Ashcroft Says Waterboarding Not Torture, Democrats Cry
Another dog and pony show took place today on Capital Hill as John Ashcroft was brought before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about detainee treatment. The purpose of these hearings is not about finding out information, but rather to provide a forum for Democrats to grandstand during an election year, and hopefully cause the Bush Administration some embarrassment.
I pretty well lost count on the number of hearings that have been held to discuss waterboarding. Even though waterboarding was only used on 3 occasions in the last seven years, Democrats have felt the need to hold hundreds of hours of hearings.
John Ashcroft was unshakable as he explained to the committee that enhanced interrogation techniques were incredibly valuable and that, “…the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources.”
Resorting to the usual “straw man” argument, Rep. Maxine Waters brought treatment of U.S. soldiers into the debate.
Waters asked Ashcroft whether such techniques would be regarded as “totally unacceptable and even criminal” if they were used on American soldiers.
To which Ashcroft swiftly responded:
“Well, my subscription to these memos, and my belief that the law provides the basis for these memos persisted even in the presence of my son serving two tours of duty overseas in the Gulf area as a member of our armed forces,” Ashcroft said.
Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark.
The fact that Democrats want the CIA to strictly adhere to the Army field manual is not only completely absurd, but extraordinarily dangerous. Our intelligence operatives are supposed to work in the shadows and have the latitude necessary to get information and keep America safe. Democrats don’t know the first thing about keeping America safe, and are either too stupid or too weak to do what’s necessary to win this war.
-Chris Jones
Motivational Waterboarding?
A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
That’s right, “motivational waterboarding” is what this guy allegedly did! Now the guy who was waterboarded is suing the company claiming that he’s in therapy now as a result.
I find this story to be hilarious! For one, because a motivational speaker would actually do something that outrageous. Secondly, because the guy actually allowed himself to be waterboarded.
The whole story sounds a little over-the-top, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in court.
-Chris Jones
White House Not Involved In Destruction Of CIA Tapes
As much as all the Bush haters in this country would just love it, there is no evidence to suggest that the White House had anything to do with the destruction of the CIA tapes.
Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes’ destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. “It was an agency decision — you can take it to the bank,” CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. “Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong.”
It was the head of Clandestine Services, Jose Rodriguez who acted against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved.
Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.
I’m betting that after all is said and done that Mr. Rodriguez will be seen as having acted lawfully when he ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes.
Mr. Rodriguez is a patriot and deserves a great deal of thanks. He knew it was only a matter of time before some traitor at the agency got a hold of those tapes and presented them to the NY Times with a big red bow on them.
Those tapes should have never been made in the first place, because our government is incapable of keeping secrets. The very existence of those interrogation tapes placed our interrogation program and national security at risk.
The anti-American/anti-Bush crowd would have given anything to get their grubby, liberal, mitts on those tapes and used them to do great damage to this country.
-Chris Jones
CIA Agent: Waterboarding Is Torture, But Necessary
Check this little gem out from ABC News:
A leader of the CIA team that captured and interrogated the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.
In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.
“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”
“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
Kiriakou says he did not know that the interrogation of Zubaydah was being secretly recorded by the CIA and had no idea the tapes had been destroyed.
I’m not sure what planet the anti-torture crowd is living on, but the argument that a person will say anything to make the torture stop just doesn’t hold up.
For every military person that says torture doesn’t work, I can point to two who says it does. A truly innocent person might make stuff up, but a guy who really knows something will usually start with the truth.
Waterboarding is the least painful torture technique available. Zubaydah was waterboarded for a whole 35 seconds and that’s it. There’s no reason to get hysterical and act like America is the new “torture” capital of the world.
Watch the full report tonight on “World News With Charles Gibson” at 6:30 p.m. ET and on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET.
THEORY:
What if when Allah supposedly came to Zubaydah in the night and told him to cooperate, it was really a hologram the CIA designed? Meaning they were able to create a hologram of Allah that floated above Zubaydah compelling him to cooperate.
Be honest, would you really be that surprised if the CIA tried something like that?
-Chris Jones
Top Democrats Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
From The Washington Post:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.
Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane HarmanJohn D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan). (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
This article just confirms a pattern of behavior from the Democratic leadership. They were briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and had no objections. Once the program was leaked to the public, the Dems pretended to shocked and outraged at this so-called “illegal wiretapping.”
The Democratic leadership was briefed about our enhanced interrogation program repeatedly including the use of waterboarding, and they raised no objections. Once that program was leaked to the public, the Dems once again pretended to be shocked and outraged that the President would allow “torture.”
