April 28, 2009

Make Terrorists Choose Between Jumping or Burning: Now That Would Be Torture

So now the president is considering show trials of Bush Administration officials who issued opinions on permissibility of “harsh” interrogation techniques on Al Qaeda terrorists.

Once again, folks, this is not hard.

Let’s flash back to the sunny September day when hell was unleashed on our nation. Many horrors could be recalled from 9/11, but I’d like to bring to remembrance just one: The roughly 200 innocent souls, by one estimate, forced into the inconceivable choice to hurl themselves from the towers to escape the searing heat and smothering smoke from flaming jet fuel.

Author Michael Daly recounted the scene: “Some jumped together, holding hands. Most leapt singly, often tumbling as they fell . . . most were on their backs as they reached the lower floors, facing the heavens if not necessarily heaven. Their last sight was of the perfect baby-blue sky as they struck the pavement with a velocity that instantly turned a living person into a bright red splatter. The sound was jarring, loud, a body becoming a bomb.”

You say Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times? Cry me a river.

How about if we had tossed this cold-hearted butcher into a room on a platform some 1,300 feet up, fired it up to a toasty 2000^oF, pumped in the acrid smoke of combusting fuel, and given KSM a better choice than his blameless victims got: Talk, jump or feel your flesh sizzle off?

Now that might have been torture.

Speaking of torture, let’s also recall Richard Clarke. No, not Dick Clark of American Bandstand. Rather, the Bush 41-Clinton-era national security official holdover who engaged in an American Grandstand when he appeared before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, turned to face the victims’ families, and dramatically averred, “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you.”

Just how did their government fail the families? Here’s what Clarke told 60 Minutes back then: “I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001.” He reiterated in his tell-all tome that 43’s national security team was “still operating with the old Cold War paradigm.”

You mean like, when we come across brutal, non-uniformed terrorists, we apply the completely inapplicable, anachronistic Geneva Convention and the paddycake Army Field Manual meant for raw recruits, not seasoned interrogators? And ask the pond scum, pretty please with a cherry on top, if they would mind letting us know where their compatriots are and whether they are planning to fly any more 747s into skyscrapers?

Clarke charged that W “ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.” And the media and Congress were in the highest dudgeon with him. A year and a half later, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was still posturing: “Four years after the 9/11 attacks, the American people are not as safe as they should be. They have every reason to ask why and demand President Bush and congressional leaders make safety of the American people their number one priority.”

But by then, the administration had already shifted into gear and taken actions that our intelligence chief admits yielded high-value information that prevented another 9/11. And now Pelosi – who according to reliable accounts knew and heartily approved of the tough tactics – and President Obama want to put the legal thumbscrews to heroes who protected us?

Those questioning the questioners claim that making terrorist detainees very uncomfortable somehow makes us as bad as they are. No. Applying rules intended for those who play by the rules to those who know no rules; attempting to find moral equivalence with lowlifes who hack off people’s heads with knives; and putting the safety of innocent Americans at risk to coddle hardened hitmen who force office workers to dive 90 stories to unspeakable deaths just makes us dumber than they are.