Waterboarding in perspective

From a witness to 9/11

Malone Vandam at New Paltz Journal gives us his take on all the overwrought fuss about waterboarding:

For those unfamiliar with waterboarding, its point is to induce the gag reflex in the person being questioned. If you’ve ever had something set that reflex off in you, you know that it’s not pleasant.

But then having the gag reflex induced is not to have a nail driven through your hand, it isn’t to have your eye gouged out, or to have a bullet fired into your kneecap, or to be beaten until you’re close to death, or to have acid dripped on your forehead.

Note, therefore, the difference between having the gag reflex induced and real acts of torture.

Now, when Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks was captured, it is said that after about a minute of waterboarding he gave up the goods. When he was finished talking he was sent off to his reward at Guantanamo, where a clean cell awaited his murdering bastard self.

No one knocked his teeth out, or pulled them out one by one. No one hooked electrical wires to his genitals and juiced him. No one cut off his digits one by one. Hell, no one even put one of his legs through a plastic shredder, as Saddam Hussein’s boys would have done to him, had they needed to know something he knew.

No, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded. Had the living shit scared out of him by the induced gag reflex. Then he gave up his terror network. And we haven’t been attacked, like we were on September 11, since September 11. I’ll take that trade, without any remorse whatsoever.

I'll add my two cents. Many leftists claim torture doesn't work; that the subjects will say anything to get their agony to stop. But that ignores the ability of the torturer to verify the information. Suppose the bad guy is being asked to give up the name and address of a suicide bomber before the bomber kills dozens of innocent civilians. The bad guy can't just give the torturer the name and address of just anybody; he (or she) needs to provide the name and address of someone who is a suicide bomber. So, the argument that torture doesn't work is bogus. Apparently, waterboarding works as well as actual torture. It has the advantage that the bad guy isn't actually harmed in the process, so he is less likely to go into shock or expire, than would be the case if, by way of comparison, his kneecaps were being drilled with your standard Black and Decker home handyman's electric drill. In WW2, British agents working behind enemy lines were routinely issued cyanide pills to use if they were captured by the Nazis. The Brits wouldn't have done that if they believed torture didn't work. That's one cent.

Let's now turn to the Geneva conventions. The President could say that we will treat all prisoners according to the Geneva conventions, provided the prisoners were fighting for a country that was a signatory, and adhered to them. That would rule out doing much more than asking for name, rank and serial number.

Terrorists operate outside the framework of the Geneva conventions. Islamic terrorists do not even consider such infidel agreements applicable; Allah did not sign off on them. I haven't noticed any Muslim clerics issuing Fatwas instructing Muslims to abide by the Geneva conventions. To do so would rule out such Islamic terrorist specialties as attacking pizza parlors with suicide bombers, cutting the throats of journalists and civilian contractors, blowing up school children with car bombs, bombing buses, nightclubs and trains, and flying civilian aircraft into skyscrapers.

The President could say that those of our enemies that do not obey the laws of civilized warfare will be treated as unlawful combatants and treated with utmost disrespect; such disrespect to start with whatever interrogation methods yield useful information and end with summary execution. Our enemies could easily forestall that by signing the Geneva conventions and adhereing to them. Of course, doing so would mean that they could no longer commit terrorist acts. Fat chance. That's my second cent.

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