Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Andy McCarthy on the Interrogation Memos
Over at NRO, Andy McCarthy writes about "The Real Interrogation Scandal":
"Law provides guidance for the human condition in all its endless variety. As such, it always accounts for context. It is a favorite talking point of leftists and libertarian extremists that heightened security measures 'suspend' the Constitution even though a crisis is when the Constitution is most needed. Never has anything so vapid been repeated with such indignation. The Constitution is never suspended. It anticipates war and peace, insurrection and domestic tranquility, and prescribes adjustments for different conditions. Free speech is guaranteed but treason is proscribed. Privacy is guaranteed but searches are authorized. Liberty is guaranteed but imprisonment is permitted. Life is guaranteed but the death penalty is permitted...
"In 2002, the only thing our lawmakers wanted to know was whether we were being tough enough on high-value detainees. In 2002, Barack Obama and Eric Holder wouldn't have dared take a courageous stand against enhanced interrogation tactics for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In fact, back then, when it was expedient to be tough on terror, Holder was telling anyone who would listen that these al-Qaeda savages who murdered Americans absolutely did not deserve Geneva Convention protections.
"To carp now about the rule of law is shameful. The rule of law hasn't changed. But they have."
Read the whole thing.
CWCID: NRO
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Apr 22, 07:59:00 AM:
I thought we'd beaten the propriety of waterboarding to death. Before it expired, it didn't tell us much we didn't already know.
I posted earlier here that my paranoid side was saying that Obama released the papers on interrogation when he did as a distraction from energy and banking, where he's pushing his agenda this week. I believe I'm right. There's little in what just came out about waterboarding that we didn't already know ... but torture is a red flag for elements of the right and left ... it's dominating the news cycle.
This week Waxman is holding hearings about how to totally f*ck-up our domestic energy industry. It could turn out to be the single worst thing that Obama & Co. do, which is saying a lot. Waxman may be worse than Barney Frank, which is saying a lot. McCain is highly critical, but no one wants to listen to an old washed-up loser talk of boring things when they'd rather debate whether Jack Bauer is right or wrong.
Once again, we've been played.
Link, over.
By , at
Wed Apr 22, 03:40:00 PM:
Torture saved L.A., or at least waterboarding did. If one considers waterboarding torture, then torture saved L.A. Would we have been better off if no torture had been used? It's a worthwhile question to ponder, and I can make arguments for both sides of the question.
Anyway, I'm convinced Obama only does things for PR value. It's his governing style, to the extant that he understands governing. This "We might prosecute Bush" is a story with legs, and it motivates his base like no other meme. He must need them for something upcoming, and he's whipped up their attention big time. PR, it's all PR.
By , at
Wed Apr 22, 08:24:00 PM:
"The report, which runs 261 pages and contains nearly 1,800 footnotes, sheds new light on the adaptation of techniques from a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), used to train American service personnel to resist interrogations if captured by an enemy that does not honor the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture. The military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) has been reported to have reverse-engineered these methods to break al-Qaeda prisoners. The techniques, including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, were drawn from the methods used by Chinese Communists to coerce confessions from U.S. soldiers during the Korean War -- a lineage that one instructor appeared to readily acknowledge.
"We can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades," Joseph Witsch wrote in a July 2002 memo.
The report shows Pentagon officials reaching out to the military agency for advice on interrogations as early as December 2001 and finding some specialists eager to help. By late 2001, counterterrorism officials were becoming frustrated by the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations -- a meager showing that was linked, according to one Army major, to interrogators' insistence on "establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," the report said. "
So in other words we tortured to backfill a link that didn't exist?
By , at
Thu Apr 23, 10:20:00 AM:
So, all those words were merely a struggle to somehow tie waterboarding to Iraq? Two favorite themes of the left, tied together! Idiotic.
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Fri Apr 24, 07:38:00 PM:
"By late 2001, counterterrorism officials were becoming frustrated by the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations -- a meager showing that was linked, according to one Army major, to interrogators' insistence on "establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," the report said."
That's retarded. Either that Army major didn't know what the hell he was talking about, or he's been misrepresented. (or invented)
If you want to know why initial interrogations were failures, reading The Interrogators would be a good place to start.
