The major news groups continue to push the idea of torture with regard to interrogation of enemy combatants in the war on terror. The same people who have time and again sawed the heads off of innocent people while chanting "Praise God" and then sending the video of such acts out on the web (if you want to see such videos visit http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html under "Know Your Enemy").
I've never been tortured and I don't claim to be an expert in torture, but I am smart enough to understand the difference between sleep deprivation and having your fingers (among other things) smashed with a hammer or yanked off with pliers. I also have no problem with the use of psychotropic drugs if it means saving the life of one innocent American.
Read on:
From Investors Business Daily
Posted 11/15/2005
War On Terror:
Sen. John McCain says that allowing torture would ruin our image. Is that worse than terrorists ruining our landscape? We want them to fear being tortured, not know they have the right to an attorney.
McCain knows torture firsthand, having suffered horribly at the hands of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. We do not question his right to speak on the subject with authority.
We do question his attempt to pass legislation banning the torture of prisoners of war and detainees captured on foreign battlefields. It's not because we advocate torture, but because the benefits gained by telling the world we have a law that bans it are outweighed by terrorists' and enemies' knowing we have such a law.
Speaking Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation," McCain argued: "If we are viewed as a country that engages in torture . . . any possible information that we might be able to gain is far counterbalanced by (the negative effect) of public opinion." Any possible information?
We accept his view that torture doesn't often work and is often counterproductive. Often, but not always. And this would be a rule begging for an exception. Let's hope that if a terrorist planted a nuke set to go off in an hour in Washington, D.C., we wouldn't tell him (or her): "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. Now, please, tell us where you planted the nuke."
McCain's legislation is vague on precisely what is considered torture. Is it to be defined by the eyes of the beholder? Is sleep deprivation torture? How about "mishandling" the Quran?
We need to distinguish what torture is. Sawing off Nicholas Berg's head was torture. Saddam's routine practice of putting dissidents into tree shredders feet first was torture. World opinion was silent on that.
With such a fuzzy definition of torture, the legislation is next to useless. But it could be harmful in the hands of administration critics, the good folks at places like Amnesty International and even those who fly planes into buildings and wear bombs to weddings.
Not long ago, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin bellowed that "describing what Americans had done to prisoners in our control, you would almost certainly believe this must have been done by the Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings."
What atrocities was Durbin describing? He quoted e-mail from an FBI agent that on "one occasion the air conditioning had been turned so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold."
Vice President Dick Cheney has been attacked for wanting the CIA exempted in any such legislation, amid reports of secret CIA prisons around the world. These prisons are exactly the right place to keep the rabid murderers who would kill us all if they could.
If the existence of these prisons and the possibility of torture makes just one jihadist spill the beans and save American lives, the fear they instill is justified. McCain's bill would take that fear away.
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