So reports the Washington Post this morning. There will be top-level vacancies right below the AG because the Senate is dragging its feet over the confirmations of two extremely able prosecutors: Tim Flanigan for Deputy AG and Alice Fisher for Chief of the Criminal Division. The reason? More theater over the preposterous notion that torturing detainees may have been official U.S. government post-9/11 policy.
Senate Democrats like Carl Levin ought to knock this nonsense off. They are the ones who are always blathering about how national security isn’t a partisan issue (right before politicizing it) and that the homeland is purportedly less safe due to the administration’s policies (which, by the way, have presided over nearly four years without a domestic terror attack – even though we know the enemy is trying with all its ingenuity to hit us).
There are other ways – and many willing media and NGO hands – to keep the silly torture story percolating. And if Senator Levin really wants more information about torture, there are reports and videotapes widely available of, for example, the Nick Berg beheading, the Daniel Pearl murder, and Saddam’s administration of Abu Ghraib – i.e., his years of beastly murders and maimings that the Left has had the temerity to equate to the comparatively benign shenanigans that briefly went on at that prison under U.S. control.
If you care about national security, it is critical that the Justice Department continue to have solid people at the helm – in the positions that are in the thick of the day-to-day task of protecting Americans. It doesn’t get more solid than Flanigan and Fisher. They ought to be confirmed immediately.