President Bush's Challenge to Great Britain

American Thinker ^ | 27 nov 2010 | Adam Shaw

[rellimpank]

George W. Bush's dramatic claim in Decision Points that British lives were saved by the use of waterboarding terrorist suspects cuts through the fog surrounding the issue of waterboarding.

Anti-Bush sentiment, as well as a general anti-Americanism, is rife in Britain. For years we have been assured by a smug nationalized BBC, and various left-wing media outlets all too keen to giggle like schoolchildren at President Bush's speech, that the former president is nothing more than a simple cowboy who did only bad things such as invade countries just for oil, drown black people, and torture poor, innocent foreigners. Luckily, Americans have seen sense and elected someone as intellectual and sophisticated as President Obama.

This narrative has taken a beating since early 2009, especially with the ardently anti-British policies of the Obama administration. As Obama is beginning to look less and less like someone who knows what he is doing and more like an anti-British academic with an ideological axe to grind, Brits previously captivated by Obama-mania are now shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

This twitchiness has been made worse by the consequences of President Bush's claim in Decision Points that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed prevented terrorist attacks on Canary Wharf and Heathrow Airport.

One of the reasons the left have been so taken aback by Bush's statement is because it gets to the heart of the use of waterboarding. For too long the left have been trying to squeeze waterboarding into their definition of torture. In part because of this, the debate over waterboarding has become dictionary-centered in that in order to debate whether waterboarding is acceptable in certain circumstances, you first need to define exactly what you mean by "torture."

[101voodoo]

The solution is simple.

If the Left refuses to permit water boarding by outlawing it then it has to be done without their knowledge. After the information is garnered and we are as sure as we can be there is no more to be had from the crazy, he should then suffer a “heart attack”

My limited knowledge of poisons seems to include something I read about a substance which will cause the respiratory system to shut down and is virtually impossible to detect even with an autopsy.

[Tennessean4Bush]

This is what should be feared when the debate is led by academics who spend their career as tenured with raises and pensions totally outside the mean streets of the market everyone else has to live in. We have ceded waterboarding as torture, effectively anyway, and we have a hard time pressing these cold, hard facts into people’s faces.

[Sherman Logan]

"What interrogation techniques are going too far when it comes to preventing the immediate threat of a large-scale terrorist attack on home soil?"

The question that is never asked.

[Niuhuru]

Exactly. Our academics are now effectively the pampered aristocrats who want us to do all the dirty work, while at the same time whining about it. Kind of like sluts who marry and then end up moaning about morals.