Oops. Turns out waterboarding does work and we initially learned the the identify of the courier who lead us to Osama Bin Laden from Sheikh Khalid Mohammed during a waterboarding session.
Here’s what then Senator Obama said about waterboarding back in October 2007:
“The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer – it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration’s approach. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.”
And here’s an equally incensed Senator Joe Biden saying the same thing on Face The Nation:
Biden on Waterboarding by hotairpundit
Will Obama and Biden now retract their statements and admit that Bush’s policies worked?
Don’t hold your breath. Unless you’re being waterboarded, that is.
Source: ProCon.org
This post was last modified on May 3, 2011
View Comments (22)
Boy were you sensitive. I don't credit Obama with any of it. I credit the build-up of the CIA, NSA and their experienced staff. All of which can be credited to Mr Bush. As Pearlcat said, Obama mereley OK'ed a good plan. Constructed by our military with the help of our intelligence community. An intelligence community strengthened by Bush. And so I credit Bush for laying the foundations for this remarkable sucess.
However, I have yet to see any evidence saying that Waterboarding had part of it... the only thing out there is an AP story that says that KSM denied knowledge of any such curier during the waterboarding session... and then gave it up later during "normal" interrogation.
I don't get it, why are some people so determined that we just HAVE to sink closer to those bastards level in order to capture them when what little tangible evidence there is out there says the complete opposite? I haven't seen anything supporting the claims that waterboarding played a part in this case. And just because I prefer reading from several different sources that does not make me a liberal.
As for the Marxist remarks, I've lived in Europe for 12 years... If you think that site is leftist/Marxist... you have no clue what Marxism is. Liberals seem extremely logical compared to Marxist, and that's saying a lot.
Alright Robert, if you think I was too touchy about this website, realize that offering a liberal website as proof for the veracity of your argument will not convince people who have absolutely no trust in the truthfulness of liberals. Understand also, that any commentary that comes to us from anywhere, before the SEAL team had a chance to be properly debriefed, is conjecture and pure speculation and political posturing. Obama, took almost all of the credit for this BlackOps venture. The way things turned out, I'd say it was more WetOps, because with all the secrecy and obfuscation going right in front of our faces, it's making me think it was never the intent to capture OBL, however, I've been wrong before, I may be wrong now. Too many things are being held back from public scrutiny, that always raises red flags for me.
I'm not overly convinced that the information that came to us, persuent to this raid, was gathered entirely through enhanced interrogation techniques. What everybody calls waterboarding is one of several such enhanced techniques, believe me when I tell you that enhanced doesn't automatically mean torture. Uncomfortable yes, but not necessarily torture. Scripture is right when it tells us: "Spare the rod and spoil the child!" Sometimes you have to really convince very bad little boys that it is in their own best interests to come forward with information that, if held in evil boyish confidence will certainly result in the death of innocents. I don't consider waterboarding cruel and unusual punishment (ie., torture), I consider it intimidating and uncomfortable. It leaves no mark, it causes no lasting trauma, it does get results out of certain individuals. It is not and has never been used on more than a very small handful of individuals, like maybe as many as you can count on one hand. I'm serious, one hand...it's the MSM and hucksters playing to the camera for reelection purposes that beat this whole issue into the dirt, so please pardon my sensitivity!
Hey, no appology needed. I merely took some offence my self as I saw it as being compared to a Marxist. But no harm done. And I simply enjoy having intelligent discussions, which means i will continue to question everything i don't agree with. Some times I end up being right, some times I end up being wrong and learning something new.
Hell, that's why I'm on this site in the first place: to have these discussions. This being one of the few sites one can have them, as an opposite to the "liberal" sites out there that shuts me down on account of be apparently being a "right-wing nut". Oddly enough, Im often a "marxist" here... Even though a would definetely call my self a conservative.
O well, this site: and you and pearlcat in perticular have become a bit of a light in the intellectual darkness for me as you two have so many times gotten in on the discussion with me. Thank you for that, and sorry if I was un-necessarily confrontational this time around.
Oh gracious friend, you aren't confrontational! If anybody's confrontational, it's me. You are a sport and you have ideas that are kind of, well, squishy, for lack of a better word. Stop arguing with liberal because they'll just give you inoperable brain cancer! Their spineless squishyness is infectious and when you get their illness, penicillin doesn't always work. Play with us and you'll get a much better education, regardless whether some of us can spell or not.
You had me at squishy.
I think there's a deep seated desire for it to be true. The problem is, it is one piece of a very large puzzle and nobody's going to share the important pieces -- while I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it directly led to bin Laden's removal, I also am not ruling it out. I wasn't there, you know.
I'd accept it as a vindication of the overall apparatus that Bush put in place, demand that he be given the respect due him and for Barry & Co to drop the immature blaming of him for every ill and let it go at that.
