189 Investigations? And???

Betsy Newmark points to this Karl Zinsmeister piece in the American Enterprise Magazine, and it’s worth reading.

As the Wall Street Journal noted the day after July’s London bombings, the West’s “resolve continues to fade along with public memories of 9/11. For months the debate in Washington hasn’t been over how best to fight terrorists but how harshly we treat them. Rather than strengthen the Patriot Act, Congress wants to weaken it…. The press corps has wallowed in Abu Ghraib as the defining event of the entire Iraq War.”

Would you believe that the number of formal U.S. investigations of how terror detainees are being treated recently reached 189? What mad self-doubt and softness! Of course we need to weed out cruel or out-of-control guards, but the clear picture of the many commissions and blue-ribbon investigations is that our detainment system is pretty tight and self-regulating, that gentleness to the point of political correctness is the norm, and that rogue actions are nearly always found out and punished, usually quite severely.

Our fastidiousness in handling dangerous terrorists has reached the point of self-flagellation, and now seriously impairs our war-fighting and intelligence-gathering capabilities. In Iraq, for instance, the terrorists now know that U.S. soldiers cannot interrogate them with any intensity, and that if they keep their mouths shut our own rules require that they must be released within three days. That’s why I saw Iraqis this spring specifically request that their relatives involved in the insurgency be arrested by U.S. soldiers rather than Iraqi troops (who have less dainty ideas about detainment and interrogation).

You’ll want to read the whole thing, but when I read the number of investigations we have already begun into how we are treating our prisoners, my jaw dropped.

Helloooo? I think everyone can agree that had anything earthshakingly untoward been discovered through these “investigations” there are more than enough leakers in Congress and elsewhere to put it out there to the press…and the press, being no friend to the war, the president or to the troops they supposedly “support” (they “support” them but won’t write a good word for them) would be quick indeed to get the information out there. It is as foolish to suggest that the press would “cover up” American indiscretions in their military prisons as it is to suggest that they would “cover up” for Karl Rove on a matter of national security…or for any reason, come to that.

Betsy says it is unbelievable that we are doing this to ourselves in the middle of a war. She is quite right. But, you know…there is always another call for another investigation.