ACLU: Hobble War Effort with Partisan Politics

Posted on April 25, 2008

The American Civil Rights Union has a great article on the ACLU. Here is a sample.

The ACLU has called on Congress to “demand the appointment of an Independent Counsel” to investigate the “approval of the use of torture” by the Bush Administration. The claimed facts are unsourced. And compared to the ACLU’s silence during Democrat Administrations, this attack is nothing more than partisan politics masquerading as protection of the Constitution.

The facts for this article should be taken with a grain of salt, since they come from the ACLU’s own website. The legal conclusions are, of course, developed for this website, for the American Civil Rights Union.

The ACLU issued a press release on 12 April, calling for “the appointment of an Independent Counsel to investigate the Administration’s approval of torture and abuse.” The ACLU claims that “recent reports indicate that high-level advisers including Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet were part of the National Security Council’s ‘Principals Committee’ that met regularly and approved the CIA’s use of ‘combined’ ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques….”

Note the lack of attribution. What reports? From what sources? With what level of prior reliability, or unreliability?

Then, there is the content of the claim. “Combined” interrogation techniques could consist of nothing more than keeping the lights on AND playing Barry Manilow records at the same time. (That would be the Noriega method.) The ACLU continues to attack water-boarding as forbidden torture, without noting that the members of America’s Special Forces are themselves water-boarded during their training, to help them sustain themselves should they be captured by the enemy. The ACLU has never said a word against the training of the Special Forces. Perhaps they know better than to pick a fight with the best and best-trained of the American military.

The ACLU goes directly from unsourced charges to its own, firm belief that the US has both approved and used “torture.” It quotes Anthony D. Romero, its Executive Director. as saying, “We have always known that the CIA’s use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the U.S. government….”

Read it all, and support the ACRU.

» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, News, Politics As Usual, Stupidity, Treason, War On Terror

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One Response to “ACLU: Hobble War Effort with Partisan Politics”

Jeff Molby on April 25th, 2008 11:00 pm

The ACLU continues to attack water-boarding as forbidden torture, without noting that the members of America’s Special Forces are themselves water-boarded during their training, to help them sustain themselves should they be captured by the enemy.

We also put hundreds of thousands of recruits in a gas chamber every year and make them take off their masks. There’s just a wee contextual difference when the person giving the order friend instead of foe.