hist2004
01-07-2006, 10:24 AM
War On Terror: True or false? Sending suspected terrorists to friendly countries known to employ torture began with Bush. And harsh interrogation techniques never yield valuable information. Answers: False. And false.
If you answered true to both propositions, you might be forgiven. But both are canards, trafficked in by administration foes whose numbers, at least in the media, are legion.
If you pay uncritical attention to those pervasive viewpoints, you might conclude that the administration, whose strings are pulled in the Neocon Executive Office Building by Vice President Darth Vader, conducts the war notoriously indifferent to civil liberties. The Bush people even take undisguised pleasure in medieval modes of warfare.
Not so fast. Take the practice, known in the spy trade as renditioning, of nabbing jihadists and, without arresting them, bundling them off to foreign jurisdictions. There, it's hoped, interrogators who don't follow Queensbury rules might uncover enemy plans.
It turns out that renditioning was activated by President Bush's predecessor. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, said he developed the practice for none other than William Jefferson Clinton.
It was the fall of 1995, and al-Qaida was rearing its monstrous head. The former president's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and his terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, ordered the CIA to destroy the Islamo-fascist outfit.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture," said Scheuer, who resigned from the agency last year. "Clinton said, 'That's up to you'." Thus renditioning, authorized but not activated by President Reagan, came to life.
The Clinton administration, clearly, was content — or, fearful of moral compromise, it didn't want to know — that foreign secret police were doing the dirty work. Since 9-11, the Bush administration continued to rendition terrorist suspects, but it sought refinements. Some captured suspects were designated enemy combatants and sent to military, not civilian, prisons.
Now, does faux torture, said by some frowners to be tantamount to torture, and thereby internationally outlawed, ever do the forces of civilization any good? Consider "waterboarding," perhaps the most written about of these practices, in which sheets of water are made to run over a suspect's face, giving the sensation of drowning.
Ask the 9-11 mastermind himself. In March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former al-Qaida operative, was captured in Pakistan. KSM soon began to sing. "Not that everything KSM said was believable," writes John Crewdson in the Chicago Tribune. "But much of his information checked out in separate questioning of other captured al-Qaida figures."
Waterboarding did it, at least initially. Interrogators point out that the technique must shift quickly to other modes — subtler techniques such as befriending a subject or playing to his messianic ego.
In short, the harsh techniques work, never mind what chin-pulling editorialists and op-ed writers contend. And never mind that Congress, in its pre-Christmas ban of torture, seemed to allow waterboarding.
The bad news: Thanks to all the media descriptions of the practice (we're necessarily repeating what's already been described globally), our terrorist enemies now know all about waterboarding. And they're prepared for it.
link to article (http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20051230)
Hist2004
If you answered true to both propositions, you might be forgiven. But both are canards, trafficked in by administration foes whose numbers, at least in the media, are legion.
If you pay uncritical attention to those pervasive viewpoints, you might conclude that the administration, whose strings are pulled in the Neocon Executive Office Building by Vice President Darth Vader, conducts the war notoriously indifferent to civil liberties. The Bush people even take undisguised pleasure in medieval modes of warfare.
Not so fast. Take the practice, known in the spy trade as renditioning, of nabbing jihadists and, without arresting them, bundling them off to foreign jurisdictions. There, it's hoped, interrogators who don't follow Queensbury rules might uncover enemy plans.
It turns out that renditioning was activated by President Bush's predecessor. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, said he developed the practice for none other than William Jefferson Clinton.
It was the fall of 1995, and al-Qaida was rearing its monstrous head. The former president's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and his terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, ordered the CIA to destroy the Islamo-fascist outfit.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture," said Scheuer, who resigned from the agency last year. "Clinton said, 'That's up to you'." Thus renditioning, authorized but not activated by President Reagan, came to life.
The Clinton administration, clearly, was content — or, fearful of moral compromise, it didn't want to know — that foreign secret police were doing the dirty work. Since 9-11, the Bush administration continued to rendition terrorist suspects, but it sought refinements. Some captured suspects were designated enemy combatants and sent to military, not civilian, prisons.
Now, does faux torture, said by some frowners to be tantamount to torture, and thereby internationally outlawed, ever do the forces of civilization any good? Consider "waterboarding," perhaps the most written about of these practices, in which sheets of water are made to run over a suspect's face, giving the sensation of drowning.
Ask the 9-11 mastermind himself. In March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former al-Qaida operative, was captured in Pakistan. KSM soon began to sing. "Not that everything KSM said was believable," writes John Crewdson in the Chicago Tribune. "But much of his information checked out in separate questioning of other captured al-Qaida figures."
Waterboarding did it, at least initially. Interrogators point out that the technique must shift quickly to other modes — subtler techniques such as befriending a subject or playing to his messianic ego.
In short, the harsh techniques work, never mind what chin-pulling editorialists and op-ed writers contend. And never mind that Congress, in its pre-Christmas ban of torture, seemed to allow waterboarding.
The bad news: Thanks to all the media descriptions of the practice (we're necessarily repeating what's already been described globally), our terrorist enemies now know all about waterboarding. And they're prepared for it.
link to article (http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20051230)
Hist2004