Roman Around

In February, 2008, three months after the House of Representatives passed it, the Senate voted 51-45 to confine the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques enumerated in the US Army Field Manual. The bill – authorizing the US intelligence budget for the year 2008 – contained a provision prohibiting the CIA from using waterboarding on terrorist suspects. At the time, New York Senator Charles Schumer had this to say:

“If it’s good enough for General Petraeus and FBI Director Robert Mueller, it’s good enough for all of America. If the president vetoes this, he will be voting in favor of waterboarding.“

Remember that?

Remember the outrage from Chuck and his leftnick bretheren directed not only toward President Bush but anyone who had the unmitigated, barbaric, uncivilized nerve to defend the use of waterboarding when necessary?

To this day, the American leftocracy is still singing the same tune – no waterboarding.

The bad guys will respect us more if we stop the practice.

I am not among those who believe that waterboarding is torture, but as long as I’m quoting the senior Senator from New York, here’s what he had to say about actual torture just four years earlier:

“And I’d like to try and interject a note of balance here … We ought to be reasonable about this. I think there are probably very few people in this room, or in America, who would say that torture should never, ever be used – particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. Take the hypothetical – if we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city, and we believed that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most Senators – maybe all – would say, “Do what you have to do.” So it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used, but when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.”

Here’s the actual audio:

The motif of 2004 – he was for it before he was against it.
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