The Need For Clarity When You Don't Need Clarity

It's insane to see the media just parrot the White House line that they simply need nothing more than "clarity' on the Geneva Conventions. They've been in place for around 60 years, and nobody else has needed such clarity, including all of the American Presidencies before him. This is not a simple question of clarity; it's a radical departure which rejects this international treaty and seeks to find loopholes in it. I can see an internal White House debate where someone says "Well, it says we can't do waterboarding, but what about Gatorade-boarding?"

Both the Feinstein-Specter bill on wiretapping, and the Warner-led Armed Services Committee legislation on military commissions are compromise bills with bipartisan support that strike the balance between defending national security and preserving liberty, without which there is no point in defending national security.

And really, if Bush's most important job is to protect the homeland, you'd think he'd give a rat's ass about the man who murdered 3,000 American citizens in cold blood.

HOST: Alright Fred, you and a few other journalists were in the Oval Office with the President, right? And he says catching Osama bin Laden is not job number one?

BARNES: Well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of American resources. His vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill Americans before they occur. That’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from England, and that’s the top priority. He says, you know, getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to that.

If Bin Laden is Hitler, you'd think his capture would actually, you know, be a priority.

Somehow, we have an Administration that is trying to scare people about terrorism, scare people into thinking "they're coming again," and yet can't be bothered to actually find its leader.

I'm listening to the President's speech right now, and he simply cannot argue the specifics of his preferred legislation, which includes secret hearings, hidden evidence, torture and coercion codified into law, instead pretending that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention is so foggy. "It's so vague, can't perform outrages upon human dignity, what does that mean?"

You know, anyone that can't figure that out is frankly a contemptuous individual.