Thank God The Blunderer-In-Chief Hired A Few Honest People

Thank God The Blunderer-In-Chief Hired A Few Honest People

This article that originally came from the New York Times shows that someone understands that crises cause judgment errors--and without the self-righteousness of the left:

WASHINGTON - President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

...

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

...

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Mr. Bush, said on Fox News Sunday last weekend that “the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a separate interview with Fox, endorsed that conclusion and said he has asked the C.I.A. to declassify memos detailing the gains from the harsh interrogations.

Several news accounts, including one in the New York Times last week, have quoted former intelligence officials saying the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda operative who was waterboarded 83 times, did not produce information that foiled terror plots. The Bush administration has long argued that harsh questioning of Qaeda operatives like Zubaydah helped prevent a planned attack on Los Angeles and cited passages in the memos released last week to bolster that conclusion.

The four memos that the ACLU sought, and that the Obama Administration released, are available here, and are worth reading. While I would certainly describe the interrogation techniques as unpleasant, they are (with the exception of waterboarding) more psychologically manipulation than torture in a physical sense. And the first of these memos, from August of 2002, when we were still waiting for another shoe to drop (or have its fuse lit on an airliner), discusses one of three waterboarded al-Qaeda leader, Zubaydah, who had shown considerable resistance to less harsh interrogation techniques.

Having exposed these techniques, such as locking Zubaydah in a box with a "stinging insect" (actually a caterpillar) because he was freaked out by bugs, many of them are no longer likely to be very effective in the future. And you know what, even if the U.S. never ever used waterboarding again, leaving al-Qaeda in the dark about what might happen in interrogation is something of a good thing. Sometimes the fear of what might be waiting for you is the scariest thing of all.

I am sure that may Democrats are saying, "Well, how would you like to be treated this way?" I wouldn't. But then again, I don't run around hijacking airliners and crashing them into buildings, nor do I execute people by beheading them. Don't do things like that, and it makes it far less likely that you have to worry about it. And I also know that if I fell into the hands of al-Qaeda (which is about as likely as ending up in Angelina Jolie's male harem), that regardless of the interrogation techniques used by the CIA, I would be subject to severe abuse. It's part of what al-Qaeda does--gouging out eyes, using power tools, etc.

One of the most interesting aspects of the series 24 is that it gives you something of a clue of the sort of circumstances that cause good people to engage in repugnant interrogation practices--because the results of not getting that information will be far more ugly. And it is apparent that there was more torture, in the real sense of the world, in many single episodes of 24 than there was used against high ranking al-Qaeda operatives.

Another point: there were a lot of people held at Gitmo who were taken not by U.S. or Coalition forces on the battlefield, but supposedly taken on the battlefield by various Afghan warlords. There is some serious question as to whether many of them were even enemy combatants. That I understand. There is no allegation that these people were subject to these "enhanced" interrogation techniques. From what I read, a total of three high ranking al-Qaeda operatives were waterboarded--and that's the only one of the techniques revealed in these memos that I would call torture.

The Obama Administration keeps going back and forth about prosecuting Bush Administration officials for these memos. I actually hope that they do--starting with President Bush. This will force them to stop playing politics with this issue, because at trial, Bush will demand release of the documents concerning the intelligence obtained, and force a frank and open discussion of the dangers that our country was exposed to at the time. By the time it is done, the Obama Administration will look like the opportunistic crooks that they are, and all but the left will be marveling at the restraint used. More importantly, a lot of Democratic leadership will be called to testify that they were informed of this stuff, and in some cases, saw demonstrations of waterboarding. This will expose them for the lying and opportunistic creeps that they are.