More Republi-Karma: Dick Cheney vs Eric Holder

Usually I avoid employing overt religious references in these blog pages, mostly for reasons of [attempted] intellectual honesty, which would be well-nigh impossible owing to my admitted fierce Judeocentrism. I write another blog [“Yeshivas Ye-ush Mi-Da’as”] in which I constrain myself less in that regard.

Yet, when discussing the ongoing issue of the legality of “enhanced interrogations” that now threatens to become an all-out war between Justice and Intelligence [Panetta’s gonna protecting his territory--who woulda thunk it?] and viewing it from my perch as the paradigmatic self-hating conservative [where are the rest of ‘em?], I couldn’t resist using both Biblical and Talmudic references to [further] elucidate my position.

In fact, I don’t think I could have found a better way to explain it.
The verse that comes to mind is from II Kings 10:18: “And Jehu gathered the nation together, and said unto them, Ahab served Ba'al a little, but Yehu shall serve him much”.

The Babylonian Talmud [Tractate Pesachim folio 87b, for those who might actually want to look it up], based on a verse in Hosea [(1:3-4): “…for in a little while I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Yehu”] relates that, when Jehu’s descendants themselves proceeded to serve the Baal as Ahab had, Jehu’s slaughter of Ahab and his household was retroactively counted as murder, despite the fact that G-d himself had commanded Jehu to wipe out the house of Ahab—for the offense of Baal worship.

The lesson herein is that sometimes, to save a society at large, drastic action must be undertaken in which people will get hurt [or, in the parlance of Dirty Harry Callahan’s commanding officer, “get dead”, though doctrinaire pacifists usually are more perturbed by the infliction of pain rather than death, for unexplained reasons]; however, at the same time, the party inflicting the pain better be certain that they act on the side of the angels.

Dick Cheney may have been on the side of the angels in a case like this, even more than Abraham Lincoln was when he suspended habeas corpus in the months leading up to the Civil War: back then, Lincoln was fighting to preserve an ideal, and here Cheney was preventing apocalyptic mass murder. [And anyone who thinks that Islamic terrorism is anything but theologically-justified apocalyptic mass murder deserves to be their next victim.] That would have been the case—until the techniques were employed to further the prosecution of what was, for all intents and purposes, an economically-driven voluntary war. [If it was anything but that, a draft would have—or should have—been called.]

I have been open about favoring all sorts of “enhanced” methods of interrogation, and that the methods of eradicating piracy in the 18th and 19th centuries provide a much more salient analog for guidelines regarding the prosecution of “War on Terror” [or whatever its being called nowadays] that the Geneva Conventions, which in any case, certainly in their 1949 edition, serve as more of a “this is how we coulda/woulda/shoulda fought the last two world wars” than as a true legal mandate for militarily “playing nice”. I have been equally open about the need for some kind of legal repercussions for those employing the techniques described above—not because they shouldn’t be used when needed, but that they should absolutely not be used at any other time.

It’s doubtful that any legal action initiated by this Administration would be anything but politically motivated. However, Cheney and his ilk have no “kick”: when they applied these techniques to preserve their own political and material positions, they indicated they were playing the same game. You don’t get to be selective about the rules, particularly after you’ve been repeatedly called on it by the electorate.

Additionally, I don’t know if any conservatives—particularly those who believe G-d Himself is conservative—would appreciate the irony of one of their own sacred texts being used to teach them such a lesson. I would reckon they do—and don’t like it.