I’m experiencing serious cognitive dissonance over Sen. Patrick Leahy’s absurd assertion that 9th Circuit Court judge Jay Bybee should resign for his role in helping write what has come to be known as the “Bybee Memo”. Leahy needs to read his history and get a sense of perspective.
Meanwhile, CNN brays in its typical leftist style that “a coalition of progressive groups” is calling for Bybee’s impeachment all because Bybee gave his honest legal opinion on the current state of U.S. interrogation law back in the chaotic days following September 11, 2001. “Progressive” ain’t the word. “Leftist troglodytes” maybe.
If we are to “repudiate” Jay Bybee and his memo, we’ll also have to repudiate FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and William Tecumseh Sherman for not only torturing but murdering millions of civilian men, women and children in their military pursuit of supposedly noble objectives. Think Nagasaki, Dresden, Hiroshima and Atlanta.
If Mr. Leahy and CNN will join me in this group repudiation, I’ll give them Jay Bybee. Otherwise, I call on both to cease the pontificating forthwith.
More at CNN and Washington Post.
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If you want to repudiate such historic figures, I recommend starting with Eisenhower.
Read “Other Losses” by James Bacque, with a forward by a former senior U. S. Army historian, Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Jr., Col. A. U. S. (Ret.) about the horrific abuses of Germans–including civilians, women and children–in prison camps where they endured freezing rain with no shelter, living in filthy holes on a starvation diet, no tents, blankets, or medical care, etc. This went on, unnecessarily, for over a year following WWII. These prisoners were not accorded the status of POWs so were not on the radar of the Red Cross, etc. A close relative was one of those prisoners, starved and beaten daily. Hundreds of thousands died. After the war was over!
This is thoroughly documented, though denied or glossed over by Stephen Ambrose and others.
I’d happily repudiate FDR for his cute kissing up to Joseph Stalin at the conference at Teheran, and all the butt-kissing he did with that communist Demon from Hell thereafter.
I don’t see a whole lot of difference between FDR’s politics of vanity and ignorance in international relations and that of Obama, who bows to Saudi kings and snuggles up to communist thugs Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega — recently addressing the latter as “mi amigo.” Someone in the British press just described O as “President Pantywaist.” Indeed he is.
Eisenhower should have been tried at Nuremberg. His acts following WWII were at least as criminal as many of the German officers tried there.
FDR collaborated with Stalin in the enslavement of millions of East European people, under a government which he knew to be at least as brutal as that of Hitler.
Truman likewise acquiesced to those agreements — while Soviet planes strafed unarmed German civilians fleeing, in bitter winter weather, on foot and in horse carts, to escape the coming Soviet horrors. 300,000 of those helpless refugees died en route.