Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former deputy assistant to President Bush, is puzzled and put off by the criticism of Barack Obama by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson (in photo). Most of the basis for the criticism was Obama’s address at a “Call to Renewal” conference two years ago. But Wehner described key points of the address as “respectful and authentic” and “reasonable,” and said that Dobson’s attacks fell “terribly short” of a fair and honest critique. “If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity,” Wehner wrote. “In this instance, Dobson didn’t. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.”
From a New York Times article today: “The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of ‘coercive management techniques’ for possible use on prisoners, including ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘prolonged constraint,’ and ‘exposure.’
“What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
“The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
When someone is named a “person of interest” in a case, especially one as big as the 2001 anthrax murders, the authorities had better have the goods on the guy. Because they didn’t when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft put that label on former Army scientist Steven Hatfill in 2002, the U.S. Justice Department will now pay Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit. Those involved in the investigation say that there was a fixation on Hatfill, a graduate of Southwestern College in Winfield, unjustified by the facts. So now the public will pay for the government’s mistakes, and the killer of five remains at large.
Barack Obama continues to court evangelicals, telling an audience Tuesday that he would not only continue but also expand President Bush’s faith-based initiative, which seeks to enlist churches’ help in solving social problems.
“The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Obama said in his remarks. “We need all hands on deck.”
He faces one immediate obstacle: the perceived failure of Bush’s faith-based program. How will Obama make the idea work better?
And some Democrats on the left are sure to object to Obama’s support for allowing religious groups that receive federal funds to hire and fire based on applicants’ faith.
In another blow to the credibility of the Bush administration’s detention of suspected terrorists, a federal appeals court ruled that the military didn’t have credible evidence to show that a Chinese detainee who has been held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay is an “enemy combatant.”
Junk cars that people leave sitting on lawns and streets, broken-down and abandoned for months on end, are an eyesore and lower the quality of life of a neighborhood. Kudos to the Wichita Police Department and Office of Central Inspection for its sweep last Thursday that hauled off 27 of these junkers in northeast Wichita after owners ignored citations to fix them.
After years of letting things slide on blight, the city of Wichita is sending a welcome message that it’s serious about cleaning up neighborhoods.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former deputy assistant to President Bush, is puzzled and put off by the criticism of Barack Obama by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson (in photo). Most of the basis for the criticism was Obama’s address at a “Call to Renewal” conference two years ago. But Wehner described key points of the address as “respectful and authentic” and “reasonable,” and said that Dobson’s attacks fell “terribly short” of a fair and honest critique. “If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity,” Wehner wrote. “In this instance, Dobson didn’t. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.”
