“You guys got it exactly right.” That what Pete Hoekstra (R, Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence committee, said of yesterday’s NRO editorial on President Obama’s national security speech.
“He’s taken this moral high ground, and he can’t possibly live up to it,” said Hoekstra, whom I reached on the phone late last night. With regard to Guantánamo detentions, Hoekstra said: “He wants to do the same thing, only with a smaller number of people.”
Hoekstra said he could not see a clear moral distinction between denying the due process of the American justice system to terrorist combatants on the one hand, and the administration’s covert activities in Pakistan (which Hoekstra said he supports) on the other. In war, he said, it is acceptable to hold enemy combatants until hostilities are concluded, and if we’re at war then that’s what we ought to do. “If this isn’t a war, then what are we doing assassinating people with no due process?” he asked. “Morally, where does that stand in comparison with waterboarding?”