Obama's remarks at this week's press conference cast grave doubts on his understanding of a president's most important responsibility.
Let’s play devil’s advocate and grant Obama all of his pretenses and premises: waterboarding is torture and the United States should never torture. Fine. But Obama still does not seem to understand the point of the American presidency. It is not to go abroad and apologize for our 150-year-old sins. It is not to ingratiate yourself to tyrants. It is not to run private industry. It is not to be on our television screens every waking hour. It is not to pose shirtless for magazines. It is not to dance with Ellen DeGeneres. It is not to serve one man’s narcissism. It is not to remind us to wash our hands before supper.
It is to protect the populace and pose as a vanguard for the citizenry, during the four or eight years that the office is temporarily in your hands. To do whatever it takes — even if it means Obama himself risks violating his own conscience and subjects himself to the possible whims of a foreign war crimes court. His solemn responsibility and obligation is to sacrifice his reputation, his career, his job, his political ambitions, his values, his preferences, his inclinations — even his life — to protect the American people. That is what we trusted him to do. That is what we elected him to do.
That is not what he is prepared to do.
One must wonder: how far would Mr. Obama go to save Sasha and Malia? What if, by some devastating travesty, President Obama’s daughters were to fall captive to al-Qaeda neck-slicers and an operative already in our custody knew the precise location of the two little girls? How far would Barack Obama — the man himself, as a terrified father — go to extract information from the detainee before him? Would he play loud music in his cell? Would he put him into an uncomfortable yoga position for a few hours? Would he pour water down his nose? And more importantly, wouldn’t he want to know the content of the memos that described which methods effectively worked against this particular detainee?
For if President Obama applies a different moral code to saving the lives of his loved ones than he does to protecting the country, he is undermining both the rationale for which the executive branch exists as well as his own intellectual honesty.
People of all political persuasions should be able to agree on three irrefutable geopolitical realities: 1) there are tens of thousands of people across this world who consider it a theological duty to destroy American cities; 2) these people are not going away soon and cannot be deterred, dissuaded, or bought off; 3) one way or another, these people will soon have the means to achieve their ends — probably within the decade, certainly within our lifetimes. This isn’t merely a possibility. It’s a probability. The only thing stopping this outcome is extracting information and quickly responding to actionable intelligence.
Let’s get serious, please. We cannot have a sincere discussion about what we should and should not be doing until we can weigh the pros and cons of a particular technique’s effectiveness. President Obama should allow the public to see what methods worked and then look into the camera and promise never to replicate those methods under any circumstances.
Only then will Obama’s pledge of being “judged as commander-in-chief on how safe [he is] keeping the American people” consist of political courage and backbone.
The entire article is here.
