Feb 14 2008

Senate tries to ban waterboarding, otherwise known as an effective technique.

Posted by: Neocon in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Terrorism

(Via Gateway Pundit) So the Senate voted yesterday to ban the use of waterboarding and other interrogation tactics. One of the most important advantages in warfare that an army can have comes from keeping the most (or at least more) information secret from your enemy than he can from you, so that you can consistently create and exploit advantages faster than the enemy can counter them. The passed legislation “would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual.” If this bill were to become law, we would lose every single interrogation and intelligence gathering advantage that we could ever hope to have in the Global War on Terror.

Terrorists who are picked up would no longer need to worry about the unknown. We wouldn’t get a peep out of them. These vile Jihadists, especially those with actionable intelligence about future terrorist attacks, wouldn’t need to worry about the military man screaming at them as they sit in a dark hole somewhere because they would be assured by the laws of the United States that he wasn’t going to do anything untoward to them. Even the illusion of possible maiming or covert coercion are gone. With the Congress literally handing Al Qaeda the list of “worst things that will happen to a captured Jihadi” you can bet that it will become required reading at all these training camps peppered throughout the Middle East.

Beyond destroying the ability to save American lives by obtaining actionable intelligence from captured high level targets, something we know has happened through the use of waterboarding, and lowering captured terrorist cooperation dramatically, laying out the list of mediocre interrogation possibilities will be a boon for Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts. When they know the worst that will happen to them, and it isn’t much, then potential Jihadists suddenly don’t need the resolve of a lion to join the terrorist’s ranks. They don’t need to worry about what American might do, what resolve America might show, because they will have the entire blueprint displayed on the front page of every American newspaper.

The same can be said for giving enemy combatants the rights that American citizens enjoy. You’re handing a recruiting tool to Al Qaeda, and proving Osama bin Laden’s addage about the United States being nothing more than a paper tiger that will crumple under pressure.

It is true that we have an inkling of what Al Qaeda will do to people who it captures. We know they routinely engage in true torture such as using power tools on prisoners, live decapitations, and gross mutilation. We know they’re willing to torture and kill children, that they relish the idea of murdering 2 million American children. In the face of this, publicly chastising those protecting us in the War on Terror and banning some of the most tame (and carefully supervised by medical officials) of the ‘harsh interrogation tactics’ will only make us appear impotent in the eyes of our enemies. It will go beyond that, it will castrate our war effort.

John McCain, someone in favor of banning waterboarding, voted against this bill. Is this continued evolution on McCain’s position, one of the most unnerving that he holds, or simply an attempt to placate his party’s conservative base? Only more action will tell. We’ve seen various answers from McCain, from outright banning of the practice, to making it illegal but allowing Presidential pardons for those officials who use the practice in the ‘ticking clock’ imminent terrorist attack scenario.

It is precisely because of the potential for a ‘ticking clock’ that we need to keep these well-supervised tactics on the table.

By the way, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton skipped the vote.

P.S.: We also give Gitmo detainees Starbucks coffee and food whenever they want it. We’re monsters.

Update 11:00AM CST:

Oh, by the way, in the original story this quote appears:

“Retaliation is the way of the world. What we do to others, they will do to us—but worse,” Rockefeller said. “This debate is about more than legality. It is also about morality, the way we see ourselves … and what we represent to the world.”

That just doesn’t fly, Rockefeller. There isn’t much worse than killing 3,000 people, cutting out people’s eyes, hacking off their heads, or burning people alive. They already do these things, they will continue doing these things, and they’ve been doing them well before we went into Iraq or starting picking up these terrorist leaders. That is why we have to stop them first. What you would represent to the world is weakness. What you would have us represented as is a society so blind that it is begging for more.