There was a desperation for information because our intelligence was caught flat-footed after 9/11 -- and I think we can all agree that you do not want to embarrass the NSA, CIA, and whatever is in place that we don't know about these days. Waterboarding did provide information, but there better ways of getting it, and those ways also leave the administration less exposed to political pressure. There are so many problems with torture, including unreliable information, and retaliation (not that that seems to be the case here -- the terrorists seem perfectly capable of committing atrocities without the impetus of "it happens to our guys, so it's OK").
In the long run, treating captives with dignity *does* pay off. I know several German POW's who immigrated to the US on the basis of the treatment they received -- and I'd be the last to impugn their integrity. In fact, their treatment was documented as enticing other Germans to surrender -- they knew that they would be fed and treated better even than they were in their particular service. We showed them decency, and they reciprocated. Not to say that we did the same with the SS, or that they would have deserved it. Just that there are varying levels of prisoners, and some respond to decency, and others don't.
I'd say that Bush had a tiger by the tail by instituting waterboarding -- it paid some dividends, but better equipment and methods have since replaced them, and I'm less enthused about celebrating its effectiveness in favor of more effective intelligence gathering. However effective it may or may not have been, once he had started it, he had had a devil of a time backing out of it. Regardless, it's over with, it had its level of usefulness, time to move on.
Perlcat - I always enjoy reading your comments. So much so that I usually look for them. I have to point out though in reference to your above paragraph discussing how german POWs came over to the US because of the good treatment that was recieved is in a totally different context than what is being dealt with terrorist. The German soldiers were just like American solders in the that they were doing a job. They in a sense were tools of thier government. The Geneva convention rules appropriately recognized that from an individual standpoint POWs needed rules to prevent mistreatment as (and this is an oversimplification but here it goes) they were doing a job demanded of them by thier government. Terrorist on the other hand are not simply doing thier job. They are criminals that take a personal interest in death and destruction without any concern for humanity. As such, they should be treated as criminals and not as soldiers. They hate, therefore they terrorize. We are not going to make them love us nor should we try. America has soldiers buried all over the world that fought to liberate those countries yet many in those countries hate us. I would ask anyone to show me a cemetary in the US where foreign solders fought for us.
Sorry, I'm a vet and a little touchy about criminals being given the same level of playing field as honorable soldiers.
Well, going back to that example, yes, the soldiers in the Wehrmacht were just doing the same thing that our soldiers were -- overall, just being good soldiers drafted into service, and as a group, they were glad for a way out of a nasty situation. The Totenkopf SS, on the other hand, were, for all practical purposes beyond redemption, and were treated as such. Appropriately, I might add.
I think that you can find some of the people collected upon battlefields in this current war are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some. Not most, and certainly not all. From what I've seen and heard about the psychos we hold at Guantanamo, the only better place to house most of them is under six feet of topsoil. I have the highest respect for our men and women in uniform who have to put up with them, and remain professional. Some guy flings his crap at me, I'd be after him with a ball bat.
For all we know, though, the ones that show signs of redemption *are* being treated better, or would be if they were allowed to behave in a less insane manner. I doubt that their co-terrorists would let them get away with it if they knew which ones weren't acting up. (I believe the SS prisoners would do the same sort of thing, so segregating prisoners and finding out who is the thug and dealing with them was a continuing problem.)
However, my personal opinion about terrorists in general is that the most effective way to deal with them is more on the lines of how they used to deal with pirates -- short drop, sudden stop. When they ran low on pirates, piracy on the high seas came to an end -- and that was no coincidence. Our current nutless method of dealing with terrorists makes the problem worse, and I think that that plays into the statist's hands -- now they can take more freedoms to keep us 'safe'.
I guess I should read the post in it's entirety before giving a thumbs up. I'm sorry, can I take it back?
"I don’t get it, why are some people so determined that we just HAVE to sink closer to those bastards level...."
Explain to me how pouring water over someone's face SIMULATING drowning comes close to what these terrorists do. Public beheading, flying planes into buildings to kill thousands of innocent people, dragging our guys behind vehicles to thier deaths and then hanging thier bodies from bridges for all to see. Oh yeah we are truly bastards on our way to hell.
If I thought it would just make some American's day a little brighter let alone save lives, I'd waterboard every terrorist I could get my hands on.
When you compare this and the other interrogation methods we use to real, documented torture, they pale in comparison to *real* torture. Real torture *breaks* people both physically and spiritually. Being kept awake, being confused, being manipulated, and having water dumped on you are all things you can live through.
However, what most on the left cannot live with is hearing how fast these animals betray their cause. It must be unsettling to them to hear how these people whose goals are so much in line with theirs so easily give them up. Then again, most American leftists are only leftists when it suits them -- e.g. The Cinematic Whale only hates capitalism when it makes him millions in the very capitalist society he hates.
