Posted by
Bill Crawford on Thursday, April 30, 2009 2:10:14 PM
I sat through Obama's press conference last night. It never ceases to amaze me that the networks allow him to make them dump an hour of primetime every month.
But I digress. My first revelation was that there was fresh news this week that the economy had contracted over 6% in the first quarter, and nobody asked him about this. Then again, Obama is a bit of a control freak, and I'm betting he had a good idea of what questions were coming from the people he chose.
Here is where my radar went wild: he was more than happy to clearly define behaviors approved by his predecessor as "torture", and went on into a five minute homily on how Churchill did not do that to his German detainees during the London blitz.
History buff to President: the British did not need any intelligence to know what was coming during the blitz. They knew the best warning they were going to get was a half hour from their primitive radars and the scout sightings from the French resistance. Then all they could do was to fire up their Spitfires and get them in the air. The detainees possessed no knowledge that could improve this picture, and both sides knew it.
On top of that, using the Brits as a harbinger of civility belies the experience of the IRA over the years. They learned even by 1940 to have a healthy respect for what became the SAS. The workings of the IRA- their terror style bombings and assasinations wre eminently qualified to be worthy of using harsh methodologies to try and get extra reaction time out of any information the prisoners might give up. And, being that they were as flagless and uniform free as Al Queda, they were beyond the Geneva protocols, too.
Obama professes to be a well read man, and I see no reason to doubt this. Culling through history and finding an example like this to use as rationale shows a willingness to cherry pick that is defined as ignorance, but of a willful nature.
It's a shame that nobody in the White House Press Corps calls him on this. Than again, under the terms he sets for these events, he wouldn't allow it.