It should be noted that the Terrorist Surveillance Program wasn’t called “illegal wiretapping,” and Waterboarding didn’t become “torture” until after the public became aware of them.
It really shows just how disingenuous Nancy Pelosi and the rest of her team really are. All the “investigations” they call for are just “dog and pony shows” used to score cheap political points with their incredibly ignorant Bush-hating base.
-Chris Jones
Thank God The CIA Destroyed Interrogation Tapes
Liberals are howling this morning about the recent NY Times article and subsequent admission by CIA that 2 tapes showing the harsh interrogation of terrorists were destroyed.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.
In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A.” and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.
General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk” and that if they had become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”
I don’t blame C.I.A. for destroying the tapes. Leaving those tapes lying around where some turncoat within the agency could possibly turn them over to the NY Times was not worth the risk.
Republicans are interested in fighting the war on terror, meanwhile Democrats (minus Joe Lieberman) are more interested in undercutting those fighting the war on terror.
If we didn’t live in a country infested with cowards who would just love to prosecute a C.I.A. agent for doing what’s necessary to keep us safe, then it wouldn’t be necessary to destroy tapes.
It’s a great victory for America that those tapes never saw the light of day. Thankfully, the C.I.A. no longer records interrogation sessions so after the a few rounds of pointless Senate hearings this whole story will most likely just fade away.
-Chris Jones
Democrats and Waterboarding
Alan Dershowitz has a great article in today’s Wall Street Journal that looks at how the Democrats could lose the Presidential race if they continue to define themselves as soft on terrorism.
He also looks at how the opposition to waterboarding during the Mukasey confirmation could come back to haunt them in the general election.
Mukasey Refuses To Call Waterboarding Torture, Liberals Cry
In an effort to quell growing doubts in the Senate about his nomination as attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey declared Tuesday that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me” and promised to review the legality of such methods if confirmed.
But Mr. Mukasey told Senate Democrats he could not say whether waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was illegal torture because he had not been briefed on the details of the classified technique and did not want to suggest that Central Intelligence Agency officers who had used such techniques might be in “personal legal jeopardy.”
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said he was unsatisfied with Mukasey’s response to the waterboarding issue.
“I remain very concerned that Judge Mukasey finds himself unable to state unequivocally that waterboarding is illegal and below the standards and values of the United States,” Leahy said.
Of course the far left blogosphere has been raging about Mukeasey’s refusal to call waterboarding torture. I think it says a lot that the biggest priority for Democrats in the War on Terror is making sure terrorists don’t get scared.
The thought of a terrorist in some CIA prison scared that he could drown unless he tells what he knows is causing Democrats to break into cold sweats in the middle of the night.
They always argue that we have to reclaim our moral authority in the world. We can’t waterboard people, because other countries might think bad things about us. When did the Democrats all of the sudden become the beacon of morality?
This is the party that supports taking god out of everything and federally funded abortion anytime, and now they’re suddenly the morality police?
What this really shows is that the long running perception that Democrats are weak on National Security is in fact valid. Their biggest concern is not getting information out of the terrorist, but making sure we’re not too mean. They don’t want terrorists to be deprived of sleep or get too hot or cold.
-Chris Jones
Bush Says U.S. ‘Does Not Torture’
Once again left-wing wimps are howling about the U.S. “torture” policies that are once again front and center thanks to that liberal rag known as the New York Times.
The Times reported that the first 2005 legal opinion authorized the use of head slaps, freezing temperatures and simulated drownings, known as waterboarding, while interrogating terror suspects, and was issued shortly after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took over the Justice Department.
That secret opinion, which explicitly allowed using the painful methods in combination, came months after a December 2004 opinion in which the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” and the administration seemed to back away from claiming authority for such practices.
A second Justice opinion was issued later in 2005, just as Congress was working on an anti-torture bill. That opinion declared that none of the CIA’s interrogation practices would violate the rules in the legislation banning “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees, The Times said, citing interviews with unnamed current and former officials.
President Bush once again defended his administration’s detention and interrogation policies for terrorism suspects on Friday, saying they are both successful and lawful.
“When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them,” he said during a hastily called appearance in the Oval Office. “The American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”
It’s beyond belief that some people are actually worried about the CIA slapping terrorists around a bit or waterboarding them. Those people want to kill us and whatever the U.S. Government needs to do to make those people talk they should do. I sleep better at night knowing that we have the guts to do what’s necessary to keep our country safe.
-Chris Jones
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