Here’s a shocker. I agree with Pat Buchanan. The president was at the top of his game last night. The section about torture was particularly strong — especially the Churchill story which was an undeniably foolproof argument against torture, but it specifically painted the pro-torture people as cowards and sell-outs.
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.
And then the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
I was also impressed with his state secrets response. In short, he said that there wasn’t any time — one week into his presidency — to establish a new process for dealing with state secrets and therefore they had to work under the Bush rules regarding national security. But, he said, Eric Holder and Greg Craig are working out a system whereby state secrets are redacted — “carved out” from classified documents, rather than having to appeal and stonewall these lawsuits (and transparency) due to various lines in the documents. We’ll see how this issue continues to play out.
