Mark down January 22, 2009 as the day that the U.S. made terrorism legal. Think this a glib statement? The path to hell is often paved with the best of intentions. In their holier-than-Bush high mindedness the Obama Democrats have officially bestowed Geneva Convention protections to the unlawful combatants housed at Guantanamo Bay without ever stopping to think about the purpose and origins of the Geneva Conventions.

The point of the Geneva Conventions was never to “protect our soldiers,” but to give soldiers of signatory countries an incentive to fight with a sense of morality, or under the proverbial “rules of war.”

To do this, the Geneva Conventions made a distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants (albeit without specifically using those terms). Specifically, it dictated that to be considered a lawful combatant, and thus protected, that combatant had to at minimum,

“fulfil the following conditions: (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.” (Convention III, Article IV, 1949)

In other words, to be protected by Geneva the combatants had to obey the rules of war.

These tactics are precisely the opposite of what terrorism seeks to achieve. Terrorism thrives by ignoring and directly opposing the rules of war. Their commanders are not responsible for their subordinates, rather they operate in cells; they wear no fixed insignia or uniform, but instead are disguised as civilians; they do not carry arms openly; and they certainly do not conduct themselves in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Thus by protecting unlawful combatants with Geneva, the Obama administration has removed the incentive for lawful combatants to fight under any rules of war.

But Obama is not alone in this transgression. Had the signatory countries stood united in their purposeful application of treatment differentiated by lawful versus unlawful combat it might one day have been a Hamas that slowly curbed towards lawful tactics, instead of using human shields or other such criminal methods.

With the incentive removed, might one day the lawful combatants of Geneva’s signatory nations begin to in turn adopt the tactics of Hamas, et. al.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

…The Army Field Manual is already the operating guide for military interrogations. The crux of the “torture” debate has been that the Bush Administration permitted more coercive techniques in rare cases — fewer than 100 detainees, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden. Yesterday Mr. Obama revoked the 2007 Presidential carve-out that protected this CIA flexibility.

The techniques that had been permissible until yesterday remain classified but were widely believed to include such things as stress positions, exposure to cold and sleep deprivation. Senior officials have said they stopped waterboarding in 2003 — which in any case was only used against three senior al Qaeda operatives and succeeded in breaking these men to divulge information that foiled terror plots.

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting “when employed by departments or agencies outside the military.” The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer “additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies.”

In other words, Mr. Obama’s Inaugural line that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” was itself misrepresenting the choices his predecessor was forced to make. At least President Bush was candid about the practical realities of preventing mass casualties in the U.S.

The “special task force” may well grant the CIA more legal freedom to squeeze information out of terrorists when it could keep the country safe. An anecdote former Clinton counterterror czar Richard Clarke recounts in his memoir “Against All Enemies” is instructive. In 1993, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler was horrified by Mr. Clarke’s proposal for “extraordinary rendition,” where our spooks turn over prisoners to foreign countries like Egypt so they can do the interrogating.

While Mr. Clinton was still chewing his fingernails and seemed to side with Mr. Cutler, Al Gore arrived late to the meeting. “Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides,” Mr. Clarke writes. “Gore laughed and said, ‘That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.’”

The wider danger Mr. Obama is inviting by claiming to draw a line while drawing no line at all is the message it sends to Langley. CIA interrogators are already buying legal insurance in the expectation that a Senator like Carl Levin or some prosecutor-on-the-make rings them up for war crimes. The executive order is bound to produce a more risk-averse CIA culture and over time less intelligence-gathering. No one may be willing to be Jack Bauer when Mr. Obama really needs him. This will have consequences for U.S. safety, and for the Obama Administration if there is another 9/11.

Despite the bait-and-switch Washington Post headline of “Intelligence Pick Calls Torture Immoral, Ineffective,” it is interesting that Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair — Obama’s pick for National Intelligence Director — declined before Congress to publicly label waterboarding as “torture.”

Thus, so far, an intelligence community headed by Blair (under Obama) has taken the exact same path that the intelligence community (under Bush) took since 2003, the last time waterboarding was used (which was approved, by the way, in part by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.)

Obama has ordered that all future interrogations, “rely on the same 16 interrogation techniques approved for military interrogators in a guidebook known as the Army Field Manual” (according to the WaPost). Ha. Good luck with that.

It’s been reported that the capture of harsh interrogations of just a handful of al Qaeda superiors, including Abu Zubaydah, and 9-11 masterminds Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh (Zubaydah and KSM were the two of just three waterboarded), provided the vast majority of the intelligence needed to stop scores of attacks both in the U.S. and abroad.

One wonders how many lives would have been lost had these captives just been asked “name, rank and serial number,” as the applied by the Army Field Manual. Would there have been another 9-11? Perhaps with Obama’s new rules we may regrettably learn one day.

