Reasons for lack of empathy for KSM

Gregory Kane:

Here’s why I don’t care that al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded after Sept. 11, 2001: I remember where I was the day before.

Every American who recalls that day can probably remember where he or she was when those jets hit the World Trade Center. I do too. But I remember where I was on Sept. 10, 2001, at about the same time.

In the lowest level of the World Trade Center, getting off a commuter train from Jersey City, N.J. I had an appointment in midtown-Manhattan and had to take a subway train from the WTC. Had I done that a day later, I’d have arrived at the WTC at just about the time the first or second jet hit.

But what if I had arrived maybe 15 minutes earlier and had some time to kill? What if I’d decided I wanted to go to the top of the WTC and take in the view?

Then I’d have been one of those people who were trapped above the inferno that raged below them, terrified, wondering how or if we could ever escape. I’d have experienced the terror they felt as the WTC Twin Towers collapsed beneath them and sent them to their horrible deaths.

And you sure as heck wouldn’t be reading this column. Yes, I came that close to perhaps being among the WTC casualties of Sept. 11.

So when President Obama declassified Justice Department memos that revealed the waterboarding of Mohammed and Zubaydah, perhaps you can forgive me if the knowledge didn’t exactly leave me prostrate with grief. Nor am I feeling the arguments of those who claim how torture violates our principles and destroys our values.

Does it, really? We were in a war against terrorists. War is called war for a reason. It’s because nasty things get done in a war, lots of them. The Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians in bombing raids during World War II. Should we have NOT bombed Germany and Japan because killing civilians violates our principles and destroys our values?

Or does torture violate our principles and destroy our values while wholesale killing of civilians is acceptable?

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Perhaps Obama, instead of piously intoning that America “does not torture,” should instead tell the world, specifically terrorists, that from now on the nation will invoke the great African-American Prime Directive of “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.” Because once you start something, then anything goes.

So from now on, we won’t have to fret when guys like Mohammed and Zubaydah get waterboarded. After all, they would have been warned in advance. (And won’t someone point out that Mohammed and Zubaydah got off a lot easier than those poor souls trapped in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001?)

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But moral preening is part of Obama's makeup whether it is in showing empathy for a mass murder like KSM or his attacks on innocent secured creditors of Chrysler it is all done from a false premise of moral superiority. This holier than thou touch is a way of avoiding serious argument. That is something liberals do on most issues.

Like Kane I have been up to the Windows and the World and don't want to think about the trip down some had to make. I am sure it was worse than having water thrown in your face.