CIA Agent: Waterboarding Saved Lives
Does waterboarding work? Without a doubt, yes. Abu Zubayda broke after 35 seconds of being waterboarded and, according to the man who did it, the information he gave let us stop “…a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks”.
Is waterboarding torture? Well, this CIA agent believes it is, as do a number of other very well-intentioned and reasonable people. I am not so sure that it is. The word “torture” carries a certain number of very weighty connotations that I’m not sure apply to waterboarding. Should it be a regular part of our interrogations? Of course not, and I’m very glad that it isn’t. Let us remember here that for all the sturm und drang over waterboarding, it has been used only three times since 9/11, it hasn’t been used since 2003, and a bipartisan group of our duly-elected officials had oversight over the program and registered no meaningful objections to it when it was in use. What we do know now, and many of us strongly suspected for some time, is that waterboarding was at the extreme point of a very carefully-followed and strictly-approved continuum of interrogation techniques. It was not used recklessly, as you might have gathered from the shrill MSM coverage and the frantic accusations from the left. But it has to be on the table. It has to be part of the continuum. Because of all the extreme things we could do, this one is by far the least damaging and it works.
Let’s also remember something very, very important. As distasteful as waterboarding is, it is a successful and necessary evil in a very, very brutal war. We should not forget that the people on whom this technique was used held information that could have killed dozens, hundreds, or even thousands 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 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.
I do not intend on making this a “well, those guys are worse” sort of argument. But we can not let the brutality of our enemy get very far from our memories. The effective, precise, expert and rare use of waterboarding on a savage enemy has saved lives. That, for me, is the end of the argument.
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Category: Featured, The Long War Here At Home
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Just because it's effective doesn't make it right. Just because it's not as bad as other methods of torture doesn't make it any better or more acceptable.
It's brutality and, unfortunately, typical of this administration. Lead by bully behavior.
That's the discussion, then, isn't it? What, exactly, is "right". Is it right not to waterboard someone, even though we know it works and we will save lives at the cost of none? What do we lose by keeping waterboarding at the tippy-top of our interrogation continuum, carefully controlled and done only with express permission of several superiors?
Or do we employ methods that, while may be a bit more time consuming, are just as effective and not torturous?
I'm all for getting the bad guys to talk. I just think that waterboarding and methods like that are barbaric (for lack of a better word) and we, the greatest power in the world, should be able to come up with a more humane, effective, even elegant way of getting the desired result.
I"m not sure what you mean by more humane, Cari, but waterboarding does no physical damage at all. It does no lasting mental damage. It frightens. It plays on a primal fear. That's it.
And how much more effective could a technique be? Abu Zubayda broke in 35 seconds. He had been training for goodness knows how many years. His whole life has been given over to pure hatred for infidels and an infidel broke him in less time than it takes to play the Final Jeopardy theme. That's pretty darned effective.
Elegant? Well, it's tough to find elegance in the world of face to face interrogation. Sometimes it is necessary to drive a wedge into a weak place in the detainee's mind and make sue he knows that you hold the power to open that weakness further or to spare him the humiliation. That's never elegant.
I'd say, for what it delivers, waterboarding is perhaps the most humane and effective technique we've found. That's why we use it when we need to. It is, I think, a testimony to our greatness that in the couple of years after Islamists tried to kill ten thousand of us and more, we've only seen fit to use that technique three times.
Three times. Would that our enemies were as "barbaric" as we.
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Then I suggest we pay restitution to the families of he Japanese soldiers we executed for waterboarding because we called it torture, opsie!
Also, if he cracked in just 35 second of waterboarding why did we waterboard him another 183 times. Either this CIA agent is lying (he didn't crack and give info) or he has just admitted that 182 times Zubayda was waterboarded/tortured was just for sport.
Either way I think he should be prosecuted.
I think you should do a little more research to find out what, exactly, was involved. I suspect that you really haven't read the most recent information that's been released about our interrogation program.
I agree with you Jimmie that water-boarding for the most part does not physical damage and you claim that is leave no "long lasting mental scars." Well you also claim that it is used to frighten the victim. Isn't Fear a form of Terrorism?
Not as you want to use it, no.
183 times was actually a false number concerning how many times he was waterboarded. that number came from the amount of buckets used in the process. Abu Zubayda himself gave a far lower number for how many times he was actually waterboarded.