Fixing Mikey Gerson.

The prospect of investigations into the who/what/where of torture has made Mikey Gerson hilariously incoherent. Thank heavens for InstaPutz!

HH: What do you…I think this is an enormous error. I think this is the launching of a witch hunt. What do you think?

MG: I think it’s a terrible error for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I think that the release of these memos, and now the talk of these prosecutions, is creating an atmosphere in which people in our intelligence services, people in our government, are going to be very timid about pursuing absolutely essential elements in the war on terror torturing people. This is creating an atmosphere that’s more like the pre-9/11 atmosphere when people were complacent and afraid to confront these problems torture people. And I’m afraid that we’ve returned to that attitude, that we’re going to return to some of those outcomes eventually. And so I think it’s a serious challenge. Now let me make one more point here, which is if there are going to be investigations of people who knew about these things, and who approved of them, then that’s going to have to include Nancy Pelosi and Senator Rockefeller, who were both briefed, along with other members of the Intelligence community in Congress about thirty times on all of these techniques torture beginning in 2002. The fact of the matter is that this represents what was happening in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. the intelligence community had no idea if there were going to be further attacks, how large the al Qaeda network was in the United States. And they were pursuing by their best lights, according to their best legal interpretation, matters that they thought were essential to American security. You can’t criminalize that torture.