McCarthy: A beautiful mind just says "no"

This is a beautiful thing...I posted several versions of this story and the letter, but please read Mr. McCarthy's own explanation at the end! It's about time.

After being invited by the [Obama] administration to be a prop in the interrogation debate, the National Review Institute's former federal prosecutor provides a clear, instructional dissent: Read this letter!

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy helped prosecute the terrorists who plotted and conducted the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, putting several radical extremists behind bars. Since then, he has become a must-read on counterterrorist policy and a critic of the impulse to fight jihadis through the American court system. The Obama administration knows this and extended an invitation to McCarthy to a roundtable on counterterrorist policy, which McCarthy has politely — and publicly — declined: Read more

By email (to the Counterterrorism Division) and by regular mail:

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Holder: Read more

I did something today that I’ve never done before. The Department of Justice, which I proudly served for a quarter century as an assistant U.S. attorney and a deputy U.S. marshal, asked me for help, and I declined. Actually, what I declined to do was attend a meeting. My hope is that the dissent I am registering — to the administration’s disastrous policies of releasing trained terrorists and threatening prosecution against government lawyers — will help the department and the Obama administration, even if they don’t want to hear it. Saying No to Justice: Why I declined to meet with the President’s Detention Policy Task Force by Andrew C. McCarthy

"Go grab his ass"

Liberals have been pining for the lost Al Gore presidency for years now...strange, though, given his Bush-esque sympathies!

An anecdote former Clinton counterterror czar Richard Clarke recounts in his memoir "Against All Enemies" is instructive. In 1993, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler was horrified by Mr. Clarke's proposal for "extraordinary rendition," where our spooks turn over prisoners to foreign countries like Egypt so they can do the interrogating.

While Mr. Clinton was still chewing his fingernails and seemed to side with Mr. Cutler, Al Gore arrived late to the meeting. "Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides," Mr. Clarke writes. "Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'" [Excerpt from "The Jack Bauer Exception," Wall Street Journal, Friday, January 23, 2009]

Sigh. For the good old days.