Mancow recently agreed to “be waterboarded” and after 6 seconds jumped up and declared, “Yes, this is torture”.
This is wrong on so many levels. Other than getting him invited to do TV shows and making him a hero on the Huffington Post, this bit of “radio shtick” was so wrong and damaging. I don’t pretend to understand Mancow’sradio show. It’s targeted at a much younger audience, one riddled with ADD, no appreciation of world history and to whom 6 seconds is a long time.
Problem #1 – Mancow is not a terrorist and doesn’t want to destroy Western Civilization. If I walked up to a stranger on the street and shoot them in the head, that’s wrong on every level. If I see someone shooting up a school, and running outside with a gun firing at random strangers and he’s headed to the playground – if I shoot him in the head, I’m a hero. Context matters. The U.S. waterboarded only 3 people, and those were very senior people who were known to have organized terror attacks against the US and were likely to know of other attacks, which raises problem #2.
Problem #2 – Mancow had no information he was concealing. The purpose of the interrogations were to convince the subject they needed to cooperate. Mancow had no information he was hiding. Water boarding was being done not to get criminal convictions (that was the Clinton era mistake that President Obama is resuming) or for sadistic pleasure. The purpose was to extract information to prevent further attacks and dismember the organization. The US Government has routinely killed members of this organization, and that has continued under the Obama administration. No Trials, no Search Warrants, no ACLU. Send in a predator missile and *boom* [of course, sometimes you end up killing other people nearby]. The reason these people in custody are alive is because we needed to know what they knew – not because we want to send them to prison.
The unintended consequence of the Democratic Party/Media frenzy over “torture” is – if you end up tying the hands of the US military and the CIA so that they have no effective ways to coerce known terrorist into giving up useful intelligence information, the military/CIA will revert to just killing everyone.
Let’s say you’re a commander and have a house surrounded in Afghanistan or Pakistan – and you know the person inside is a senior leader of a terrorist group. If you send your troops in to try to capture the leader, some of your troops will probably die in the attempt. If you do capture the person, you face criminal prosecution if you later are judged to have used too much coercion (even though the President of the United States told you it was okay at the time). Your alternative is to drop a laser guided bomb from 20,000 feet and blow up the house and hope you find a cell phone or computer in the rubble. Which do you do? Which choice better serves the longer term interests of the United States?