My reactions to the Obama/Chaney speeches of May 21, 2009 and the hours of press coverage in the aftermath.

** The left seems to emphasize that enhanced interrogation is both immoral and ineffective. If it is immoral, why qualify it? If you are going to be guided exclusively by your moral compass, then isn't the quality of the results produced immaterial?

** The point was raised more than once today that there are other, more efficient ways of getting the information. The question is not really if, it is when. Information concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been very useful on December 5th in 1941, a historical footnote on December 9th.

** Vice-President Chaney made a compelling case for the release of information relating to the information elicited from these interrogations. Should that occur, he should be prepared to defend comments about the saving of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.

** Lanny Davis made the comment that waterboarding is torture citing a 1994 law. Legal opinions from the Bush Justice department clearly differed. This would be an interesting subject for some "journalist" to report on.

** The most interesting note in the Chaney speech was to a recent editorial referring to terrorists as abducted, saying " a major editorial page makes them sound like kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies". There was a time when no editorial page would have used such language without feeling compelled to support it in the text of the editorial.

My take - Should there be some debate over the limits of interrogation? Absolutely. But consider what actually happened here. We didn't behead anyone, hang any combatants from bridges, nor did we shoot prisoner A to encourage prisoner B to talk. We frightened them. Maybe terrified them, a concept that terrorists could probably process, maybe even admire. If you ever been in a fight with someone who has an advantage (such as being bigger and meaner than you) you might understand than one equalizer is making the opponent think that you are crazier than they are, less likely to be constrained by the rules, more likely to hit them with a chair or bite them or perhaps willing to drown them.

I hate hypotheticals but let's consider this scenario. The Twin Towers attack and the Pentagon attack occur on September 11th. The White House/Capitol attack is planned for September 16th. We pick up a planner of the attacks on September 12th and the only information we can obtain via the allowed protocol is that a spectacular attack is going to occur on the 16th. Every member of Congress is assembled and told that we have evidence an attack is imminent and are convinced that the prisoner knows the details. It is our opinion that the only hope we have of preventing an attack is to scare the crap out of Khalid. What would you have us do?

How would your representative have answered this question? It is easy to look back in history and surmise that we would have oppsed slavery in 1790 or the excesses in the aftermath of the French Revolution. We can be sure that we would have risen up against the Nazis during World War Two. We can be sure because we have the luxury of coming to our convictions far removed from the moment.

Last comment. There was precious little to admire in the analysis. That said, Dana Perino was articulate, thoughtful and forthright. I have always admired both of the Chaney girls. Liz Chaney's commentary was as well-articulated as you will hear this side of George Will. I am pretty sure that Mara Liiason is comfortably liberal but I never detect that in her analysis. I find both her and Charles Krauthammer a welcome relief from the water carriers posing as dispassionate analysts.