Remember When We Had A Smart Two-Term President?

More than the 8 years of peace and prosperity, at this point I miss having Bill Clinton around because, you know, he can, like, talk and stuff.  Here's part of his response to an FT interviewer's question about closing Gitmo:

"Well it either needs to be closed down or cleaned up...

"I'm not blameless...We had a law on the books when I was President, that was enforced from time to time, which permitted the Justice department to hold suspected terrorists beyond the normal length of time they could them without trial, if, bringing the indictment and the trial would require the presentation of evidence which would reveal the identity of the intelligence source, compromise the life of the intelligence source, maybe risk the life of the intelligence source, but more importantly dry up what we thought we were finding out about terror networks.

"It sounds so reasonable but if you're the guy who's in prison and you're not guilty, you could be held there three, four, five years and there has to be come limit to that.

"But the more important thing and I want to make some explicit statement here because I think people in the West who feel threatened by terror may be tempted to become more tolerant of the need to be tougher with suspected terrorists.

"But once you've got people in custody if you start really roughing them up, there are two huge problems with that quite apart from the morality of it.

"There are two huge practical problems. Practical problem number one. If American or British troops get the reputation for abusing people in their prisons then when they get captured you know, then who do they send for, every time there is a problem in the world? When I left the White House, I was more criticised for where I didn't intervene then where I did, except among the Republican in Congress who said I went everywhere and did everything.
...
"The second problem is, if you rough somebody up bad enough they'll eventually tell you, most of them, whatever you want to hear to get you to stop doing it.

"And if you run a dictatorship, maybe all you want is for somebody to say they are guilty. If you are trying to preserve and expand freedom you want to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent. If people are abused and they confess, or the finger other people, and you gather up those who are not guilty, then as a practical matter you've let the guilty go free and you are vulnerable to whatever they are going to do to you.
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"Here's the question you should ask yourself, 'If we do this thing, whatever it is, will it change the fundamental character of my country?' If the answer is yes, you've already given the terrorists a profound victory, so at all costs we should try to say 'No. We will not do anything that changes the fundamental character of our country."

Compare and contrast to the interview below the fold...

DeathBush speaking to FoxNews:

CAVUTO: Speaking of civil liberties, one of your predecessors, Jimmy Carter, was very critical of our operations at Guantanamo Bay, saying they should be shut down, that abuses there, if proven true, are dragging our name through the mud globally. What do you make of that?

BUSH: Well, I first of all want to assure the American people that these prisoners are being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. I say in accordance with because these weren't normal, you know, military-type fighters. They had no uniforms. They had no, you know, government structure. These were terrorists, swept up off the battlefield in a place like Afghanistan, for example.

And it's in our nation's interest that we learn a lot about those people that are still in detention, because we're still trying to find out how to better protect our country.

Secondly, that anytime there's an allegation of abuse, we investigate. That's what transparent societies do. We've got a press corps that's constantly asking tough questions about prisoner treatment, for example. You just asked one. And that's what open societies do, they answer the questions by saying...

CAVUTO: But now President Carter has said, sir, shut it down. Joe Biden said shut it down. Do you think it should be shut down?

BUSH: Well, you know, we're exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America. What we don't want to do is let somebody out that comes back and harms us.

And so we're looking at all alternatives and have been. And when there have been questions of abuse and allegations like the Koran, the Pentagon went through a full investigation and then released the data for everybody to see.

And I will tell you that we treat these prisoners in accordance with international standards. And that's what the American people expect. When somebody put out that Amnesty International report, they asked me about it. I said it's just absurd to equate Gitmo and Guantanamo with a Soviet gulag. It's just not even close.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine which President understands national security better.

ntodd