I know it’s silly to get upset over a fool with a TV show, but I can’t help it with the most recent comment byJon Stewart. According to Stewart, former President Harry Truman was a “war criminal” because he dropped atomic bombs on Japan, rather than dropping the first one “15 miles off shore” (5:50 into the clip) — a warning shot, in other words.

What’s truly ignorant about this statement is that Japan was offered multiple opportunities to surrender, including AFTER we dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, and the Japanese still did not surrender! We think al Qaeda is tough? As a rule, the Japanese fought to the last man, literally. What good would dropping one in the sea have done if they didn’t surrender after we dropped the first one on Hiroshima?

Remember Nagasaki? Apparently Jon Stewart doesn’t. He also apparently has no idea or concern that the last two battles of World War Two, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, accounted for more than 7 percent of all U.S. casualties in the entire war. How was Truman to explain to more widows that he had a weapon that might have ended the war but couldn’t use it for fear of what future ignoramuses with TV shows might say of him?

Stewart, quickly realizing that he’s in an untenable argument, waxes poetically how “all war” is “temporary insanity” to the applause of his mindless and doting audience. No, temporary insanity is my boot up Mr. Stewart’s arse for making light with psycobabble of the extremely difficult but justifiable and sober and somber decision that Truman made in context and contrast to the horrifying number of lives, both Japanese and Allied, that would have been lost had we invaded Japan (Operations Downfall/Olympic).

Here’s a stat for Mr. Stewart, PhDumb in History: The conventional bombing of Japanese cities killed more people than the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Here’s former CIA Director Porter Goss commenting on all the outlandish liars in Congress:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

– The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

– We understood what the CIA was doing.

– We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

– We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

– On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

A very true point by William McGurn: Now that Democrats have their coveted 60-vote majority in the Senate, why haven’t they legislatively banned and thus made illegal the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding?

Why indeed.

Over the past few years, the Democrats have moved to ban waterboarding only when it was clear that such a bill would not pass — or would be vetoed by George W. Bush. In September 2006, Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced an amendment to the Military Commissions Act that would have effectively defined waterboarding as a war crime, and it was defeated largely along partisan lines. In February 2008, when Democrats were in control of Congress, they made a big fuss about sending a bill that would have limited interrogation to techniques found in the Army field manual. They did so knowing President Bush would veto it, and that he had the votes to sustain that veto.

Today the Democrats have an even larger majority — plus a president who would sign such legislation. So why the call for a truth commission instead? The answer is a nasty one: If Congress made waterboarding illegal now, they would be making clear that it was not illegal before.

Andrew McCarthy is the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind sheik) behind bars for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Mr. McCarthy explained it this way to me: “When Senate Democrats didn’t have the votes, they voted to make waterboarding illegal. Now they have the votes, but there’s no effort to ban waterboarding. And the reason is that they are more interested in setting off a partisan witch hunt than passing a principled ban on something they say is torture.”

Here’s the latest interview between Dennis Miller and former Guantanamo Bay JAG officer Kyndra Rotunda-Miller. Listen to the whole thing.

Ho, hum, more misleading slant from the New York Times. Nothing new here:

[Fox News] The New York Times reported last week that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in one month by CIA interrogators. The “183 times” was widely circulated by news outlets throughout the world.

It was shocking. And it was highly misleading. The number is a vast inflation, according to information from a U.S. official and the testimony of the terrorists themselves.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed’s face — not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect.  According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of “five sessions of ill-treatment.”

“The water was poured 183 times — there were 183 pours,” the official explained, adding that “each pour was a matter of seconds.”

183 pours? What a bargain for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed! If a pour is equal to each of his 3,000 9-11 victims it’s only 1/16th the number he should have received!

How incredibly weak we look before our enemies right now. They must be getting a good laugh at our hand wringing and self-flagellation. And, they are no doubt updating their capture-training methods to reflect exactly how far we are willing to go (or, rather, how far we aren’t).

Here’s William McSwain, former U.S. Marines scout/sniper platoon commander and executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). McSwain echos the comments of the former CIA director and former attorney general: the goal isn’t confession or evidence, but gathering intelligence to save lives.

The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.

I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.

While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane — in short, too much like “torture” — to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who’s next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?

Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib “trump card”: The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly “prove” the Bush administration’s supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.

As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations — whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter — also stated that “no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities.”

Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush’s antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.

Mr. Bush’s advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?

As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.

The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool’s errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren’t fools. Or at least I don’t think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don’t prove me wrong.

Let’s get at the truth too about the word “torture,” which to different people, means different things. Some think “torture” means standing on the 98th floor of a burning skyscraper and realizing you have a choice between jumping and being incinerated. Some think torture is being crushed when a building implodes around you. Some think torture is not thinking you might drown for several minutes, but looking at burning buildings on television and knowing that people you love are inside them. They remember that being crushed, incinerated, or killed in a jump from the 98th story happened to almost 3,000 blameless Americans (as well as a number of foreigners), and that 125 Pentagon employees were killed at their desks, while many survivors suffered terrible burns. They think the choice between stopping this from happening again by slapping around or scaring the hell out of a cluster of brigands, or leaving the brigands alone and letting it happen again, is a no-brainer.

