Posted on 04/22/2009 5:59:47 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
With Barack Obama releasing the OLC memos and branding them as all but criminal and leaving the door open to prosecutions connected to the interrogation of Al-Qaeda terrorists, one might expect the CIA to retreat from its earlier defense of its actions. So far, though, the agency remains tenacious in insisting that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Abu Zubaydah saved American lives. CNS News reports that the CIA stands by its 2005 memo describing how those interrogations stopped another 9/11-scale attack:
The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.
Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”
According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”
KSM initially resisted all other interrogation procedures, right up to the waterboard. He insisted that Americans did not have the necessary resolve to get information out of him, and that we would only know about the next plot when it killed hundreds, if not thousands again. Only after the waterboard did KSM cough up the information on the “second wave” attacks, and the CIA and other national-security agencies stopped it.
Does this answer whether waterboarding is torture? Not really. Does it negate the canard that “torture never works”? Yes. Torture works in getting people to talk, and sometimes they tell the truth. The CIA got what it wanted — the information it needed to save lives — but it doesn’t prove or disprove whether a mock-execution procedure like waterboarding is torture or not.
It does, however, pose a difficult question for Americans, especially since the CIA even under Leon Panetta seems determined to get an answer to it. What price do we want to pay for a pristine conscience in combating terrorism? Do you mind if it costs thousands of American lives in plots we can’t discover because a terrorist suspect captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or somewhere else has lawyered up? Are there times when we can appropriately use a non-lethal technique without letting the target know that it’s non-lethal, in order to save American lives?
Both sides need to quit pretending on this issue. Mock executions fit the definition of torture, and they also saved a lot of American lives. If we can admit to reality, then we can have an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves, and what price might be too high for our public image internationally.
Funniest movie ever. I saw it the first time when I was out of town staying in a hotel. When I got home, I rented it for our family Friday Night movie.
When it started my kids where whining about what a lame movie Dad picked. Before it was over, they had tears running down their cheeks from laughing so hard.
The Khmer Rouge and others used it to torture and to get phony confessions. Some of those water boarded got brain damage due to oxygen deprivation
We do not use it as torture. We do it very quick (less than a minute) and painlessly and we do it strictly to get intelligence
If I am going to be tortured I will take one minute of water boarding over real torture such as Saddam Hussein used any day of the week. Saddam knew real torture do does a Khalid Sheik Muhammed
My granddaughter had a couple of of her fourth-grade friends over for a sleepover last weekend, and she cajoled me into letting them stay up to watch the "Ai! Yi-Yaii! Yi-Yaiiiiii!" movie -- as our grandkids call it... '-) They had a great time...
OK, since we have no official or authoritative benchmark on the absolute definition of “torture”, let’s just move on to say that waterboarding is a practice that should be reserved and limited to nasty operators such as KSM.
Anything further discussion is exactly the kind of semantic hairsplitting that appeals to lawyers. It’s also the this same lawyerly discussion that took place among White House staffers in 2003 and 2004.
When the simple answer then as now would have been to drop the “is it or isn’t it” arguments, concede that it may be, take responsibility for it, and move on.
There may occasionally be things that patriots must do without further deliberation, and then leave the consequences to a jury of one’s peers.
That’s pretty much what GWB and his staff did in this case and you can’t really fault them for it.
I don’t mind if you want to accept “Waterboarding” as torture, because you also want to accept torture as an occasionally, under certain circumstances, O.K. thing to do. That’s fine.
But, on a factual basis, by any classical definition, “Waterboarding” is not torture, even though the unsuspecting recipient of that act believes it to be at the time.
Like I said, it is a mind game, and only a mind game, executed by physical means. The body is in fact not harmed, nor in danger of it and the psyche does not suffer any irreparable harm. If that were not the case, it could not be administered to our own special forces in their training.
It is not a matter of “undefining” torture, but of keeping it in it’s historical, classical and rightful meanings.
Is it intense “psychological warfare”, on an individual scale? Yes. Torture? No.
I have been busy in my chores as temp caregiver for my mom, so I have not been on the boards till now. I may check out Fox to see if anything in the way of videos is still available on this one.
2007: Torture update: What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?
Cause today Nancy says this...FR Thread:
Pelosi is one operator. One hell of a lier and actor. She is every bit as good as Zero and BJ in the lying department, by all indications.
Thanks Ernest.
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