President Bush certainly agrees with Andy McCarthy’s fundamental point today. We quoted some of his points about this yesterday, but here they are more fully. On the hunt for Bin Laden:

I’m going to tell you that it is essential that American Presidents get the information that was gathered, that we gathered, in order to protect this country. The way you win the war on terror is to find people and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do. You know, this thing about, well, let’s put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work. What works is somebody, somewhere, saying, oh, guess what — and then a kinetic action takes place.

On the importance of interrogation:

I think what we need to do is to clarify what is not acceptable and provide liability protection so that interrogators will feel comfortable in going forward. What the American people do not understand is that so long as the War Crimes Act hangs over the head of any U.S. — the officials on the front line, they will not take the actions necessary to get information, within the law, to protect the American people. So the approach is to say to Congress, here is what — step one, U.S. law will define what Article III means; two, please tell us — not “please” — define the techniques that are unacceptable [he corrected this to note it’s behaviors not techniques that will be so defined]; three, provide liability protection for those tasked with getting information under the law. And that’s the best way to go.