AMERICA AT RISK - AT 8:05 A.M. ET: - Part II:  Very rarely do we do two-part posts, but national security is critically important.  Below we reported on a fine piece by Michael Goodwin.  In today's Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger continues the theme - that Obama is damaging the national security of the United States:

Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” As we know, that didn’t happen. Four hundred years later, they’re killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.

And...

In a May speech at the National Archives, President Obama, mirroring Kenny MacAskill's remarks, said we had to "update our institutions" to deal with terrorism but "do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process."

That "update" is upon us. The smothering pillows have arrived.

Attorney General Holder named Connecticut prosecutor John Durham to conduct an investigation into whether interrogations by CIA employees warrant a criminal inquiry. It has been shown repeatedly the past 25 years that an office of independent counsel or special prosecutor nearly always puts in motion an Inspector Javert-like hunt for an indictable defendant.

And...

The day of Mr. Holder's announcement, CIA Director Leon Panetta said his agency received "multiple written assurances its methods were lawful." It's now clear that even playing by the rules cannot stop erosion by legal challenge.

But erosion is exactly what the left wants.  It wants the war on terror destroyed, as it wanted the war in Vietnam destroyed.  It believes America is the cause of evil, rather than the opponent of evil.

To supervise future interrogations, the administration is creating something called a High Value Detainee Interrogation Group. Interrogation techniques will be limited to those in the Army Field Manual or that are "noncoercive," which suggests more constrained than a big-city police department...

...This means that the class of person who blows up skyscrapers, American embassies or the USS Cole would spend less time under a bare light bulb than a domestic robbery suspect.

Finally...

The message of...the Holder decision is that the will born in the wake of 9/11 is waning. The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West's caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back. The second war on terror is in the future.

COMMENT:  I'm glad to see that some journalists are speaking out.  But how many?  On television, Fox will certainly join the combat on the correct side.  But CNN?  NBC?  Come on.  They think this new administration is just fine, "enlightened" the way people who attend Manhattan dinner parties (organic) are enlightened.

They will weep crocodile tears the next time Americans are victims of mass killing.  And then, a day later, they will be back at the same old stand, looking for the "root cause," and finding that it was us.

August 27, 2009