They Saved Lives
By Johnny Roosh
The CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed over 250 times.
As former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out last week, half of the U.S. government’s knowledge of al-Qaida’s structure and activities is the fruit of enhanced interrogation.
…which is to say torture – let’s not mince words
That information let the U.S. and other governments foil numerous 9/11-style operations, saving hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives.
The torture of terrorists, not babies, not harp seals, not your neighbors, not your friends…saved innocent lives.
We understand that people have legitimate concerns about the U.S. being involved in torture. But enhanced interrogation — a reasonable (but now rescinded) response to the deadliest of threats to our homeland — should be seen for what it is: a tough, but effective, way to save lives.
War on Terror Scorecard: Obama 0, Terrorists 1
April 24th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Rick,
This is why discussing with you feels like such a sisyphean waste of time:
I had assumed that everyone believed that the interrogation techniques of the Soviets were the paradigm example of illegal, immoral, and unreliable techniques.
Haha, cute misdirection, bla bla bla.
Human nature, behavior, science and psychology are not political. While i would prefer we avoided physical torture (in the classical sense, as opposed to the almost meaningless sense the left gives it today), psychological coercion of terrorists legitimately captured in action against the US is not the same as Stalin’s mass arrest, uprooting and murder of millions, including entire ethhic groups (like those of my hometown’s Volgadeutch who’d not emigrated to the US).
Let’s also address for a moment the “unreliable information” canard. Any given datum extracted by torture is likely to be unreliable – that is true. So is any given datum extracted by psychological coercion, skilled interrogation, drugs, jailhouse snitches, bugs or hearsay. Individual pieces of data, valid or not, take on value when compared and corroborated with the subject’s earlier and later statements, and the statements of other subjects – not by itself in a vacuum.
That Stalin’s evil went beyond the 40 million. I had assumed that the whole purpose of these methods was to produce false confessions.
The “whole” purpose? An important one, but hardly the only, or even an especially important one (“confessions” were utterly superfluous to the Soviet “legal” system; “guilt” for political “crimes” was determined in advance). Read Solzhenitzyn; the purpose was to cow, humiliate and break not only individuals, but society as a whole.
If you want to go to defend the legality, morality, and effectiveness of Soviet police techniques, feel free.
Please stop wasting my time with the juvenile misdirections. I am not amused.
I am sure America would warmly embrace a GOP that came out strong on the issue.
Perhaps a lesson on the historic ties between the DFL and the Stalin-era Communists is in order.