History Repeats Itself

Yesterday on CBS' Face the Nation Senator Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) Chairman of the Judiciary Committee said a special commission is required to get to the bottom of the Bush-era interrogation policies:

"It is not from some idea of vengeance in doing this. But we know that there were a number of people that made the decision to violate the law, a number of people who said that we don't have to follow our Constitution, others who wrote memos basically saying the president and the vice president are above the law".

He says "we know", but where is the specific proof for that statement. How does Leahy "know" the motivation of people in the Bush administration as he contends? From Leahy's point of view Leahy's truth justifies an investigation. And so here we go again. We have a very entrenched, polarizing politician, with leadership by tenure, from a politically protected district, engaged with his liberal constituency in the symbiotic blood thirst hatred of all things Republican.

(June 2009 update: If only Leahy was as concerned with unusual, a perhaps illegal, termination by President Obama of Gerald Walpin, the AmeriCorps inspector general.)

Somehow it is not enough for some of these people agree "that is why we have elections" and to allow that the opposition were duly elected representatives of the people doing what they believed to be right under very threatening circumstances.

Now there is posturing by many in government saying 'water boarding, shocking! I didn't know they were doing water boarding". I feel somehow I was secretly privy to national security secrets not even known to the now Secretary of the State and Speaker of the House who are amazed and dismayed these methods could be have ever been used. It was all over the news, with demonstrations of the technique, everything. And they were in positions of power, in the House and Senate, high rolling players within the Beltway? And now they are shocked? This is all posturing and positioning to absolve themselves in the eyes of their liberal constituents for their past inaction. If they now want to be shocked, then they now should also be ridiculed for being naive and oblivious.

Then there are the questions, what is torture? Is water boarding torture? Others say "but we are the United States, we don't torture". We have a huge array of weapons to defend our national security. But we are not allowed to have water boarding as a weapon against terrorist bent on killing our citizens and destroying our way of life? Terrorist who neither adhere to nor are covered by the Geneva Convention so conveniently and frequently brought up in their defense.

In 2001 we asked, "why didn't we know about these terrorists plots?" The answer, The Church Hearings, where we eliminated the CIA's use of human intelligence from unsavory foreign sources. So here we go again repeating history by failing to remember it. We will be blind to terrorist threats because we unilaterally choose to limit access to the insights of those captured. This is exacerbated by other misguided decisions now underway that are testing our inclination to even capture and imprison those sworn to our destruction in favor of conducting a strange hybrid combination of warfare and judicial proceedings.

Why can't Enhanced Interrogation Techniques just be part of the arsenal at the disposal of the President, to use or not use, at his discretion, to protect the country? And if he chooses to ignore detention and enhanced interrogation and we are attacked, then "that's why we have elections" (and impeachment).

Taking the lead from Leahy's propensity to assign motivation, I suggest Leahy's motivation for a "truth commission", is Leahy wants pay back for Dick Cheney once telling him "to go fuck yourself' "; a sentiment I then and now share.