Left's torture logic could kill you

By Noemie Emery
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

We can all thank Clifford May for having gotten Jon Stewart to say (at least for a while) that President Harry S. Truman was a “war criminal” for, among other things, the two atom bombs that he ordered dropped on Japan.

This is a window into what has emerged as a curious mindset, which seems to believe that a) America’s leaders owe more to the enemy than they do to their allies and people, b) that one can wage war in a fastidious manner, deterring or defeating bloodthirsty people without resorting to ugliness, and c), that anything done by Americans to win a war, end a war, or forestall an attack on the country and the people is wrong.

This began to emerge even before Iraq, George W. Bush, and the issue of “torture,” in the late 1990’s, when the Smithsonian mounted a display of the Enola Gay suggesting the bombing was a matter of race-induced genocide, and forgetting to mention such things as a) the fact that Japan started the war with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, b) the Japanese atrocities against helpless civilians, and c) the thousands and thousands of Allied and American servicemen whose lives had been saved by the end of the war.

At times, the logic deployed in the debate about “torture” borders on torture itself. Here is Michael Kinsley branding us all as a nation of criminals, for standing by idly as innocent people are randomly plucked off the street. “There is another group [beyond Bush and his lawyers] that stood by and did nothing while Americans grabbed people off the streets of foreign countries, took them to other foreign countries...and tortured them until they said whatever our government wanted to hear....Millions of people...knew that torture was going on, and voted for Bush anyway...62 million of us voted to reelect George W. Bush in 2004.”

So 62 million war criminals voted to have innocent passersby tortured: this does sound serious. But if Kinsley strains logic by ignoring the fact that interrogations have a life-saving reason behind them, Richard Cohen assaults it still further by conceding they do save the lives of innocent people, while saying he still wants them stopped.

“Of course it works,” he admits, and goes on to say that “ceasing this foul practice will not in any way make Americans safer,” adding that Obama demoralized the CIA in the process, and “made things a bit easier for terrorists, who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught.” Presumably, it’s better for the national psyche and soul to forgo visiting stress on an enemy terrorist, and end up with another smoking hole in another American city, filled with the smoking ashes of 3,000 people.

Then he says he doesn’t want to compare Bush to Hitler, and then does it anyhow, saying the legal memos from the president’s lawyers resemble the “squalid efforts of legal toadies” to justify evil that one saw in the Third Reich at war.

Once upon a time, literate and intelligent people understood the difference between attack and defense, assault and pre-emption, and the use of force to conquer, destroy, enslave, or cause pain to large numbers of innocents; and the use of force deployed on aggressors to deflect or prevent the slaughter of thousands, to reverse an invasion, or to end a war others began. Once upon a time, they understood that presidents don’t have the luxury of indulging their qualms at the expense of their countrymen.

Once upon a time, American presidents believed that their first job was protecting the country and people, which is the reason why John Kennedy, an aspiring war criminal, by some critics’ standards, thought he would have deserved being impeachment if he left American cities on the East Coast of the country vulnerable to attack by Soviet missiles in Cuba. And between 1942 and 1945, Americans in foreign countries shot and bombed people without reservation or mercy, while in Los Alamos scientists worked night and day to produce weapons of vast and unheard of destructive capacity. And people voted for Roosevelt anyhow, who was a war criminal, exactly like Truman, and Bush.