Instant and genuine outrage from callers and e-mailers greeted President Obama's about-face on the possibility of prosecuting former Bush Adminstration officials.  Not only do such wild swings give everyone dealing with the president or the U.S. pause over his reliability, the idea of such an unprecedented attempt to criminalize prior policy positions immediately summons up the memory of Tailgunner Joe, though this time the hunted are conservatives and the pitchforks are in the hands of Democrats.  The absurdity of a prosecution is laid out by an attorney with experience in the field here at Patterico's second site, but of course it isn't about convicting anyone, but about ruining lives and reputations.

The transcript of my interview with former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is below.  Though Gerson doubts he'll be caught up in any investigation or commission proceedings, any senior Bush Adminstration official has got to realize immediately that the "senior counsel" to any "blue ribbon" commission could easily become Javert, in fact might be selected for his Javert-like qualities.  The time to "lawyer-up" is now, and a call to Andy McCarthy for advice would be the first one I'd make if I had been within two arms-lengths of the prosecution of the war and the collection of intelligence.  Further, every single professional up-and-down the line of the war effort has to begin wondering right now when the subpoena arrives.

The Gerson conversation:

 HH: Joined now by Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, long time aide to former President Bush, speechwriter and consigliere in many respects. Michael Gerson, welcome back to the program, good to talk to you.

MG: Great to be with you again.

HH: I’d like to play for you a part of President Obama’s comments in the Oval Office today.

MG: Right.

PBO: With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that.

HH:  Michael Gerson, these are your friends they’re talking about, obviously. You might even be on of them. I guess you’re not a lawyer, but…

MG: No, I don’t think I am in this case. But I still, you know, but they are some of my friends.

HH: What do you…I think this is an enormous error. I think this is the launching of a witch hunt. What do you think?

MG: I think it’s a terrible error for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I think that the release of these memos, and now the talk of these prosecutions, is creating an atmosphere in which people in our intelligence services, people in our government, are going to be very timid about pursuing absolutely essential elements in the war on terror. This is creating an atmosphere that’s more like the pre-9/11 atmosphere when people were complacent and afraid to confront these problems. And I’m afraid that we’ve returned to that attitude, that we’re going to return to some of those outcomes eventually. And so I think it’s a serious challenge. Now let me make one more point here, which is if there are going to be investigations of people who knew about these things, and who approved of them, then that’s going to have to include Nancy Pelosi and Senator Rockefeller, who were both briefed, along with other members of the Intelligence community in Congress about thirty times on all of these techniques beginning in 2002. The fact of the matter is that this represents what was happening in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. the intelligence community had no idea if there were going to be further attacks, how large the al Qaeda network was in the United States. And they were pursuing by their best lights, according to their best legal interpretation, matters that they thought were essential to American security. You can’t criminalize that.

HH: Michael Gerson, I know there’s also talk of a bipartisan commission like the 9/11 Commission, which of course will be more witch hunt theater. But at that point, when do you start to lawyer up? Because when this stuff gets going, you know, it doesn’t stop anywhere. It goes off on a head hunt for anyone. And obviously, you had to have discussed, you wrote the speeches, about the need for surveillance, and the need to be proactive, and the need to go after al Qaeda. When do you lawyer up, Michael Gerson?

MG: Well, I haven’t been presented with that, and I hope not to. I mean, it’s one of the real concerns here. And this is true of people that were in the Clinton administration, it’s true of people in the Bush administration. I think it’s a real mistake to try to criminalize policy disagreements. You know, we can disagree with some of the things that the Clinton people did. You know, people disagree with things that people in the Bush administration did. But people were involved, for example, at the Justice Department, were making their best legal judgments. It’s very hard under those circumstances to try to impose a mindset, a kind of witch hunt mindset to people that thought they were doing their duty.

HH: Did you ever talk about waterboarding with anyone in the White House?

MG: No, those were, in fact, those techniques and approaches that were revealed in the memo were known by a very small group of people, on a kind of need to know basis. I didn’t know about them.

HH: Do you expect…how wide of a circle would that have been debated that among? You knew the White House pretty well, even if you’re not in the meetings on al Qaeda, how many people are we talking about? 20?

MG: I honestly don’t know the answer to that. Obviously, it would be the senior people who were involved in this, the lawyers at Justice, the people at the CIA who were involved in these efforts in the intelligence community, and the people at the White House that were involved as well.

HH: You know, I’m just shocked by this. I really am. This is a war that we’re in, Michael Gerson. You lived it every single day for your service to the President, and this is so cavalier and so deeply damaging the national security, I’m actually kind of stunned.

