Bill Clinton gave an interview to NPR this morning. It was odd. He said (and I’m doing this from memory) that he’s never discussed — ever — what American interrogation policy re the Geneva Convention should be and that this was the first time he ever talked about it. This just struck me as odd because one would think the topic would have come up in his conversations with, I dunno, his wife.

He also seemed to be saying that scenarios like the “ticking time bomb” and the like were ones he never really had to think about before and treated it like it was all an interesting academic and/or political question.

But, yes, he was focused like a laser on the terrorist threat during his eight years as commander-in-chief.

If I misheard him, I’m sure someone will let me know. I’m not going to pay for a trasncript from NPR and I can’t get the audio to play for me.

Update: From one of my liberal readers:

To quote Andy Dufresne, but are you being deliberately obtuse?
President Clinton didn’t think what American interrogation policy re the Geneva Convention should be because he hadn’t authorized torture.
That has nothing to do with whether or not he was focused on terrorism.
Please.

Me: Please yourself. These are two different points the reader is conflating.

First, Clinton said — if I heard him right — that he never discussed the most debated topic in the war on terror of late (modifying the Geneva Conventions) until NPR asked him about it. I simply find that hard to believe. It was mostly likely a classic Clinton moment when he likes to the gussy-up his statements by making it sound like he’s being extemporaneous.

Second, is it really plausible that while Clinton was waging a war on Bin Laden, as he so often claims, he never thought about the limits of interrogation methods and the ticking time bomb scenario? If you watced the Path to 9/11 (heh) you’d get the impression that interrogation methods were a big issue for some folks on the frontlines.

Again, I don’t want to get too invested in all of this without hearing the interview again. But it struck me as a fairly lame performance.