclusion that enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead to finding Osama bin Laden:
The film suggests that waterboarding directly contributed to obtaining vital information about bin Laden’s courier — a break that eventually led to the al-Qaeda leader. Opponents of the CIA are quick to insist that waterboarding played no role in tracking him down. Both the movie and those critics are wrong.

The first substantive information about the courier came in 2004 from a detainee who received some enhanced interrogation techniques but was not waterboarded. Although we had heard the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, until that time we were unaware of the central role he played in bin Laden’s communications. Subsequently, as we always did, we checked out this information with other detainees. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had been waterboarded, was by then cooperating with us to some extent. He denied any knowledge of the courier, but so adamantly that we knew we were on to something. We then intercepted secret messages that Mohammed was sending to other detainees, ordering them to say nothing about al-Kuwaiti.
Where does George Bush go for an apology for all the calumny that was heaped upon his head for so many years?   Or are all of these things different morally simply because a Democrat now does them and profits politically by doing so?

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