In a speech last Wednesday, President Bush for the first time admitted what had been widely reported for some time: that the U.S. operated a secret C.I.A. prison system where high-level terrorist suspects were detained, interrogated, and, though the president denies it, possibly tortured.
For the benefit of those who don't listen to the BBC at twelve in the morning, I would like to bring to your attention a short interview I heard later the same day. The World Today wanted a conservative Bush supporter's reaction to the President's admission, so they turned to Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R - CA).
Not surprisingly, Rohrabacher defended the illegal detentions. At the end of the interview, however, he went a bit further:
Reporter: But isn't what you're trying to defend in all this, and what the attackers on 9-11 were trying to attack, is being in principle with law, in sticking to civilized values, however bad the crime you may be trying to pursue?
Dana Rohrabacher: I think that's a bunch of liberal nonsense. The fact is that the American people and the British people have been spared the slaughter of thousands of their own citizens because we have dealt with those terrorists who brought down the buildings in the United States on 9-11 and were trying to slaughter tens of thousands of our people. We have brought them to prisons that were not disclosed to the public so that their other terrorist allies could not then terrorize the jailers, and that makes all the sense in the world to me, and we can nitpick it all we want, but if it has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people to, for example, execute someone who is engaged in this type of slaughter of non-combatants well then that execution's been justified.
Hello.
Given the context of the rest of the inteview (listen here), the most straightforward conclusion is that Rohrabacher supports, in some circumstances at least, not only the secret imprisonment of terrorist suspects, but also their secret execution. His use of the present perfect tense is a little disturbing, too. Does he know something we don't?
Posted by cradle at September 11, 2006 6:50 PM