And So It Begins

And the Republican attacks on Eric Holder's patriotism begin.

A "furious" Rep. Peter King, the hawkish, maverick Long Island Republican, blasted a "disgraceful" Eric Holder for opening an investigation of CIA interrogators and chided his own party for what he described as a weak response to the move in an interview just now with POLITICO.

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

King, channeling both the sense of outrage and of political opportunity felt in parts of the GOP, defended in detail the interrogation practices — threats to kill a detainee's family, and or to kill a detainee with a power drill — detailed in a CIA inspector general report released yesterday.

"You're talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him — but never doing it," King said. "You have that on the one hand — and on the other you have the [interrogator's] attempt to prevent thousands of Americans from being killed."

"When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something — or that they actually used the power drill," he said.

And sadly enough, our discourse over the Global War On Terror has been reduced to "We question whether or not Eric Holder is helping America's enemies because he has a problem with our interrogators saying they are going to kill a detainee's kids." And we have Republican lawmakers actually arguing that it's okay to do this because they didn't actually USE the power drill or the gun to actually kill people.

It's not terrorism if we do it.

[UPDATE 10:26 PM] BooMan rings Peter King up.

This is captured-in-Bush Era-amber rhetoric, and it is total bullshit. The Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture establish "human" rights, not just rights for people who are not suspected of terrorism. Eric Holder never said that it is okay to waterboard people. He testified at his confirmation hearing that waterboarding is torture and is prohibited by law. Eric Holder is not declaring war on the CIA. And torturing people is not something that goes to the heart of our national defense.

Just because we can do it, doesn't make it right.