Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Exception That Proves Not a Lot

I suppose it's possible that enhanced interrogation techniques work on some people; promote them to confess the truth under duress, etc.. I mean, they're probably the minority and all. Most of the literature I've read (a lot of it coming from people who've actually done interrogation and NOT George Tenet, Bill O'Reilly, Dick Cheney, etc.) seems to indicate that these techniques provide unreliable information. But, hey, anything here's possible, I guess.................................................................I point this out because Dick Cheney now wants to declassify documents which show (according to him) that the water-boarding of Khalid Sheik Muhammad, etc. provided intelligence that conceivably saved thousands of lives. Well, guess what, folks? I say fine - release 'em. But I also think that we should release all of the other documents, too. This, I'm saying, in that I'm sure that there are probably a lot of other documents showing enhanced interrogation techniques leading to dead-ends, dead-ends that possibly led to the LOSS of human life (coercing people to admit to an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, for example, leading us head-first into the Iraq War)....................................................................Look, folks, both of these sides are cherry-picking. The Dems can be just as bad as the Republicans. But on this particular issue, I really think it's imperative that we, as citizens, take a firmer stand here. Don't you think?......................................................................And, then, of course, there's the possibility (if in fact these techniques did work) that we could have gotten the intelligence legitimately. Take Abu Zubaydah, for instance. The story that I've been getting is that Zubaydah was actually cooperating better WITHOUT THE WATER-BOARDING! It was only after they started torturing the bastard that he started becoming a problem for us. Hopefully, folks, they'll have the decency to release that "document", too.

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