MG: Well, it is stunning certainly in one way, which is every member of the Obama administration could imagine circumstances where they might be forced to use such methods, okay? In fact, Leon Panetta, entering his own hearing, seemed to indicate that that was the case. If you face a circumstance with a nuclear or biological attack on an American city, you know, you may well employ sleep depravation to try to get information.

HH: Oh, I think waterboarding would make a comeback in a moment if, for example, the scenario outlined in Rich Lowry’s new book, Banquo’s Ghosts comes to pass. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to read that yet, Michael Gerson, but it’s chillingly realistic, and I’ll leave it at that. I look forward to talking to you again soon, Michael Gerson of the Washington Post.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a story on President Obama's new director of intelligence admitting that the interrogation techniques that are allegedly the basis for prosecuting lawyers for writing memos yielded valuable information.  The absurd idea of prosecuting these public servants for non-crimes just got even more absurd.

The opening graphs:

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

The president's decision to open the door to prosecuting former Bush Administration officials for policies developed and used in the war on terror is not just the threat of the worst sort of unconstitutional ex post facto prosecution, it also greatly endangers the United States by obliging current front-line prosecutors, intelligence operatives and even uniformed members of the military that if it becomes politically useful to classify their conduct as "potentially criminal" this Administration will do so.  The impact of that posture will be devastating to the security of the United States.

There is no serious prosecutor who would bring a charge against any of these Bush Adminstration officials.  No one not from the far left side of the political spectrum can even frame the indictment or explain how the tactics less coercive than water-boarding could be considered criminal when Congress, offered the opportunity to declare water boarding a crime, refused to do so.  When the left turns up a former United States Attorney or even senior prosecutor not named Ramsey Clark willing to lay out his theory of prosecution, that will be an argument worth responding to. This is a  witch hunt, a political prosecution, one that should be a central issue in the campaigns of 2010.

I'll discuss these topics with Andrew McCarthy, Frank Gaffney, Michael Gerson, and Mitt Romney on today's show.  Fair minded Americans of both parties and none should be denouncing this politicization of the war on terror, if only to assure that we remain vigilant and on the offensive against our many deadly enemies.

Read Andrew McCarthy on the release of the OLC memos.  Unlike every other commentator, McCarthy has actually prosecuted terrorists and knows the nature of the enemy and how it studies our stories and adapts its tactics. 

Hank Adler and I spent an hour discussing our new book yesterday.  The transcript is here.   Order the book here.



E-mail from Fair tax enthusiasts urge that I or Adler debate Neal Boortz on the subject. I'll be happy to, on a home-and-home basis, an hour or more on both shows.  Hank is willing to debate anyone on any program, though I am less available for the next three weeks due to the "First 100 Days of Obama Tour" with Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved and Dennis Prager. I'll post any debate plans here.

I will replay the conversation with Hank in hour three of today's program to make sure that as many people as possible get the vaccination.  Geraghty the Indispensable notes that Fair Tax enthusiasts tend to be in love with their grand vision of radical change.  Like Adler and me, Jim wants tax reform proposals that a party can build upon and ultimately pass into law, ala Reagan and Bush.

into an ocean of red ink.  The analysts predicted a loss of 4 cents a share.  The company reported losses of 52 cents a share:

The owner of The New York Times, The Boston Globe and 15 other daily newspapers said Tuesday that it lost $74.5 million, or 52 cents per share, in the opening three months of the year. That compared with a loss of $335,000 at the same time last year, which was break-even on a per-share basis.

The results in the most recent quarter included charges totaling 18 cents per share to cover the costs of jettisoning employees and other one-time accounting measures.

Even with those charges stripped out, the loss was much worse than analysts expected. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had predicted the New York-based company would lose 4 cents per share.

On Sunday Times' columnist Frank Rich blasted as "bigots" every defender of traditional marriage in the land, which given that even California voted to define marriage as between one woman and one man, puts the loudest voice of the paper on record as denouncing at least 60% and probably more of the country.  Not disagreeing with them, mind you, or attempting to persuade them.  Simply denouncing them as bigots. 

Its a sign of the paper's commitment to robust free speech from any point on  the political spectrum from liberal to radical that it will allow its frothing lefties to push the paper further and further into the role of hater of majoritarian, mainstream religious belief even as the paper scrambles to find advertisers and readers.

