No compromise with torture

Most of the commentary and panty-twisting over Obama’s nominations have struck me as exaggerated and alarmist, but one exception is the arena of national security/ intelligence and very specifically anything to do with suspension of civil liberties and of course the torture of defenseless prisoners. I personally could accept a lot of unseemly compromise and deal-making, even on the best way to wind down the horrible war in Iraq. But not on this.

People better versed than I in the ways of Washington are saying that the powerful are gearing up all sorts of strategies to maintain their new police-state powers and to keep the guilty in key positions throughout the security apparatus. And not incidentally to protect each other from prosecution.

Let’s hope that yesterday’s comments from Democrat Sylvestre Reyes, the goofball head of the House Intelligence Committee, are the result of his general cluelessness rather than a sign of what’s to come. His call to keep the top architects of current policy in place at the NSA and the CIA are a slap in the face to those of us who voted for exactly the opposite, but then again he probably wants a fat job in some consulting firm later and is just going about it more cleverly than the Illinois governor by doing the big boys’ bidding now in hopes of collecting later.

Or maybe I’m being unfair, and Reyes isn’t corrupt, just dumb as a stump. That’s possible since he’s quoted as not knowing whether al-Qaeda is Sunni or Shi’ite. You don’t need access to top-secret briefings to figure that out, but you do have to be at least eight years old and paying attention.

None of these top Democrats had the cojones to stand up to Bush when he was riding high, but you’d expect them to bring a pair out of mothballs now that Bush is a laughingstock and their party just won a convincing triumph. Maybe our man Barack recalls the licking he took from inside the Obama campaign itself when he buckled on the telecom-immunity bill, which gave Verizon and AT&T a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card despite their illegal spying on us. If not, I’ll be the first to join in the next one.