Let’s Summarize
There’s a battle raging in DC over whether rabid Democrats will hold a show trial, about whether President Obama’s DoJ should prosecute members of President Bush’s DoJ for writing legal opinions on harsh interrogation techniques. Based on this post, it’s safe to say that Powerline’s John Hinderaker is outraged:
Barack Obama has now changed his mind and, going back on the main theme of his election campaign–post-partisanship! What a joke–says that Eric Holder will decide whether to prosecute Justice Department lawyers for writing legal opinions that Eric Holder now disagrees with. (I’m curious to see what criminal statute they will claim the DOJ lawyers violated. To my knowledge, authoring a legal analysis with which Eric Holder disagrees is not a crime.)
Let’s get down to the most basic basic. The Constitution DEMANDS that the commander-in-chief protect us from enemies, whether they’re ecoterrorists, a dying superpower or Islamic fanatics.
Following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush’s most important responsibility was preventing another 9/11. That’s what he successfully did, thanks to harsh interrogation techniques and NSA intercepts. We know this through Marc Thiessen’s article:
For example, critics of the program say enhanced interrogation does not work because detainees will say anything to get the techniques to stop. Not so, says Abu Zubaydah. The released documents quote Zubaydah explaining that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardships.”
In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can, and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything and anything they know. The CIA’s job is to give them something to resist, so they can do their duty and then speak freely about planned attacks.
This previously unknown information is why the program was so effective, and its effectiveness was confirmed by the documents the president released. The documents note that after 9/11, mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed underwent enhanced interrogation, he gave up information that helped thwart an al-Qaeda plot called the “Second Wave,” in which a cell of East Asian terrorists were to highjack a plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.
The simple truth is that the interrogations worked. They prevented another major terrorist attack. To the best of my knowledge, that fits into the commander-in-chief’s responsibility of “protecting us from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Note the prominence of the word ALL. Notice, too, that it doesn’t say that this is voluntary, as in a suggestion. Notice that it’s an affirmative responsibility. As in ALWAYS.
Politicians can’t prohibit, or put limits on, those things that the Constitution mandates.
Only people who care more about image than they care about human life would argue with that. That’s what Gary Kamiya does in this article. The title of the article is telling:
Torture works sometimes — but it’s always wrong
The subtitle gives him a little wiggle room:
The “ticking bomb” scenario only happens on TV. Those, like Dick Cheney, who cite it are leading society down a fatal slippery slope of abuse.
First, let’s address Mr. Kamiya’s statement that the ticking bomb scenario leads “society down a fatal slippery slope of abuse.” IT DOESN’T!!! There’s never been proof of his assertion.
I’d love to agree with Mr. Kamiya but he’s wrong. The ticking bomb scenario doesn’t happen often in real life but it’s happened in real life. Here’s the proof:
According to our intelligence community, other plots stopped thanks to enhanced interrogation include: a plot to hijack airplanes and fly them into Heathrow Airport and downtown London; a plot to blow up our consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and our Marines camp in Djibouti; and an al-Qaeda cell that was developing anthrax for attacks on the United States. If it were not for these techniques, there would be craters in Los Angeles, London and Karachi to match the one in downtown New York.
With all due respect to the pantywaists that get the vapors at the thought of using enhanced interrogation techniques, saving thousands of human lives is infinitely more important than “maintaining our image in the world.”
Maintaining our image in the world is a nicety; protecting our citizens from terrorist attacks is a constitutional imperative. That’s quite a difference in importance.
Technorati Tags: Terrorism, Attacks, Los Angeles, London, Karachi, Interrogation, Waterboarding, CIA, Commander-In-Chief
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
Once again, history is coming around to bite the Democrats in the @#$#.
The Church commission in the late seventies exposed CIA methods and practices to the point where the agency was ineffective in preventing things like the Tehran Hostage Crisis. This, coupled with Jimmy Carter’s absolute ineptitude and focusing on getting other nations to ‘like us,’ guaranteed international disaster for the US.
Obama believes of course that he is smarter and better than anyone else, so the results for him should be different. However, He won’t be able to blame the next attack on American soil on someone else. He and CNN will try, but it won’t stick this time.
Clinton and the Obama team are absolute fools to think that the outcome would be different if they expose and prosecute those that actually defend the country.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 am
It should be quite obvious by now, that Obama really gives a shit about the consututution and his oath to support and defend it and thereby the the country.
Face it folks, we’ve elected ourselves an ego maniac who cares about one thing and one thing only - himself. This grand apology tour to Europe and the OAS no doubt goes down well with academia and the media, and of course the Obama maniacs, but should be more than disturbing to any real American. Because this was not about defending the people of the United States, but entirely about getting the big ME, Obama, into the world dictators club. Now its on to demonizing the middle class, nationalizing te economy and entrenching himself in the White House.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I can’t wait for another attack to happen on American soil so I can finally be proven right for blaming Democrats for being weak on terror. When will Democrats learn that the only way to fight terrorism is to torture suspects for information, just like Jack Bauer, because the cost is worth the avoidance of another attack. But the world needs to understand that only America is allowed to torture.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
And in Liem’s world, only punk ass teen aged pirates and Islamic terrorists, (oh Im sorry, creators of “man made catastrophies”), are allowed to get away with murder and mass destruction, because somehow we are above torture, even of it means the lives of thousands of Americans are put in jeopardy.
With all due respect, you are one sick ass loon.
No we should not be above the torture of a bunch psychotic radical nut cases, hell bent on killing Americans, because even you are worth saving, Mr Liem.
What do you think of that!
April 24th, 2009 at 11:15 am
That’s why I’m saying you should never trust a Muslim. If they do anything remotely suspicious, we should imprison them and secretly torture them until they confess about their secret plots to take away our freedoms and allow gays to marry by attacking us. And even if they give false confessions under torture, we should continue torturing these radical nut cases until they give us real information that will prevent thousands of American deaths. And the only price we have to pay is our country’s integrity.
The sorry situation here is that we don’t torture enough. Just think of how much safer we will all be if torture were used on criminals, as long as it’s not used on right-wing extremists. That’s just Obama being politically racist.
April 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Liem is right. Isn’t it great that we conservatives can now admit the one thing we all secretly agree upon: we love torture. I can’t stand all this whining about “enhanced interrogation”: what sort of gobbledegook is that? It’s for wimps. We like torturing people. The fact that we complain about, or indeed execute, foreign nationals who use the same techniques on us is just funny. Consistency is for wimps, too. And Thiessen is also right: seen in a certain way, we are setting these muslims free by torturing them. It’s almost an act of love. Aren’t we great?
April 24th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
What the Obama administration needs to do is release the memos that says Bush protected us from another 9/11 because the torturing we’ve done has been so effective. Only then will these lefty loons finally shut up about how torture doesn’t work. But I highly doubt Obama will actually have the balls to prove to this country that torture is the greatest and most effective method in protecting America.
So it’s up to our hero, Dick Cheney, to spell it out for us. He would know best since he authorized the protection of America by making sure lawyers were involved. On top of that, he made sure America was aware of his role as awesome protector when news first broke on Abu Ghraib instead of letting a few bad apples take the fall for him. Man, what an American hero.