Krauthammer's Take
NRO Staff
The Corner
From last night's "All-Stars."
On Obama’s comments on waterboarding:
<<< Well, when you hear him airily say that we could have gotten the information from other means, you have to ask yourself, isn't that exactly what was attempted. And the reason they resorted to the enhanced interrogation is because it didn't work.
And in the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the guy who they knew was the mastermind behind 9/11, the man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife, he was asked politely about the plans that he knew about, and his answer was "Soon you will know," meaning you will be looking in the morgues, counting the American dead, looking in hospitals at those who were destroyed, bodies destroyed in a future attack of which he will tell you nothing right now.
That's why they used enhanced interrogation, which worked.
There was also a question of timing. It is true that you can use the good cop routine, in which you earn the trust of the prisoner over time and get information. Nobody denies that.
The problem is it can take weeks or months or longer. And after 9/11, we did not have the luxury of weeks or months or longer in a situation in which America had been attacked and we knew almost nothing about Al Qaeda and its plans. That was a matter of urgency.
And to airily say today we might have used other techniques I think is incredibly irresponsible. >>>
On Joe Biden’s swine flu gaffe:
<<< I think the single most important public health measure that we can take is to put Joe Biden in quarantine. The prognosis, unfortunately for him, is not good. There's no known cure for what ails him, which is a congenital inability to control his tongue.
But the good news is that that researchers around the world are working around the clock on a cure. So they always is hope.
I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself on that.
As for the flu, I think what's really important is to see how virulent it is. What we really worry about is the flu epidemic of 1918, which killed in very high numbers.
It looks as if, anecdotally, looking at the evidence in Mexico and elsewhere, that the death rate is relatively low. If this is like any other flu with a death rate of one in a thousand, it's not a catastrophe.
There could be a mutation, but until it mutates and becomes like the 1918 epidemic, I think that what we're having now is a lot of panic without reason
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