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Waterboarding

Gets Allah’s vote. ABC: 

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

That sounds useful.  So now waterboarding’s got endorsements from Allah and Nancy Pelosi. I’m glad they stopped using that particular technique. It’s a political lightning rod and extreme.  A distasteful practice for Americans or their proxies. But we’re talking about thwarting terrorists who purposefully murder civilians by the thousands, not soldiers engaged in anything remotely resembling military operations. We’re talking about people who put power drills into the kneecaps of people they capture, apply blowtorches to their bodies and cut their heads off for the cameras. It’s an ugly war. If stopping them calls for harsh measures that the genteel, protected classes might find distasteful, so be it. The people who keep all of us safe have to do a lot of things not even close to waterboarding that the genteel classes would find distasteful.

Captains Quarters notes Kiriakou described a deliberate, command-approved escalation, and suggests that should be part of a process laid out in law. I’m not sure as a political matter how practical that is, and suspect we’ll be stuck with blaming Congress should it  transpire that a legal ban on harsh interrogation techniques ever prevents anyone from beating the clock. 

Welcome, FDL, assorted lefties! Glad to see you’ve dropped by for a dose of reality and common sense.  I know you enjoy hating fascism and oppression. Remind me to tell you some day what family day at a mass grave is like. Meanwhile, if you like being disgusted by this post, you’ll love despising these: Uh Oh.  Justice for Bilal. Black Like Barack. This one’s the most fun, though: Islamic Like My Cousin.  Some good news: only 18 percent of Americans are as gullible as you are.

Topics: GWOT

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:45 pm on Monday, December 10, 2007

11 Responses to “Waterboarding”

1. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   December 10th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

   It’s an ugly war. If stopping them calls for harsh measures that the genteel, protected classes might find distasteful, so be it.

   Amen.

2. welovekkk Says:
   December 10th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

   The_Real_JeffS Says:

   “It’s an ugly war. If stopping them calls for harsh measures that the genteel, protected classes might find distasteful, so be it.

   Amen.”

   Yeah you and KKK, Real JeffS. Mississippi is Burning again. Racists rule the world when good men say nothing.

3. tanstaafl Says:
   December 10th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

   As we lurch from one obsessive topic to the next , currently the merits and demerits of “waterboarding”.

   “Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique,” Kiriakou told ABC News. “And I struggle with it.”

   I don’t know about the sincerity of this guy in particular, but I’ll repeat that a lot of the caring and concern is trumped up for political purposes. Everybody’s “ok” with stuff (see WaPo story over the weekend of briefings of Congress in 2002) until “it” becomes the hot political story du jour.

   Then everybody sees a chance to emote and show their bleeding hearts, not to mention exploit the topic in the name of partisan political games.

   In my view of the planet, any individual even remotely associated with terror attacks, beheadings and the agenda of violent jihad doesn’t merit particular respect for his person.

   I’ve got 4 words. Daniel Pearl. Nick Berg.

   (actually I’ve got a lot more than 4)

4. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 12:55 am

   Mississippi is Burning again. Racists rule the world when good men say nothing.

   Racism is not the issue here. Ideology is the issue. Fascists using terrorism to push their religion values is the issue. People who are perfectly willing to kill innocent people by the thousands, all in the name of Allah. The KKK (as vile as they were, and still are) are pikers compared to the current crop of terrorists. Lynching? Ha! They’ll blow up school buses full of children with suicide bombers to make their point. Not that you care, so long as you can stand back and laugh.

   So you can take your sneering and condescending attitude, fold it until it’s all corners, and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

   Oh, by the way….racists don’t rule the world; they just want to, and it is people like you that enable them. The racism that you should be worried about is not in Mississippi. It’s in your own heart. Deal with it.

5. The Heretik : Proper News Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 1:01 am

   [...] bonum? Or some um boner? What is the problem with “waterboarding?” Is it really “torture” if it makes somebody feel like [...]

6. CIA Agent: Waterboarding Saved Lives : The Sundries Shack Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 1:26 am

   [...] of us. We should also not forget that we are not waterboarding choirboys here. I’ll bring Jules Crittenden in on this point: But we’re talking about thwarting terrorists who purposefully murder civilians [...]

7. Dave Surls Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 4:12 am

   We’re dealing with people who (among other things) kidnapped little American girls on 9/11/01 and then murdered them in cold blood by flying them into buildings.

   As far as I’m concerned ANYTHING we do to Muslim terrorists is fully justified, including the use of REAL torture.

   I’d rather see us burning captured terrorists alive then to see another American child killed by these scumbags.

   No mercy for these animals ought to be our policy.

8. RebeccaH Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

   The argument has muddied itself with hair-splitting over what actually constitutes torture. Kneecapping with a power drill? That’s torture. Waterboarding? Possibly, but the victim isn’t permanently harmed. And I cannot find within me the merest shred of sympathy for the cowardly, murderous likes of Abu Zubaydah. As far as I’m concerned, he’s done the crime, now he’s doing the time.

9. Michael Lonie Says:
   December 11th, 2007 at 10:13 pm

   Cheer up guys. If Hillary gets into the White House welovekkk and his fellow jerks will cheer her on when she orders the CIA to apply the electrodes to the genitals of the jihadist scum, and if a terrorist atrocity comes near him he’ll be leading the lynch mob down to the nearest mosque for vengeance, unlike we RWDBs who don’t target the innocent. He objects to what we are doing, like 90 percent of the “antiwar” types, solely out of partisan spite against Dubya and the GOP.

   I wonder if welovekkk realizes, with all his faux outrage over racism, that Jim Crow and the KKK night riding were done by Democrats?

   If you want real racists and fascists, welovekkk, look at the jihadist terrorists. They stand for everything that liberals in America supposedly oppose. And they are coming for you.

10. Jules Crittenden » Tragedy Lessened Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 8:42 am

    [...] met with al-Zawahri, and could be an excellent candidate for waterboarding, should he require Allah’s encouragement to spill what he knows about AQ. Not to mention what he knows about the whereabouts of the [...]

11. Bush Admits Ordered Being Mean To Terrorists, Think Progress Has Hissy Fit » Pirate’s Cove — Shiny! Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 7:59 am

    [...] Jules Crittenden puts it nicely Actually, Bush admits he approved harsh interrogation methods after being advised they were legal and did not constitute torture … seeing as they are applied to U.S. soldiers in training … and that the interrogators gained information that helped save lives. Think Progress, citing an entirely different situation, falsely claims that interrogators denied that the breaking of al-Qaeda terrorists without causing any physical harm via waterboarding saved lives. In fact, the only interrogator who participated in waterboarding to have spoken publicly about it to date has said while he didn’t like the method, it was quick, highly effective and in his estimation, may have prevented dozens of attacks. [...]

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