I AM UNSTINTING in my respect for Sen. John McCain, for his experiences as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, for his personal integrity and (mostly) for the policies he espouses.
That is why it was so disconcerting to read his Op-Ed article in the Record (“Torture: It’s un-American and immoral,” May 17).
Seeking to uphold the highest American values of basic human dignity and individual human rights, the good senator launches into an attack on enhanced interrogation techniques on both moral and practical grounds, and he gets it spectacularly wrong on both counts.
He starts by muddying the definition of torture, claiming that water-boarding is torture because it “is a mock execution.”
But that definition appears nowhere in United States law or in the Geneva Conventions. The closest it comes is 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2340(2)(C) which includes “the threat of imminent death” as within the definition of torture.
The problem is water-boarding does not cause death, imminent or otherwise.
McCain admits Khalid Sheik Mohammed was water-boarded 183 times, yet he is still among the living. Water-boarding is not torture under United States law, nor under the Geneva Conventions, which in any case expressly by their terms exclude from their protections terrorists and other irregular combatants (including, by the way, our own special forces, at least on some missions).
McCain then stoops to quibbling with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey over whether the intelligence that lead to bin Laden’s death “began” with Mohammed.
Who cares where it “began”? The indisputable fact is that intelligence that proved useful in connecting the dots to get us to bin Laden’s hideaway came from water-boarding.
So, water-boarding (whether it is considered torture or not) actually works, contrary to the hoary old left-liberal cliché (which McCain dutifully trots out) that subjects undergoing torture will say anything they believe their interrogators want to hear, simply to stop the pain.
Well, sure, of course they will, but our interrogators know this, and can control for it in their interrogation sessions.
Subjects will always lie
Besides, in all methods of interrogation, subjects also will lie, or try to get away with lying, and will tell interrogators what they think the interrogators want to hear.
If that were the test for useful interrogation methods, there would be none that ever could pass.
Not only do enhanced interrogation methods (and even outright torture for that matter) work, but they actually are supremely moral.
The right to life is the highest human right, and in paramount need of protection is the right of the individual (non-combatant) citizen to go about his quotidian business in public places without being blown to pieces by a bomb set off by terrorists yoked to an ideology both utterly evil and nihilistic.
The judicious use of enhanced interrogation techniques advances and vindicates this highest of human rights, whereas the failure to use them subverts it.
And it is well to remember, it is often the threat of the use of enhanced interrogation methods (or torture) that produces the best result, but such threat will not be effective if we announce in advance that we never will use such techniques, that they are beneath us, that we would rather let people be blown to bits in the marketplace than stoop to these techniques.
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