– Noemie Emery.

Rest assured that if the CIA hadn’t taken these steps and the U.S. had been hit again, the same people denouncing these memos now would have been demanding another 9/11 Commission to deplore their inaction.

– Wall Street Journal.

I don’t agree with the final conclusion, but the point is this: Even an Obama-supporting, center-left Washington Post writer, David Ignatius (Body of Lies), thinks that Obama has done our intelligence services damage with his decision to release the memos. It’s Amateur Hour at the White House. Again.

Obama seems to think he can have it both ways — authorizing an unprecedented disclosure of CIA operational methods and at the same time galvanizing a clandestine service whose best days, he told them Monday, are “yet to come.” Life doesn’t work that way — even for charismatic politicians. Disclosure of the torture memos may have been necessary, as part of an overdue campaign to change America’s image in the world. But nobody should pretend that the disclosures weren’t costly to CIA morale and effectiveness.

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.

For a taste of what’s ahead, recall the chilling effects of past CIA scandals. In 1995, then-Director John Deutch ordered a “scrub” of the agency’s assets after revelations of past links to Guatemalan death squads. Officers were told they shouldn’t jettison sources who had provided truly valuable intelligence. But the practical message, recalls one former division chief, was: “Don’t deal with assets who could pose political risks.” A similar signal is being sent now, he warns.

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called “risk of capture” interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and “pocket litter” were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I’m told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn’t even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

Agency officials also worry about the effect on foreign intelligence services that share secrets with the United States in a process politely known as “liaison.” A former official who remains in close touch with key Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan warns: “There is a growing concern that the risk is too high to do the things with America they’ve done in the past.”

If Obama means what he says about protecting the CIA workforce and its operational edge, he must give up the idea that he can please everyone on this issue. He should recommend limits on any congressional inquiry and resist demands for a special prosecutor. Instead, he should push the White House’s preferred alternative — a commission that can review secret evidence behind closed doors, then report to the nation.

America will be better off, in the long run, for Obama’s decision to expose the past practice of torture and ban its future use. But meanwhile, the country is fighting a war, and it needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn’t blind its shadow warriors.

More egg for your face, Mr. President? The attempt by the Obama administration to play politics with intelligence gathering and national security this week detonated in their collective face after the president’s own National Intelligence Director, Admiral Dennis Blair, admitted that the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques provided critical information in the War on Terror. Ahem, excuse  me, I meant “in Overseas Contingency Operations.” George Orwell move over.

[NY Times] “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

The Obama camp is now backspinning on that redacted memo, claiming it came at too high a cost to our public image. Yeah? Tell that to the families of 3,000 murdered 9-11 victims. But it is the Obama camp that now looks confused.

Besides, if they really felt that way they wouldn’t have attempted to hide Blair’s admission and sympathy with his predecessors, comments which weren’t included in their very selective release of just four memos. As former Vice-president Dick Cheney mentioned, if they really have nothing to hide, why not release the remainder of the memos?

As for the newest exposed methods themselves: “Walling” with a rubber wall? Placing a caterpillar on a bugphobic terrorist? Boxed “Confinement was limited to two hours.” And even waterboarding of the mastermind of 9-11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was in short bursts not exceeding 40 seconds.

Seriously? If this is “torture” we really have watered down the word beyond meaning. Anything remotely uncomfortable or psychologically tricky is now torture apparently. Our enemy, meanwhile, publishes Internet videos of scimitar sword beheadings, whether military capture or Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl. But we’re going to wring our hands over caterpillars. It’s actually kind of embarassing how impotant and humane our “inhumaness.”

Explains former Bush Justice Department lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey:

All of these interrogation methods have been adapted from the U.S. military’s own Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (or SERE) training program, and have been used for years on thousands of American service members with the full knowledge of Congress. This has created a large body of information about the effect of these techniques, on which the CIA was able to draw in assessing the likely impact on the detainees and ensuring that no severe pain or long term psychological impact would result.

The actual intelligence benefits of the CIA program are also detailed in these memos. The CIA believed, evidently with good reason, that the enhanced interrogation program had indeed produced actionable intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans. First among the resulting successes was the prevention of a “second wave” of al Qaeda attacks, to be carried out by an “east Asian” affiliate, which would have involved the crashing of another airplane into a building in Los Angeles.

The interrogation techniques described in these memos are indisputably harsh, but they fall well short of “torture.” They were developed and deployed at a time of supreme peril [2002], as a means of preventing future attacks on innocent civilians both in the U.S. and abroad.

“Not exactly Torquemada,” adds Rich Lowry.