Then again, despite the holier-than-Bush stance by Obama, it seems that when push comes to shove, Obama may, just like Bush, bend the rules a little:

The administration left open the possibility that the CIA could be given more leeway in the future, not on what the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but on other interrogation-related guidelines. A “separate protocol” would take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans, the senior administration official said. But he added that the same ban on coercive measures would apply.

What a fine line they try to walk. It would seem it’s far easier to ban harsh interrogation as a candidate than as a president.

How dare you ask the president a question? He came down here to be adored and idolized, not asked questions of!

Here’s a WaPost article that does its best to imitate the The Onion. It may as well have been titled, “Government agency report finds need for more government.”

In 2001, during the confirmation of John Ashcroft to be attorney general, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee forced a one-week delay in the committee’s vote on Ashcroft, saying there had not been enough time to answer all the questions about the nomination.  On January 24, 2001, the Washington Post reported the story under the following headline:

Vote On Ashcroft Is Delayed A Week; Democrats Cite Need for More Review

Yesterday, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee did precisely the same thing for the nomination of Eric Holder to be attorney general.  Today, the Washington Post is reporting the story under the following headline:

Republicans Obstruct Holder’s Path to Justice Department

– Byron York.

Mark Steyn:

“At some point in the next four years, we will reach a situation where the majority of Americans pay no federal income tax but are able to vote themselves more goodies from those who do. The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. We now have a government offering trillion-dollar rewards for bad behavior to the financial system, to the housing market, to the auto unions, and to individual voters.”

Here are some thoughts on the proposed and likely confirmation for Secretary of Treasury nominee Tim Geithner.

1) If a proposed secretary of the treasury cannot figure out our tax code, how is it that the rest of us should be expected to?

2) Conversely, if it’s not a tax complexity problem, how is it that Geithner, whom we’re told over and over is just brilliant, could screw up his tax returns?

3) Geithner didn’t make “goofs” on his tax returns. Nor did he make “mistakes,” “oversights,” or any other myriad of downplaying terminology. He didn’t pay his taxes for several years. Period.

4) Worse. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) refunds its employees (who are taxed as self-employed) for their taxes. This means that Geithner double dipped — he accepted the IMF stipend to pay the taxes, but didn’t ever pay the taxes! That’s not a mistake. It’s criminal.

5) [Wall Street Journal, Geithner Apologizes Over Taxes, Jan. 21, 2009] “After the Internal Revenue Service audited him in 2006 and discovered the payroll-tax errors, Mr. Geithner corrected them for 2003 and 2004. Only after Mr. Obama picked him last fall to be Treasury secretary did Mr. Geithner pay the Social Security and Medicare tax he owed for 2001 and 2002.” Again, this is Obama’s proposed treasury secretary. This is “Change”? No, it’s more “do as we say, not as we do” from the federal government.

6) The media gave Joe the Plumber a million times more grief for his tax woes. Similarly, could you ever imagine the press giving a tax-cheating Republican nominee such a pass?

7) If you or I made such mistakes, and owed the government $42,000 in back taxes, would we be treated with such kid gloves? Yet tens of thousands of self employed go through this maddening tax code every year with no sympathy from their government.

8 ) The defense that Geithner is not that liberal, and that Republicans could do worse in an Obama treasury secretary, as echoed by some Republicans, may be the case but shouldn’t trump principles. That Republicans seem to have no issue with this simple concept explains why they keep losing elections.

9) The defense, recently repeated by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, that Geithner is the ONLY person who can get us out of our financial woes is ridiculous and insulting to our intelligence. By the way, Geithner has been one of Bush’s chief economic advisors and bailout advocates for the past year. If the bailout didn’t work over the last year, why will it work under Obama? (Also, see #2 above. So much for the financial genius.)

All in all a good speech, not a great one, and not because of his subtle shots at conservatives, but because the speech, when compared text to text against Lincoln, Washington, et. al., just falls short. (By the way, those are very difficult marks to hit).

Having said that, here’s what I thought was an important excerpt:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.

It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Jonathan Adler:

President Obama’s remark that his administration would “restore science to its rightful place” was both a shot at the Bush Administration, as well as a misleading statement. First, this comment wrongly suggested that science can somehow resolve difficult policy questions.  Insofar as policy differences are based upon normative concerns, science may inform our decisions, but it cannot resolve policy disputes.  Nor, contrary to Obama’s explict suggestion, will it magically address health care costs (as Scott Gotlieb explained in the WSJ today).  President Obama’s comment also reinforced the meme that Republicans politicize science, while Democrats respect science.  Yet, as I explained here, Obama’s selection for his top science advisor, John Holdren, is hardly someone to end politicization of science.