Say Anything Blog

Which is actually something of a flip-flop given that she formerly supported the “ticking time bomb” exception for allowing the torture of terrorist detainees.

Senator Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) ended her support for legalized torture at a debate in New Hampshire Wednesday night, splitting with her husband – and with her own recent stance on the charged issue.

“Senator Clinton, this is the number three man in Al Qaeda.  We know there’s a bomb about to go off, and we have three days, and we know this guy knows where it is. Should there be a presidential exception to allow torture in that kind of situation?” moderator Tim Russert of NBC asked during the debate held at Dartmouth College.

“As a matter of policy it cannot be American policy, period,” Clinton responded, seconding the clear positions of Senators Barack Obama (Ill.)and Joe Biden (Del.).

But in a pair of interviews with the New York Daily News last October, Clinton outlined the same narrow exception that Russert described, and which had also been floated by former President Bill Clinton in an interview last year with National Public Radio.

“If we’re going to be preparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law,” Clinton said at the time, in a telephone interview with this reporter, expanding on comments to the Daily News Editorial Board that there should be “lawful authority” for torture in some cases.

She said then that the “ticking time bomb” scenario would be a narrow exception to her opposition to torture.

I don’t know what’s worse.  The idea that Hillary is now saying that she wouldn’t torture someone in order to possibly save thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of American lives or the fact that she apparently can’t make up her mind on the issue.

Do we want a national leader like that?  Especially given her husband’s administration’s limp-wristed, legally-blinkered approach to fighting terrorism that was apparently so bad they had to send disgraced National Security Adviser (and current Hillary campaign adviser) Sandy Berger into the national archives to steal out terror-related documents in his underpants so he could destroy them. 

Bush may not be perfect when it comes to national security.  I think we could all name at least a dozen blunders he’s made on the issue, but at least he gets it unlike Hillary and the rest of the Dems.