Smack of the day

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Light day today as we are off to Orange County to be with family but before we left, we wanted to share some epic smack shot off by Charles Krauthammer this past week and which is consistent with pointing out the incoherence of the Obama administration's counter-terrorism policies:

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the war on terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

Bingo.


And it's not just foreign terrorists. Team O has fashioned a legal construct whereby American citizens can be held indefinetely without cause and like Anwar al-Awlaki, even be killed without due process.

For you Obama supporters out there, how do you square that circle? How do you wack U.S. citizens based upon one's personal vetting procedure but desire to confer the rights of citizenship upon foreign terrorists? You can't, therefore, you are guilty of championing a system, a process that is far more egregious, far more non-sensical and far more dangerous than any policy put into place by Obama's predecessor. You have become what you so allegedly and righteously claimed to have despised.

As we have said before, we never, for obvious reasons, want to hear one peep about water-boarding ever again. Funny how that outrage has quietly dissapated, now isn't it?