The Guy is Money In the Bank!
Why the mere relocation of imprisoned terrorists from Guantanamo to prisons in the United States is a moral issue in the first place is by no means clear, since morality deals with behavior, rather than location. But putting them within the jurisdiction of liberal circuit court judges who can find reasons to turn them loose is a much more serious issue.
Much discussion of the interrogation of captured terrorists ignores the inescapable reality of trade-offs. The real question is: How many American lives are you prepared to sacrifice, in order to spare a terrorist from experiencing distress?
Just days after Colin Powell informed us that the American people were willing to pay higher taxes in order to get government services-- and that Republicans therefore needed to stop their opposition to taxes-- California voters resoundingly defeated a bill to raise taxes in order to pay for the many government services in that liberal state.
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I will say this: one Thomas Sowell is worth ten Ann Coulters or Rush Limbaughs. When I say that I respect honest and principled conservatives, it is people like Sowell that I have in mind.
Gitmo was at attempt to remove the men detained there from the rule of law. Ultimately an unsucessful attempt, as Bush found out in Ramdan V. Rumsfeld and other rulings. The treatment of prisoners at Gitmo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the secret prisons, was a violation of the rule of law, of the Geneva Conventions, as General Petraeus has now said, and other laws as well.
Not all of the men at these facilities are terrorists, perhaps not even a majority of them. Some have been released already. There is no way to determine which of them deserve to be punished as terrorists without some sort of legal process. Real conservatives value the rule of law. Rightwing idealogues, proto-fascists and wingnuts do not. Which camp do you fall in?
It will be difficult to prosecute any of these men, without using evidence produced during torture. (You can translate that in your head to "Enhanced Interrogation Techiques" if you like, which does sound more sanitary I admit.)
Have you seen all the interviews with FBI and military interrogators who say they got more and better information with traditional interrogation rather than EICs? One reason for that I think is that the military and the FBI have skilled and trained interrogators and much of the torture was done or supervised by people who really didn't know what they were doing. And, of course, torture has never been a very good way of getting information.
I saw an interview with one military interrogator on the tube. He was interviewing a real terrorist in Iraq. The first thing the terrorist said was "I'd like to slit your throat!" He asked him why he felt that way. The terrorist started talking about the way our Shiite allies had treated his family. The interrogator apologized (to the terrorist!) for mistakes the U.S. had made and their costs. The terrorist started crying and eventually told the U.S. everything he knew.
The Zubayda case illustrates this. He gave a lot of good information to the FBI and then shut up when the CIA started questioning him, even though they waterboarded him 83 times. Khalid Sheik Muhammad was waterboarded 183 times and gave up, it appears, a few scraps of information mixed in with a lot of bullshit.
Would I be willing to see a terrorist or criminal tortured to save my kidnapped daughter? Well, if the question were would I rather have him interrogated by skilled FBI interrogators using proven methods, or waterboarded 183times over the space of a month while she starved to death,I'd have to go with the first option. But yes, if that didn't work I'd try anything, as any father would do. But then we don't waterboard criminals and for good reasons.
Basically, what it comes down to for me is that the Bush administration interrogation policies didn't work, as well as being illegal and immoral, which is why they were largely halted during the Bush adminstration. But Dick Cheney had seen too many episodes of 24. (Which may be a fine show, I've never seen it.)
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