FRANKN,
EVERYBODY is entitled to their opinions military or not. That said, I spent the better part of my young life in both the US Navy and then the US Army. I have taken off in a LOT of airplanes, but only landed in a few.
What you read in the Democrat Report, is only the tip of the iceberg. Turning lights on and off, and blah, blah, blah, is not torture. We have plausible deniability when it comes to most of the really horrible stuff. It is an old soliloquy from the left that torture does not work. If it didn't work, it would not have been used for thousands of years. If torture is used by ignorant thugs, all it does is inflict pain. Administered properly, torture provides a wealth of information. Here's what I mean by plausible deniability:
Let's take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for instance. Lets say that the US captures him, and interrogates him using what we can do (waterboarding, sleep deprivation, angry voices). Lets say he resists that and doesn't talk. So, we hand him over to the Egyptians (currently the world's best torturers). Now visualize this scene: Khalid Sheikh is in the basement of some building in the middle of the Negev Desert. He is naked and hanging by his thumbs from a pipe in the ceiling. He has been awake for several days. Two Americans in civilian clothes stand against one wall of this room, two men (??nationality??) sit at a desk by another wall, and two men stand on either side of Khalid Sheikh. The Americans never speak a single word. They just have a pad of legal paper. On that paper are two columns. The left column contains questions to which we already know the answers. The right column contains questions to which we still need answers (or at least verification of the answers we have).
The Americans show the legal pad to the men at the desk, and point to the first question in Column A (we already know the answer). They ask Khalid that question in Arabic. No matter what his answer is, he gets intense pain. He is asked the same question again. No matter what his answer is, he gets pain again. After he answers the question truthfully for a few times (receiving pain every time), they move to the second question in Column A (we already know the answer). Same thing happens again. Ask the same question over and over, and once we get him answering truthfully several times in a row after receiving pain every time, we move on. They then skip to the first question in Column B (we don't know the answer). Same thing. No matter how he answers for the first several times, he gets intense pain. Once he answers the same way many times, we skip back to Column A (we already know the answers). This process continues back and forth between the two columns of questions for days and weeks. He is given drugs to keep him from passing out (methamphetamine), and this also has a side effect that works to our advantage. It makes our friend Khalid very paranoid. May even cause hallucinations with the right amounts administered and stress levels achieved. Speed induced hallucinations are never of nice things. People usually hallucinate things that scare them intensely. Between the drugs and the pain, he would be hard pressed to remember how he answered his last question, much less one asked three days previously. Once he has answered the same way to the questions we needed answering several times over several days, we give him a rest, because at some point he will completely break down and become useless. Now we can be fairly confident that he gave us correct answers that we needed, but we would go through that entire process with other terrorists and get the same answers from them all before any of the Column B Questions are put in Column A.
So, when we get several bad guys giving us the same answers under a lot of pain and discomfort, we get a wealth of actionable information. THAT is how we found Osama's Driver (which in turn led us to Osama). Also, we never touched nor spoke to this guy after we handed him over to the
(Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, pick a country). Because of this, we can legally say that we handed him over to the
. We didn't torture him.
....... and do I care about the inhumanity we show in torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and those like him? Not a bit. I would happily stand there and rip out his fingernails. Playing fair is for Football and Soccer. When you commit to a war, you have to win at all costs. Playing fair doesn't enter into it. I am a believer in the idea that if we commit to an action that would cost ONE American Life, then anything less than winning at all costs is a dishonor to any American Life lost in that action.
Mike
