Leave It to Bill Kristol to Make a Bad Argument Even Worse

Praise be to Bill Kristol. Someone should issue him a remedial reading-comprehension exam.

Recall yesterday that Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, wrote a morale-boosting memo yesterday to the CIA saying, “Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing.” What he means to say is pretty straighforward: We’re several years from 9/11; these decisions to torture people that you were asked to implement were carried out in the atmosphere of fear; and a lot of the criticism today will ignore that context.

Now, that’s a poor argument, because it assumes people who are horrified by the idea of making a detainee shoved into a box with insects crawling on him are unable to contemplate the idea of a future terrorist attack. As a matter of fact, it turns out to be perfectly possible to believe that one should fight terrorism without carrying out illegal and monstrous acts. But if there’s any mitigating factor here, it’s that Blair’s the boss of the intelligence community, and so you can at least understand why he’d say something like that to his troops on a day when some of their dirty laundry is getting aired.

Naturally, Kristol thinks the right response is to misrepresent what Blair said.

So: We were once in danger. Now we live in “a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009.” Now, in April 2009, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence seems to be saying, we’re safe.

At some point, it becomes tiresome to wonder if Kristol is actually stupid or merely cynical. But to belabor the point: it’s possible to recognize gradations of danger, and of perceptions of danger. The available intelligence that Blair has presented indicate there’s no imminent attack on the U.S. “homeland” (how I hate that word) in the works. There’s an over-the-horizon threat, emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, that the Obama administration has devoted enormous resources to confronting. Blair was making a point about hindsight — not a great point, but one that Kristol might even sympathize with if he was willing to read Blair’s statement in good faith. It’s a fourth-rate mind that can’t help but think in terms of absolutes.