Paths of Glory: The Continuing CIA "Torture" Investigations


As delighted as we all can be with the death of Osama Bin Laden, we continue to have a Democratic Party that is of two minds on waging the war on terror. On the one hand, they are delighted to accept applause for killing Osama. On the other, they continue to maintain the politically convenient fiction that the United States engaged in "torture," this despite the fact that information gathered during the Bushhitler years was crucial in the Bin Laden hunt. Worst of all, AG Holder continues to investigate CIA interrogators for torturing terrorists, and Holder's boss is just fine with that. At least one person managed to ask the president about this: Debra Burlingame, who had a brief encounter with the president at Ground Zero.

(Burlingame) told Fox News: 'I was very upfront, I said Mr President, I've been one of your most ardent critics, but on Sunday night I was very proud of you, I was very appreciative of what you helped make happen, and I was very proud of America.

'And then he hugged me, but then I said I have a question for you.'

She said: 'As a former attorney I know you can't tell the Attorney General what to do, he said, "No, I can't."


But I said "we - that shouldn't stop you from giving your opinion. We wouldn't be here today if they hadn't done their jobs. Can't you at least give them your opinion."


And he said "no I won't," and he turned around and walked away.'

Burlingame has a lot more guts than most members of the news media, who would never ask such a question. More important, shouldn't Republicans be asking such a question a little louder? The Left spent the Bush years making civil rights martyrs out of dubious cause celebre's like Jose Padilla and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Can't the Right do the same for heroic CIA interrogators (apparently some of the few effective CIA employees out there) who elicited invaluable intelligence about al-Qaeda?

These men are not being persecuted because they tortured people. The AG and the president are going after them to protect the loudest Democratic talking point of the last 10 years: that dastardly Republicans tortured people and it was only brave progressives who were able to save the Constitution from the shredder. Sure, the intelligence they developed through painstaking effort led to the death of Bin Laden, but on the other hand Democratic politicians don't want to look like hysterical ninnies. It's no different than the old WW1 practice of pulling a few random privates from the ranks and execute them whenever the troops started acting reluctant to go over the top, and about as repugnant.

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