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Krauthammer Goes Long

10:49 AM, May 1, 2009 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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An unusually long column today from Krauthammer that makes several important points. First off, it's all well and good to hold a deep and principled objection to torture, but "you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation." Second, Krauthammer dispenses with the ludicrous argument that "torture" doesn't work:

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former attorney general Michael Mukasey) that "as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." Even Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded "high value information." So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works....

"We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened," asserts Blair's predecessor, Mike McConnell.

And finally, Krauthammer slams Pelosi: "If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do 'in the future.'"

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