Mitt Romney broadsides the first 100 days of foreign policy embarrassments in a piece at NationalReview.com.  The opening:

At last week’s Summit of the Americas, President Obama acquiesced to a 50-minute attack on America as terroristic, expansionist, and interventionist from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. His response to Ortega’s denunciation of our effort to free Cuba from Castro’s dictatorship was that he shouldn’t be blamed “for things that happened when I was three months old.” Blamed? Hundreds of men, including Americans, bravely fought and died for Cuba’s freedom, heeding the call from newly elected president John F. Kennedy. But last week, even as American soldiers sacrificed blood in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend liberty, President Obama shrank from defending liberty here in the Americas.

Read the whole thing.  The miscues are piling up ala Carter, and the costs will follow unless the new president genuinely commits to defending the country and all that it has accomplished and stands for rather than apologizing for it like a tweedy professor in search of the approval of his international colleagues at a conference.

Ron Howard has a defense of his new movie up at Huffington Post.

I saw the trailer yesterday, and it looked like a thriller involving the Vatican --one without an anti-Catholic spin.  I'll have to wait to see the movie before I decide whether Catholics taking offense have a legitimate beef. 

My new D.C. Examiner column on Amir Taheri's book, The Persian Night, is up.

This is a new book that I have co-authored with Hank Adler, a professor at Chapman University's business school, a post he took up after retirement from a long and successful career as a partner with Deloitte.



Hank and I undertook this project because we had --independent of each other and for different reasons-- arrived at the same conclusion: That the "Fair Tax" proposal put forward by my radio tal show host Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder is a disastrous mirage that far too many Republicans have been drawn too, and for all the wrong reasons.  "The Fair Tax" is a hopelessly flawed fantasy, but one with a surface appeal of simplicity that attracts especially politicians in need of energetic volunteers and quick headlines.  But if the "Fair Tax" becomes the "Kemp-Roth" of the next few years, the GOP will be rightly punished at the polls as the details of the plan make it to the desks of serious political and economic analysts and from there to large numbers of voters who will examine the plan carefully and reject it almost immediately upon doing so.  In short, not only should Republicans and conservatives not endorse the Fair Tax, they ought to affirmatively disavow the plan and press instead for serious and thoroughgoing tax reform, including lower and flatter tax rates.

Fair Tax enthusiasts often call my show and demand that I "read the book," by which they mean one or both of Neal's books.  We have, and they do nothing to persuade serious readers of the plans merits, but much to camouflage the scheme's many deeply embedded flaws.  Henceforth I'll be able to respond "Yes, but have you read the book that exposes the Fair tax as a destructive fantasy it is?"

The latest missive from our favorite anonymous ad man:

Hugh:

I can still be reached at bearinthewoods84@gmail.com.  Of course, these days I have to wonder if that address is on some DHS list.  Oh well.  Whatever.

So, what's next?  That's the question every Republican and conservative should be both asking, and planning, this very minute.  If the momentum from the Tea Parties is to continue, it's up to individuals to continue it.  Waiting for the GOP to pick up the ball and run could not only cost momentum - it could cost the game. The Tea Parties indicate that although the GOP still hasn't figured out 21st Century communications, conservative Americans most certainly have.   The parties were a success on so many levels, but I want to point out three:
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The long-time columnist for the Asia Times comes clean on his identity and his journey.

I'll try and line up an interview (the first of perhaps many) this week.

The Tribe wins 22 to 4, with the Indians rolling up a "most ever in the history of baseball" 14 runs in the 2nd. 

Not able to juice bats or players, Big George may have juiced his new home.  One ESPN analyst last night described right field at new Yankee Stadium as a "wind tunnel."  Perhaps the bogus home run numbers of the past decade will be erased by inflated records run up in the House not Built By Ruth.

Mark Gearan has been nominated for Harvard University's Board of Overseers.

Mark is the president of Hobart and William Smith College in New York, and a long time Democratic activist and government official.  He served in a number of positions for President Clinton, including the Director of the Peace Corps. 

Did I mention he was my roommate for two years at Winthrop House?

Mark has never been right about an election as far as I can recall, and we disagree on most of the issues that divide Democrats and Republicans.  But he is an extraordinarily good man and an accomplished college administrator and public servant.  He has made HWS a campus that is friendly to speakers from all viewpoints and to serious education.  All universities could use such people on their boards, and conservatives could only hope to find such talented and good-humored liberals to serve alongside.

That quote is from Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput's talk to journalists at a Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life in which he discussed the obligations of journalism professionals to accurately report the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  The transcript of the forum is here.

Thanks to John Schroeder of Article VI Blog for pointing me to it, and to the debate over the U.N. resolution condemning the defamation of Islam.

Transcripts of today's conversations about the tea parties with Mark Steyn and Karl Rove and yesterday's conversation with Rich Lowry about his new thriller Banquo's Ghosts are already or soon will be posted here.