If waterboarding wasn't stunningly effective, it wouldn't be a problem for the liberals. If it merely yielded the same success as sleep deprivation, then they'd be just fine with it.
If this constitutes torture, then good cop/bad cop, leading questions, deception, sleep deprivation, listening to Barack's speeches on an iPod, and other interrogation techniques are all also torture.
IMO, it's only torture because the left says it is so. They spend a great deal of time and effort to characterize it as such. I have a problem with letting my opposition choose the language for the argument. It is much like allowing your enemy to choose the place to do battle. Never good for you. I refuse to be made to feel guilty about one of many techniques used to extract information, while ignoring the value of the information and the fact that other techniques are considerably more harsh. (I mean, come on, those speeches are HORRIBLE.)
This entire argument over waterboarding is a classic technique of the Left -- if you cannot win an argument on the substance, pick on the details. Slander, of course, is tool number one for them. I refuse to be distracted by it.
H2O is the universal solvent, given enough time, it will break anything down!
bombing in liyba,sending our military into the sovereign territory of another country to kill an enemy,i guess cowboy diplomacy is ok with the press as long as its a liberal cowboy who rides in on a hybrid
Accept we didn't learn it during a session of water boarding...
"Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation"
and: "Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar"
All from http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-republican-spin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+andrewsullivan/rApM+(The+Daily+Dish)
Does proof mean nothing anymore...print some lies up and post a link...that's supposed to show the world you are right and other people are stupid...you link to their links to other links yet there is not a shred of real evidence. Oy!
Face it your boy barry stumbled into the situation and damn near fumbled it away. Water boarding or extreme integration techniques worked. It broke the will of KSM and the others. Unable to acknowledge that Bush, Chaney and Rumsfield where right about using it. I could care less if they used the techniques on Bin Laden's mother if it put him in the ground with out his 72 virgins.
If barry wanted to get the point home, he should have wrapped the body with a died pig and then put it over the side to be eaten away.
You have the unmitigated gall to post a pile of marxist website crap as evidence here as if the Daily Beast were credible. Robert, you're a bonehead--The Daily Beast is far, far, far less credible than IHTM, and absolutely no offense to IHTM, but at least we know we're venting explosive gases so we don't kill ourselves from all the sh*t you libturds throw out. Get real and post real information!
Accept that it played a role. There was a lot of information from a lot of sources. If you want to deny all credit for waterboarding, then we can use the same logic to deny all credit for Barry. After all, his only role was the "no shit, sherlock" role of okaying the decision to take out UBL. The only downside he could have faced was if he had *not* approved the attack -- it takes no courage at all to accept a foregone conclusion.
Also, he severely botched the burial, causing that entire section of the world to rise up with multiple conspiracy theories (which they *love* to do). Me, I'd have chosen a nice spot, and taught the people wanting to set him up as a martyr suitable for pilgrimage a new old word -- 'enfilade'.
bush did it = crimes against humanity
obummer = I take all the credit
Look real close at the Obummers position in the "famous" picture of him watching the takedown live. His posture and look on his face tells you that not only is he an outsider, but he is in way over his head. now the truth comes out that we had a military take-over of the chain of command.
I have always said that good ole bill may have been elected, but hillary ran the show. and here she still is, running the show.
"...Look real close at the Obummers position in the “famous” picture of him watching the takedown live. His posture and look on his face tells you that not only is he an outsider, but he is in way over his head. now the truth comes out that we had a military take-over of the chain of command..."
Agreed.
Another picture that I saw on TV last night and then found online, is the 2nd photo in this article (linked below) from the Star-Telegram.
Forget Bin Laden's picture, THIS is the one Obama should have refused to release!
Taken from behind, he looks like a shrunken head...one of the most bizarre (and certainly unflattering) photos I've ever seen of a President that is trying to reflect a strong, decisive leader at a critical time.
I imagine at some point soon, they will delete this image from the rest of the historical "keepers".
http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/02/3041551/bin-laden-killed-in-us-raid-on.html
When dealing with barbarians you have to use barbaric tactics. Fight your enemy on the terms they understand and fear. Sun Tzu, Gen. Jack Pershing and Gen George Patton all understood this and did it to the best of their abilities. Pershing and Patton had to deal with bureaucrats who thought they knew better.
Some things never change. Such as barry and lil joe telling all that water boarding doesn’t work. Wonder if they have tried it or would be willing to try it?
They almost sound like a good communist, I was against it before I was for it and that was my old self. This is the new me.
One wonders whether or not water boarding would also work on the flop eared Kenyan. "Enhanced" interrogation methods are effective, when used correctly.