Reuters reports:
President Barack Obama's choice to head the CIA declined on Thursday to call waterboarding "torture," only days after his attorney general nominee condemned the interrogation practice as precisely that.
Retired Adm. Dennis Blair replied cautiously when pressed on the waterboarding question at a hearing on his nomination to be director of national intelligence....
"There will be no waterboarding on my watch. There will be no torture on my watch," Blair said, refusing to go further.
Note that Blair has been nominated for the job of DNI, not head of the CIA. At CIA Obama has nominated Leon Panetta, whose righteous indignation over torture extends only as far as American sovereignty. Panetta was more than happy to allow our Egyptian "allies" to use such coercive measures when he was Clinton's chief of staff and signing off on that administration's rendition program.
This isn't mere semantics -- serious people understand that there are consequences to turning campaign rhetoric into policy, and that sometimes bad things need to be done in order to ensure a good outcome. In this case Blair's language was calibrated to avoid accusing the people who will soon work for him of war crimes, but if he thought what they did was criminal than why wouldn't he say it? Lofty principles won't keep this country safe, contra Robert Gibbs, but perhaps the left will refuse to accept this "false choice" and force Obama to throw Blair under the bus.
