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Gen. Petraeus joined FOX News and Martha MacCallum today and gave a blockbuster interview, but probably not the one Fox expected. Once again, he called for the responsible closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. He also said that mistakes were made after 9/11 and that the Army Field Manual is all that we need to use to interrogate prisoners. In addition, he said that we have to have faith in our judicial system and we should try the Khalid Sheikh Muhammads in a court of law.

Martha tried to give him the ticking time bomb scenario to justify torture and he really didn't bite. He did say maybe an Executive Order could be appropriate, but that it really wasn't necessary. Petraeus repudiated pretty much most of what Limbaugh Republicans and the Rove/Newt/Cheney Party have been saying.

(rush transcript)

MacCallum: Where do you think those people should go?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, it's not for a soldier to say. What I do support is what has been termed the responsible closure of Gitmo. Gitmo has caused us problems, there's no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has been used by the enemy against us. We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activity since 9/11 and again Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of some in that regard.

MacCallum: What about the concern that a Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or anybody of that ilk might be tried here in a US court and the possibility that some of the treatments that were used on them that they could go free.

Gen. Petraeus: Well, first of all, I don't think we should be afraid of our values we're fighting for, what we stand for. And so indeed we need to embrace them and we need to operationalize them in how we carry out what it is we're doing on the battlefield and everywhere else. So one has to have some faith, I think, in the legal system. One has to have a degree of confidence that individuals that have conducted such extremist activity would indeed be found guilty in our courts of law.

MacCallum: So you're confident that they will never go free.

Gen. Petraeus: I hope that's the case.

MacCallum: (Ticking time bomb scenario)

Gen. Petraeus: ....T here might be an exception and that would require extraordinary but very rapid approval to deal with, but for the vast majority of the cases, our experience downrange if you will, is that the techniques that are in the Army Field Manual that lays out how we treat detainees, how we interrogate them -- those techniques work, that's our experience in this business.

MacCallum: So is sending this signal that we're not going to use these kind of techniques anymore, what kind of impact does this have on people who do us harm in the field that you operate in?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, actually what I would ask is, does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again have beaten us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion? When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions, we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it's important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those.

Wow, there was a lot in that interview. I couldn't transcribe it all. He admits that we violated the Geneva Convention. Is he saying that the Bush/Cheney administration failed our "value system" in their leadership in the two wars and how America responded to the 9/11 attacks?

He obviously is against torture. He is also saying to let the chips fall where they may in prosecuting these detainees and use our legal system to try terror suspects. Martha didn't go into the military commissions, but if they come here, just let them stand trial. All the conservatives and Republicans anointed Gen. Petraeus as the true leader of the wars when George Bush decided he didn't want to take the heat on the war any longer.

Remember when to question him was sacrilegious? Will they now disavow what he is telling them today?

After the interview, the other Fox host predictably tried to intimate that Petraeus was working for Obama now so, ya know, he's in the tank for him. Whatever happened to listening to the generals on the ground being critical to our "victory" in Iraq? He said that our values as a country do change in a time of war -- a scary notion -- so Bush is just all right. Don't they ever give up with their Bush-hero worshiping?

How long will it take Rush Limbaugh to lash out at the General? What about Newt and Rove?

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There's just so much garbage in this clip, it's hard to sort it all out. But garbage it is and sort we must. I think that it's instructive to remember as we wade through this textbook example of fallacious logic that Newt Gingrich is considered the great scholar of the GOP. No wonder the GOP doesn't seem able to think their way out of the tea bag they put themselves in.

Still holding the talking points given to him by the Bush administration's Revisionist History Tour™, Newtie tries to muddy the waters by simultaneously claiming that the Clinton and Obama administrations did or do not take the War on Terror™ as seriously as the Bush administration, but also find that the tactics used by the Bush administration in their pursuit of against terrorism are so acceptable that they haven't tried outlawing them yet. HUH????

(S)ince 1993 when seven people were killed at the World Trade Center, we’ve had two cycles. We had a Clinton administration that thought this was a criminal problem, that issued -- that refused to allow the CIA and the FBI to cooperate, that refused to pressure Saudi Arabia or Yemen to go after people who were killing our folks. And then you had a Bush administration that said this is a war.

Hmm...interesting revisionism. Let's recall, Newtie, that the Clinton administration actually caught and prosecuted the "blind sheik" responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, unlike the Bush administration, who declared war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and killed millions of Iraqis but left Osama Bin Laden uncaught. That's a successful strategy, innit?

WALLACE: I want to ask you about one other aspect of this. Pelosi says even if she was briefed on this that there was nothing she could do because these were classified briefings. She and the Republican chairman of the committee got this information. There’s nothing they could do.

You as House speaker received these kinds of briefings back in the ‘90s. If you objected to a secret operation, was there something you could do?

GINGRICH: Sure. I mean, the first thing you do is call the president and tell him you will feel compelled to pass a law cutting off the money. I mean, there are lots of things you can do if you want to do it. The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be.

And second, you know, they’ve had control since January of 2007. They haven’t passed a law making waterboarding illegal. They haven’t gone into any of these things and changed law. In fact, they’ve had several -- they -- recently, you find that Attorney General Holder’s own Justice Department is saying, “Well, you know, some of these memos are actually right. They’re not wrong.”

Um, Newt? You do know that waterboarding is already illegal, don't you? Oh great historian of the GOP, can you tell me what happened to those Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American GIs during WWII? So Congress should make waterboarding illegal again otherwise they condone the act? Astonishing lack of logic there.

So this is -- what we’re seeing now in a very sad way is as bitter a partisan attack on the Bush people as we’ve seen since the McCarthy era. The degree that they’re putting specific people at risk for criminal prosecution is unprecedented in modern America.

Never let be said that today's GOP isn't the most persecuted bunch of privileged white folk in the history of mankind. Jeez. Here's another way to look at it, Newt: Specific people are at risk for criminal prosecution because of THEIR UNPRECEDENTED CRIMINAL ACTS. "Rule of Law" party, my aunt Fanny.

Which brings me to my final point, the implied slur against AG Eric Holder for his firm's representation of Yemeni detainees at Gitmo. Somehow this is siding with terrorists to actually respect our legal system. While Holder himself did not actually work on those Gitmo cases, the fact remains--and I'm sure that this comes as a shock to Gingrich--but not all attorneys think their clients are innocent. They are just interested in making sure that justice is served by a fair trial.

Obviously, the concepts of fairness and justice are alien to Gingrich.

Transcripts (courtesy of CQ Politics) below the fold

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