l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Dick Cheney says he would “do it again in a minute.” He’s right.
By Bret Stephens
Dec. 15, 2014 6:52 p.m. ET
I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11,
was waterboarded 183 times. KSM also murdered Wall Street Journal reporter
Danny Pearl in 2002. He boasted about it: “I decapitated with my blessed
right hand the head of the American Jew,” he said after his capture.
I am sorry KSM remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been
let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have
happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he
became cooperative. As far as I’m concerned, he waterboarded himself.
I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11
to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. I am not sorry that
going to the edge meant, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put it in 2002, doing “
some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.
” I don’t suppose she was talking about removing our shoes at airport
security.
I am sorry we weren’t willing to do those “things” before 3,000 people
had their lives unnaturally ended on Sept. 11, 2001.
I am not sorry Osama bin Laden died by an American bullet. John Brennan ,
the CIA director, delivered a master class in rhetorical obfuscation
masquerading as epistemology when he waffled last week about the quality of
intelligence yielded by the interrogations of KSM and other high-value
detainees. But several former directors and deputy directors of the CIA have
all attested to the link between KSM’s interrogation and the
identification of bin Laden’s courier.
I am sorry that the Feinstein Report, which failed to interview those
directors and thus has the credibility of a Rolling Stone article, seeks to
deny this. Maybe Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of the discredited University
of Virginia gang-rape story and a pro at failing to interview key witnesses,
will find a new career in Sen. Feinstein’s office.
I am not sorry that President Obama has ordered drone strikes on hundreds of
terrorist suspects hiding in Pakistan, Yemen and other places. I am not
sorry he has done so despite the fact that the strikes inevitably have
killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of their associates, many of whom were
either innocent of wrongdoing or had committed no crime deserving of death
from 30,000 feet. This is the nature of war.
.
I am sorry that we are now having a national convulsion over the fact that
the CIA captured, detained, interrogated and in at least two cases
accidentally killed two detainees. This is undoubtedly wrong and merits
apology and compensation. But how this is any worse than what Mr. Obama
routinely brags about doing with drones is beyond me.
I am not sorry that Dick Cheney told NBC’s Chuck Todd this Sunday that, in
the matter of enhanced interrogation techniques, he would “do it again in a
minute.” The former vice president seems to feel none of the need for the
easy moral preening that is the characteristic political reflex of our age.
I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced
interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were
torture. They are not. Waterboarding is part of the military’s standard
course in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. Tens of
thousands of U.S. servicemen have gone through it. To describe this as “
torture” is to strip the word of its meaning.
I am not sorry that Google makes it easy to recall what the political
class had to say about KSM in the immediate aftermath of his capture. Here
is a noteworthy exchange between Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West
Virginia, and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on March 2, 2003:
Blitzer: “There has been speculation, Sen. Rockefeller, in the press that U
.S. authorities, given the restrictions on torture, might hand over Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and his colleagues to a third country, a friendly Arab state
, Jordan, Egypt, some country like that, where the restrictions against
torture are not in existence.”
Rockefeller: “I don’t know that. I can’t comment on that. And if I did
know it, I wouldn’t comment on it. [Laughter.] But I wouldn’t rule it out.
I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this
is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last
10 years.”
I am sorry that Sen. Rockefeller saw nothing amiss with the idea of handing
over KSM to the Cairo Cattle-Prod Crew. This is rightly known as torture-by-
proxy. It is wrong.
I am not sorry that Sen. Feinstein went ahead and released her report. In
its partisanship, its certitudes, its omissions of reportage and
recommendation, and its attempt to seem authoritative merely by being
verbose, it has reopened a necessary debate that was nearly closed—and
nearly lost. Eventually we will have another mass-casualty attack on U.S.
soil. We’ll need better than Ms. Feinstein’s insipid shibboleths to answer
it.
And for that, I am sorry—for all of us. | T*********I
发帖数: 10729 | 2 I Am Not Sorry for the nuke thrown at Japan in WWII | l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 3 me either, haha.
【在 T*********I 的大作中提到】
: I Am Not Sorry for the nuke thrown at Japan in WWII
| k****g
发帖数: 1509 | 4 啊哈哈
【在 l****z 的大作中提到】
: me either, haha.
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