Waterboarding...

In todays blog I am reacting to another persons blog, because my message to him got too big.

What started this mess:

Mike Kiriakou told reporters about the interrogation of suspect Abu Zubaydah.

Kiriakou revealed that Zubaydah asked him to smother him with a pillow when he emerged from a coma in U.S. custody after being shot by Pakistani police during his capture in 2002.

"No, no," Kiriakou said he replied. "We have plans for you."

He said Zubaydah was able to withstand 35 seconds of the procedure, which involves covering a prisoner's mouth with plastic or cloth and pouring water over his face. The prisoner quickly begins to inhale water, causing the sensation of drowning.

Kiriakou said when he was subjected to waterboarding as part of his training he could last only five seconds.

"It's entirely unpleasant," he told CNN. "(Your body) almost seizes up. You're so full of tension that you just tense up. Your muscles tighten up, and it's very uncomfortable."

Kiriakou said he did not personally witness the waterboarding but was told by other agents that after Zubaydah was subjected to it, it was like "flipping a switch" and he soon told his interrogators Allah had visited him in his cell and told him to co-operate to make things easier for his brothers.

He told his interrogators about alleged Sept. 11 accomplice Ramzi Binalshibh, and the confessions of the two of them led the U.S. to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the U.S. government said was the mastermind behind the attacks.

My friend wrote in his blog:

"Everyone is so upset that the CIA may torture an enemy of this county to obtain information that may save the life of a United States citizen or soldier. What am I missing here?
I don't know about the rest of you folks...but I prefer my intelligence service to be known to friends and enemies alike as the baddest bunch of bastards on the planet.
Sorry if this offends anyone...and anyone who has investigated a terrorist attack death scene...dealt with survivors or my most favorite memory..."

OK, so there it is...and pardon my language, but its like we (USA) are becoming a bunch of wimps...

Our family have become close friends with a man whom I used to work with. He is a Indian national having lived here since he was 15 (he's 38), and his wife has been in this country from india for about 12 years. When we talk about this stuff, as he and i did via email today, he says the problem with how the USA is seen overseas is that our friends( like india) dont think we have the stomach for what it takes to fight this type of war...that we are too nice and need to understand the foes are utterly ruthless in the pursuit of their goals. Read the Pakistani or Indian news online sometime. They are in this as much as us, in for a penny, in for a pound as the saying goes.

Another friend, who was in Israel in 1967 (lucky him, his bar mitzvah) was pressed into service and fought the syrians, and has wounds to prove it. He said they captured a high ranking soldier, and from checking his maps, knew there was an attack coming but needed more info. "Normal" techniques were not working, so he tells the story, so an Israeli Colonel walks over to the guy, and tells him to strip; then tells him to get in a trench and lay face down. They blind folded him and then placed a leather coat over him, saying" OK, you either tell us what we need to know, or I am going to shoot you, and leave your unshaven body face down, facing away from mecca, and covered with this pigskin coat to rot and fester in the desert heat until something comes along to eat your rotten... the guy started babbling, and the found out what they needed. Janos explained that they had basically told the guy they were guaranteeing a lousy afterlife a fear he did not relish.

Another friend told honey once (after the Israelis bombed the Iraqis nuclear power plant/ future bomb plant) " Forty years ago, WE would have taken that plant out"

So excuse me if i dont boo hoo too much for the means and methods we use to get info that might well prevent another serious attack, or lead us to those plotting such attacks.
I know I told you about my cousin that was in Iraq, giving up his job as a stock broker/financial analyst. He did it because, having seen combat in Panama, and later Desert Storm, he said the most horrific sight he had ever seen was a couple holding hands and jumping 100 floors to their death on 9/11...a vision he could never get out of his head. He told me" It must be my destiny to pay back those SOB's that tried to kill me and everyone else in our building that day" He is not alone, there are stories I have read or seen on TV about like minded Americans.

So what is the problem with waterboarding?? Is it the same as the "torture" of what routinely happens in the middle east and elsewhere? Do we hold our standards to the higher moral ground of no torture, and absolute, when those opposing us have no doubt that they absolutely want us to die? Are we REALLY that naive as to think we can reason with people that are educated, sophisticated and fervently believe WE are the most evil creatures on the planet??? How do you reason with someone who hold the unreasonable assumption as the cornorstone for their belief and value system?? I am not a philosopher, but I did study debate, and first all sides have to accept certain things to be accepted.

Our opponents are commonly referred to as IslamoFascists. The term may be offensive, but it has history, in 1939, when psychologist Carl Jung said about Adolf Hitler, "he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic, warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god"

People say 9/11 was a fluke, a one time thing: Consider then that many people have rsearched the topic, including in his book, "Brotherhood of Terror", author Paul L. Williams describes plans recovered from raids on terrorist camps in Afghanistan that indicate future attacks both on the United States and Europe, including strikes on targets highly populated by Jews and a plot to smuggle nuclear materials into America in order to construct and detonate a weapon on American soil. He also claims that al-Qaeda had purchased as many as twenty Russian suitcase nukes from members of the Chechen mafia.

Me personally, i would like the CIA, MI5, the German BND and other allied intelligence services find the plotters and their evil plans out before a suitcase bomb goes off in a major city somewhere.