Clinton Endorsed “Working Over” Terrorists

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Bill Clinton gave an interview a few months ago where he endorses forms of “working over” a terrorist to gain information by putting through a defined narrow piece of legislation: (Hot Air has the audio)

“Look, if the president needed an option, there’s all sorts of things they can do.Let’s take the best case, OK.You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal.

“We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture.They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Alan Dershowitz complains that when he stated pretty much the very same thing he was raked over the coals:

Several years ago, I provoked a storm of controversy by advocating “torture warrants” as a way of creating accountability for the use of torture in terrorism cases. I argued that if we were ever to encounter a “ticking bomb” situation in which the authorities believed that an impending terror attack could be prevented only by torturing a captured terrorist into revealing the location of the bomb, the authorities would, in fact, employ such a tactic.

Although I personally oppose the use of torture, I recognize the reality that some forms of torture have been, are being, and will continue to be used by democracies in extreme situations, regardless of what we say or what the law provides. In an effort to limit the use of torture to genuinely extreme “ticking bomb” situations, rather than allowing it to become as routine as it obviously became at Abu Ghraib, I proposed that the president or a federal judge would have to take personal responsibility for ordering its use in extraordinary situations.

For suggesting this approach to the terrible choice of evils between torture and terrorism, I was condemned as a moral monster, labeled an advocate of torture, and called a Torquemada.

But he notes that Clinton’s admissions went by with nary a peep from the left, or anyone at all actually. Ed Morrissey tells Alan what pretty much all of us on the right have been saying for years, welcome to the club:

After all, this is the same President and political party that pushed for excessively burdensome sexual harassment legislation that allowed for all sorts of unreasonable discovery, taking political advantage from the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas smear campaign, and then howled loudly and successfully when Paula Jones applied it to him. This is the same President who has convinced a majority of Americans that his impeachment for perjury, a crime against the Constitution, represented a historical defense of it.

In the end the Democrats are really serious about one little thing….power. They want it back and damn the consequences of their actions in getting it back.

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You’re surprised by this Curt?

After all, Clinton used warrantless wiretaps and the same folks who say Bush is the new Hitler nodded in agreement. And when Clinton spied on American citizens including: Roman Catholic Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Feminists for Life, the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Bishops’ Conference of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Anchoress » Veep Bill Clinton who says “torture might be okay…”

[…] Well…if nothing else, suddenly torture would finally be allowed to be defined properly. Under President Bush, we’ve been told by our moral betters that wrapping a prisoner in an Israeli flag is torture. But with the Clintonian Double Standard in play that definition will necessarily change. […]