A Tortured Charade

We are not safer, and the President's Guantanamo posturing, along with the release of the "torture memos" only puts us more in danger.

Cheney and Obama went head-to-head a few weeks ago over the treatment of captured terrorsts, with the former VP administering a masterful schooling to the President. Gerald Seib sums the issue up quite succinctly in his definitive WSJ analysis:

He (Cheney) said the release "was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States," adding that it gave terrorists "a lengthy insert for their training manual."

Mr. Obama said releasing the memos in no way helped aspiring terrorists train against U.S. tactics, since the interrogation techniques were now banned by the White House.

Cheney is right. Obama is wrong. Here is how the memos help any terrorist going up against the US:

The memos reveal our medically-supervised, careful regard for human life and the law, what with the fake walls, anti-whiplash collars and whatnot. Oliver North said it best. I paraphrase from memory, with my own embellishments added in, so apologies to the Colonel:

These techniques were intended to scare the crap out of the scraggly bearded rabble we scooped up off the battlefield. Killing and torturing is against our values, so we cannot do those things; but we sure as hell can make captured combatants think that we will torture or kill them. So we scare the crap out of them hoping they will spill the beans. We crafted a deliberately well-thought out plan intended to put mortal fear into them, but the cat's out of the bag now.

What's the lesson?

Imagine the following advice being dispensed in a thick Arabic accent to a young jihadi: Americans are weak. They can't even bring themselves to kill their mortal enemies. If you're captured, take the fifth, ask for your ACLU lawyer and an International Red Cross representative. You can ride out whatever they throw at you while reclining at table eating halal. Accuse them of Koran abuse while you're at it. They will not kill you, they will not harm you. They will only try to scare you with threats that we now know are empty.

That's it folks. The Obama administration has emptied the toolbag. Feel safer now?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124291383880043289.html
WSJ - No Middle Ground - Gerald Seib

Gitmo is Not a Gulag

Gitmo is not a gulag and the hysterical torture allegations remain unsubstantiated

The heady first 100 days are over and reality has set in; we may not be shuttering Guantanamo after all. Arthur Herman has written the most coherent summary of the Gitmo issue to date. Like Dick Cheney, who cleaned the President's clock on this issue, he presents a cogent defense of the facility.

The whole Gitmo as gulag trope was a socialist myth anyway. The International Red Cross and various human rights organization have almost carte blanche access to the facility as they do to all US military-run prisons. While working at a prison in Southern Iraq I used to run into snooty Euro Red Cross workers on my way to breakfast. They would sneer at me and my buds if we made eye contact with them. They clearly had contempt for all things American and would not hesitate blowing the whistle on us.

Indeed, what we should do is turn this into an International Model Detention Facility, complete with liberal watchdogs and European Criminal Court judges with powdered wigs. We must bring legitimacy to the Global War on Terror (or whatever the O-ministration is calling it nowadays) and this is just the way to do it.

Either Europe can take its stinking, scraggly-bearded rabble back, or it can join us in ushering in a new era of hope and change for the imprisoned at Guantanamo.

Commentary - Arthur Herman

Condi Bats Down the BS

This is the recent confrontation Condoleezza Rice had with a student at Stanford.

Dr. Rice gives the best defense of the Bush Administration's interrogation policy I have seen to date. Most impressive is that she did it impromptu (no teleprompter!) and with such grace. Her towering intellect was no match for the little lib who tried to take her on. Ever the diplomat, Condi knew she was in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, so she eviscerated his nonsense in a charitable, professorial manner.


Notice how the legitimate questioner at the end, in a Freudian slip, calls waterboarding torture by accident? That is the power of words, and the power of definitional abuse practiced so effectively by the left. James Delingpole provides excellent commentary on this at his Telegraph Blog.

Condoleezza Rice For President 2012!

The News Media is Torturing Us

The "Torture Memos" have the unhinged Bush haters ululating with excitement.

Here's a simple question for those screaming "torture!" What is the definition of torture? Not your definition, but the only one that counts in this discussion, the legal One. Here is one definition from the US Code:

Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code, prohibits torture committed by public officials under color of law against persons within the public official's custody or control. Torture is defined to include acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. (It does not include such pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions.) The statute applies only to acts of torture committed outside the United States. There is Federal extraterritorial jurisdiction over such acts whenever the perpetrator is a national of the United States or the alleged offender is found within the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or the alleged offender.

You can read the International Committee of the Red Cross's broader definition here .

The screaming hordes spilling ink and infesting our radios and TV sets have so misused and sensationalized this word, but no one has started by defining it. Such blather is unproductive and unworthy of your attention. These sensationalists also risk falling prey to the logical fallacy of equivocation, where the meaning of a word, especially an emotional one like torture, is shifted to fit the arguer's agenda.

This tower of babble has various agendas: The lefties use it to further castigate and discredit the Bush "regime," and the good folks at FOX, CNN, et al are milking it to rake in the advertising dollars by keeping you agitated and tuned in. Getting at the truth has nothing to do with it.

How can the critics be so sure we tortured when they can't even honestly define it?

DOJ Manual
ICRC
HuffPo
Wikipedia - Equivocation

Truth Commission

I initially recoiled at the idea of establishing a "truth commission" to investigate supposed crimes of the Bush administration. It lumps this president and his team in the same category as dictators and military regimes. This categorization is only at home in the fevered imaginings of Bush Derangement Syndrome patients.

This article by Stuart Taylor has made me reconsider. We know that Abu Graib style abuses have happened. Were these rogue operations, or were they authorized, tacitly or otherwise, by government officials? Did torture happen? To what extent? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? As a society that upholds high democratic ideals, we have a responsibility to ourselves and the world to get to the bottom of whatever happened, document it, and report the results for all the world to see.

We need to get the facts out in the open, if for no other reason than to knock down the nuttiest speculations and to exonerate anyone who may have been unfairly smeared.

...the U.S. needs to take serious steps to show reasonable critics at home and abroad that we are not going to sweep the evidence of Bush administration torture under the rug. This is not necessarily to suggest that Bush, his appointees, or other U.S. officials should be prosecuted. Most or all would have a valid defense of good-faith reliance on then-authoritative -- although erroneous and now-repudiated -- legal advice from the Justice Department.

Who could conduct such an investigation and prevent it from becoming a political circus? Only a respected Republican of "unquestioned stature" who is...

"known for courage and for independence from both Bush and Obama -- and for personal knowledge of the horrors of torture. His name John McCain."

I still hate the idea of all this, but the Bush administration's failure to construct a coherent legal framework to deal with jihadis scooped up from GWOT battlefields has led us here. Iron clad proof would not pacify the Bush haters, but a thorough review would at least establish a record of findings that reasonable people could analyze, debate, and learn from.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20090404_6094.php