Dan

Calabrese

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November 29, 2007

Waterboarding and Stephen King’s Tortured Logic

Stephen King tells scary stories about people who experience terrifying situations. He’s pretty good at it, which is why he needs to stick to fiction.

When King tries to pontificate on terror in real life, he reveals himself to be quite an ignoramus. In fairness to King, however, he is no more so than the people running Congress – people who tried to make America’s new attorney general promise not to be too mean to terrorists as a condition of his confirmation.

You hear a lot about waterboarding these days. This is the practice of pouring water on a person’s face continually so as to simulate drowning. It is supposedly used by Americans when interrogating terror suspects, and this is supposedly objectionable – at least to Democrats and certain deranged authors.

Mr. King, whose gift for expressing himself eloquently would appear to have serious limits, voiced his objection to the waterboarding of terrorists as follows in a recent interview with Time Magazine: “I said something to the 'Nightline' guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.”

For the record, Stephen King thinks the daughter of the president of the United States should be tortured. Hey. They say he’s scary. He’s also easily led. King is apparently so gullible that he’s willing to buy one of the most ridiculous lines of reasoning imaginable during times of war or peace.

Consider the prevailing storyline of Democrats and mainstream media on the question of waterboarding in particular and torture in general: The United States must renounce the torture of its enemies, even when useful for interrogation purposes, because torture violates our treaty obligations (even though Al Qaeda never signed any such treaty) and because if we torture, it upsets other countries (even though, when we really want to get rough, we hand suspects over to some of these same other countries, who put us to shame in the torture arena).

The confirmation hearings of Attorney General Michael Mukasey became a veritable sideshow, with Democratic senators demanding that Mukasey declare waterboarding to be torture, and thus forbidden by American interrogators.

If they could, perhaps these same Democrats would go back in time and prevent the waterboarding of poor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who sang like a canary under the splash, and gave up crucial information that continues to help us prevent future attacks.

Apparently this has all made quite the impression on Stephen King, who applies the curious standard that you shouldn’t do anything to a terrorist that you wouldn’t do to your own daughter. Wouldn’t war be nicer if all presidents applied the same thinking to enemies? I’d really love to order you to attack the enemy’s positions, but I wouldn’t strap a bomb to my 12-year-old and push the detonator, so it really doesn’t seem fair. Surrender!

Let’s explain things a little for the benefit of Mr. King. Jenna Bush – daughter of the president, respectable, law-abiding citizen; Al Qaeda – murderous, jihadist, lawless, sadistic thugs.

Clear? Maybe he could make little notes so he doesn’t forget before the next time he gives an interview. Or maybe he could just talk about his books and leave political commentary to people who actually know the first thing about the subject.

Then again, an awful lot of Democrats wouldn’t say anything much different about it.

If torturing a member of Al Qaeda will get us information we can use to more thoroughly or more quickly defeat them, any form of torture will do. And even if we get no information at all, they deserve it for being murderous, jihadist, lawless, sadistic thugs.

If the rest of the world doesn’t like that we torture terrorists, so what? If the rest of the world only likes us when we’re bending over and grabbing our ankles for the pleasure of our enemies, we can do without their approval.

I would rather scare the crap out of the rest of the world than have them love us for our daintiness in handling our enemies. Stephen King, on the other hand, needs to stick to scaring the crap out of people with his books.

Because when he attempts to pontificate about the real world, it’s nothing but crap.

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