Sounds Like They Were Doing Their Job

CIA Director Michael Hayden testified that only three (3) terror suspects were waterboarded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The three "victims" were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and senior al Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. That's what all this fuss is about - three well-known and well-funded terrorists? Now maybe you think Hayden is lying and there were in fact dozens - perhaps hundreds - who were waterboarded. Otherwise, if you find this disturbing, I have one question for you: WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?

Senator Majority Leader Dick "Dick" Durbin is determined to get to the bottom of this and force a criminal investigation. Since no even remotely sane person could actually be bothered by the waterboarding of these guys, I have to assume that Durbin is fundamentally anti-American*, as there's nothing that could come out such an investigation but further embarrassment and discrediting of the U.S. Unless you subscribe to the notion that if we debase ourselves before the world then the world will like us. It doesn't matter if the world likes us - it only matters if they respect us. So, sure, when we drop bombs on wedding parties thinking they're terrorist training camps we lose respect. And when we can't bear the thought of roughing up some terrorists involved in the murder of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, we similarly lose respect. I'd be more than happy though to not torture anymore terrorists and dramatically reduce our footprint in terror-friendly regions. Pretty soon they'll forget we even exist.

* Anti-American is probably too strong - it's more like a-American. Durbin and his colleague Obama (and many others) don't think in terms of America but of some higher principles that transcend a nation - a quest for a kind of higher-order transcendent society that would have been unrecognizable 50 years ago as "American" except by the more knowing socialists. Sort of like Norman Lear's vision of the "American Way", where the nativity is banned from Christmas, where members of all racial and ethnic groups are proportionately represented in all walks of life, where pornography and family-fare are co-equal, where abortions are freely available, where school discipline is tightly constrained, where men marry men and women marry women, firearms are banned, and loitering is a natural right of man. Perhaps you do prefer such a society, but it is in no way, shape or form the "American Way."