by Jack Lee
This article was meant to dovetail with the article “Torture in Perspective”, but from the view of just your every day kind of citizen.
If we should be tough on terrorists, then how tough should that be? Should we put panty hose on their head and take pictures to embarass them? Maybe punching them moderately in the stomach would be ok? Just how far should we go to get cooperation from them? President Obama says no to water boarding and threatens to investigate those responsible. He says, we need to stop the rough treatment of terrorists and that means no force of any kind. I can’t help but think, of all the issues before the President this one should rank near the bottom of his priorities. And discussing secret interrogation tactics in public, what good can that do? I think the USA was far safer when our soldiers obtained information from terrorists under a policy of “Don’t ask – don’t tell”. We got results and nobody except our enemies was worse off for our rough efforts.
Who here does not know that maniacal Islamic terrorists are sworn to do their absolute worst to us?
They have proven this time and again and everyone should know by now terrorists, make that Islamic terrorists, will use any means available to hurt us, be it nuclear, biological, chemical, aircraft, kidnappings, beheadings, etc., Maximum destruction and panic is their objective and they have only one rule, do whatever it takes to destroy Americans.
Their terror tactics make our interrogation methods look extremely mild by comparison, but you wouldnt know that by all the hand wringing in the White House these days. I am appalled by this!
Look folks, comparing our interrogation methods to any other nation in the entire world, we still come out looking good! Want to see tough, check out China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Vietnam, India, Russia, and many, many other nations are as bad or worse! There is simply no nation on earth with as much at risk as the United States that engages intel gathering any more humanely than we do…none. This should be to our credit that we are acting with great restraint even we are very much at risk!
Some might say, well, you didnt mention Switzerland, Norway, Sweden or Denmark, etc., they could all easily claim a higher moral ground when it comes to interrogation tactics. Maybe thats true to a point, but then I would have to remind you to compare apples to apples. None of these [nicer] countries are in the same risk category as America,
Radical Islam has not declared war on them and until they are they in the same spot they can’t wear the mantle of moral superiority. We only have to look to back a few decades to a time when many nations were at great risk from Nazi Germany, and we know exactly what they did to fight back. They didn’t quibble over how much force to use, they just did whatever it took or do you think Nazi captives and their collaborators were treated lightly?
This is why I find Obamas rhetoric about CIA torture so disturbingly unrealistic and out of touch. You have to seriously question if President Obama is acting in our best interests when he (one) says no more torture and (two) we will leave the door open for prosecution of those who created the torture policies. Torture is a strong word and it means many things to many people. In this case he uses it quite liberally to encompass almost anything that is uncomfortable, from sleep deprivation to water boarding. If thats the case, then a military boot camp must really be a torture camp! Soldiers in boot camp are forced to endure all kinds of discomfort such as sleep deprivation, exhaustion and verbal abuse. They are pushed to their mental and physical limits, but this is too harsh for an enemy sworn to destroy America?
Another odd thing Ive notice is that the Obama administration always chooses their words so carefully to avoid offending anyone even if those feeling offended are our enemies? And just recently his administration said they will replace the term fighting a war overseas against terrorism with an “overseas contingency operation” and further they will not be using the words Muslim and terrorist in the same sentence either. Ok, he just doesnt want to offend I get it. But, this is where it gets weird, because the Obama Administration then flips over and has no problem calling our non-leathal interrogation methods against these monsters…torture? Well that just happens to offend the Hell out of me and probably 75% of the rest of us that have our heads screwed on straight!
The typical liberals justification we hear for not allowing coerced confessions is that the captives will say anything and the information is always unreliable. Now this rational comes real close to stupid. Whenever possible, forced extractions are measured against other intelligence facts and then it is quantified on a 1 to 10 scale for credibility. This is how intel works, it does rely on just one thing. Furthermore, the prisoner knows we will check out his information and if he is caught lying it will not go well for him. So yes, absolutely, we do get good information and it happens all them time! How can these liberal morons say otherwise? Where do these people get off saying these tactics have no value? Dont believe me, ask anyone who has been in the military and had to force information from a captive. You will get a completely different answer 99% of the time. ( I reserve 1% for the nut cases that are bound to pop up. )
Since 9/11/01 the United States has not been attacked by Al Qaeda. There have been a number of attempts and each one failed because we were one step ahead of them. Now think about how that was possible? Let me tell you how…we used wire taps, surveillance, radio intercepts, link analysis, informants and we rolled up the bad guys and treated them roughly to get them to talk!!!! If we had not been playing rough there is credible evidence to suggest that a large scale terrorist attack would have been committed in Los Angeles about a year ago.
This is why I worry that President Obama will hand over our play book on interrogation to anyone, including our enemies and this will result in golden opportunities to extract high value intel that could have saved many innocent lives.