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I’m going to start this post off with a really tough question, and I want you to answer it to yourself honestly. “Would you submit to torture, if you knew the lives of 3000 of your fellow citizens depended upon it”? Now, I only picked 3000 because we all have some experience with that figure. We know what it feels like to watch 3000 innocent Americans perish before our eyes on a clear, cold September morning.
Returning to the original question, I’m thinking that torture may actually be too broad a word. How about being really uncomfortable for a period of time? How about no maiming, no blood? How about believing that you are about to die, but not really being in a life threatening situation? How about “waterboarding”? That’s pretty specific. No excruciating pain, no lasting physical scars, no real danger of death, but pretty darned uncomfortable. Would you go through that for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of your fellow human beings? I think you might, and I want you to keep your answer in mind as you read the rest of this post. I’ve only asked this question because waterboarding has become the Liberal lightning rod for all that is wrong with our intelligence gathering programs. I just want to provide some perspective into it’s actual use, who it has been used on, and what results have been gained because of its use. Last year Jonah Goldberg wrote an article for National Review that discussed waterboarding and its use by the United States for intelligence gathering purposes. The article titled Five Minutes Well Spent describes the five minutes that waterboarding was actually used and who the three recipients of the technique were. Some really nasty characters with a lot of American blood on their hands, rather quickly gave up valuable information, which undoubtedly saved countless lives. I encourage you to follow the link and read the whole article. So the point of this article is: If, as I suspect, you would endure waterboarding to save the lives of many other Americans, is it so outrageous to use the technique as a tool on known terrorists who may be planning attacks on our Country many times worse than 9/11? The Libs get their mileage out of this issue, but I doubt that many of them know the true minimal extent to which waterboarding has actually been used, and against who in particular, but now you will know and you won’t be fooled by their rhetoric. Torture is bad. It is perhaps the worst possible way to gain information and clearly the most unsavory of available options. But, these people who don’t like us are tough, and not very nice, and not real eager to share their plans with us. Sometimes we have to fight repulsive intent with equally repulsive preemption. In Liberal la la land where everyone is good and decent, our enemies volunteer information to us so we can all avoid coercive unpleasantry such as waterboarding, and they don’t fly planes full of unsuspecting travelers into buildings full of innocent workers just to prove that they can. In the real world that we share with these characters who want all Americans dead, we should be concerned with the nature of torture and how repugnant it is. But if being uncomfortable and fearing for one’s life is the Liberal litmus test for torture, then yes, in some extreme situations, it may be our only recourse. However, Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, President Obama's nominee to lead the U.S. intelligence community, set our official policy, telling Congress yesterday that torture "is not moral, legal or effective" and that "there will not be any waterboarding on my watch." Fine, but the people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center, in the end, realizing that there was no way out of the choking smoke and heat, suffered unimaginable torture, which we as a Country must never forget, and as Americans, it is our duty and responsibility never to allow that to happen again at any cost.
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