My Leftist blogosphere buddy Todd Epp has joined others on the Left in expressing their outrage that American troops and intelligence operatives have poured water on the faces of a few terrorists in the pursuit of saving lives.
Simply for the sake of context, it might be useful to recall that some of the same Leftists who are crying buckets of crocodile tears over waterboarding now, apparently had no problem with it a few years ago.
From the Washington Post:
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 Harman (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).
Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."
But back to Todd's post. Todd asks, "What if Al-Qaeda were waterboarding our troops?"
Forgetting for a moment that our special forces troops go through this in their training, it'd be a huge step up on the road to humane behavior if that were all the terrorists were doing to our troops. Instead, these combatants masquerading as innocent civilians in civilian clothes shoot and blow up our troops (and other civilians)...a little more serious than waterboarding.
Beyond what happens on the battlefield, recall the terrorists torture handbook found earlier this year? Al Qaeda has a few things up it's sleeve that are a little more serious and lasting than waterboarding:
...an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like "blowtorch to the skin" and "eye removal." Along with the images, which you'll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters.
I don't recall anything as mild as waterboarding in the terrorist bag of tricks.
Remember, too, how they not only treat our troops, but how they treat our civilians? Recall the incident a couple of years ago where they killed four civilian workers in Iraq, mutilated their bodies and strung them up from a bridge:
The mob had tired of thrashing the two scorched torsos. The body on the south side of the skeletal steel bridge was tied to the girders with electrical cord about five feet above the ground, dismembered and decapitated. The second body hung on the other side of the roadway, feet up, its limbs slack, its head little more than a blackened skull. A few blocks away, another crowd was beating two more burned bodies.
On the bridge, an Arab reporter would raise a camera and a man or boy would climb to pose beside a corpse. Some in the crowd would turn and flash a "V" for victory with their fingers.
If they had only waterboarded these civilians...
Remember the beheadings the terrorists have done on film of journalists and other civilians?
In June 2004, two terrorist beheadings occurred almost simultaneously: the decapitation of Paul Johnson, an American contractor in Saudi Arabia, and Kim Sun-il, a South Korean contractor in Iraq.
Beheading is a little more serious and lasting than waterboarding; you can't overcome that, even with plenty of therapy and hugs. The wives and sons and daughters and fathers and mothers probably wish the terrorists had only waterboarded their loved ones...
Todd seems to be continuing the error started by Bill Clinton in treating war and combat as if it were a law enforcement matter. You might as well make the case that shooting the enemy in battle is unconstitutional because it violates the enemy's right to due process.
It's this kind a idiotic mentality that demonstrated the United States is soft and weak, and made the world ripe for 911 in the first place. It has demonstrated that we don't understand the nature of the evil we face, and we lack the resolve to deal with it firmly and decisively.
Waterboarding a bloodthirsty terrorist to obtain information that may save dozens of lives? I don't have the least problem with that. Nor do I worry that terrorists may do it to our troops, because they already have a track record of doing far worse.
Terrorists waterboard American troops? If only that's all they did...
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