Cheney3, Obama 0

The media wail about "torture," but are noticeably short on facts.

Liberals try to disguise the utter “wussification” of our interrogation techniques by constantly prattling on about "the banality of evil."

Um, no. In this case, it's actually the banality of the banal.

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There's even a medical term for it now: "the Gitmo gut." Some prisoners have been heard whispering, "If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls."

In terms of "torture," there was "the attention grasp," which you have seen in every department store you have ever been where a mother was trying to get her misbehaving child's attention. If "the attention grasp" doesn't work, the interrogators issue a stern warning: "Don't make me pull this car over."

I know that Obama is a lawyer and a politician. Singly, either occupation has both an ability to mouth a lot of words without actually saying anything and an ability to ignore that which doesn’t fit their view of the real facts. But, combine the two and you have a truly frightening distortion of the actual world that you and I inhabit.

Let’s look at Gitmo and the three ring circus that’s been going on between Obama and Pelosi and Cheney:-

According to the first two, Camp Delta is a recruitment tool for terrorism. How so when the attackers of the USS Cole, the bombers of the World Trade Center, the bombers of the Khobar Towers, the bombers of the African embassies and, most notoriously, the 911 hijackers all came into being before Camp Delta was established. And yet with some of these animals behind bars, there has been no successful attack on these United States.

And, as Vice-President Cheney pointed out, intelligence obtained from there via the so-called “enhanced techniques” enabled our security services to head off an attack on the City of Los Angeles. It’s hard to dispute hard facts just by wishing it so unless you’re a lawyer and a politician.

So there was Obama earlier this week sounding more defensive than I remember. First there was the campaign promises to end the US involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East. Well, we’re still in Iraq, we have more troops than ever in Afghanistan and now we have American boots on the ground in Pakistan.

Then, of course, he confirmed that Military Tribunals are here to stay and also there is the troublesome issue of the fifth category of Gitmo inmates. He left their fate unspecified but if we exclude them as we must from the ones who will be sent here and we exclude them from those who will be sent abroad, what is left? The answer dear reader is that Gitmo stays around for the foreseeable future never mind what Obama says. For another attribute of lawyer politicians is that parsing words is their stock-in-trade.

And it didn’t exactly support Obama’s stated goal when the Senate refused to fund the $80 million to close Guantanamo by a margin of 90 to 6.

Robert Gibbs, in a rare insight into the true situation, said last week that the Administration regretted some of the decisions voiced in their earlier days and dubbed them "hasty". Truly a masterpiece of understatement if ever I heard one.