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Report sheds new light on torture methods

4 min read

Torture!

Emphatically saying something doesn’t happen, is certainly no guarantee that it doesn’t.

Despite claims by the architects of the War on Terror, that they weren’t involved in practices that are abhorrent to people all over the planet, there’s some proof they weren’t being honest.

The release of the 500 page “Torture Report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has set off a firestorm of controversy that paints a devastating picture of the evils of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

This might be an old controversy, but the specificity about the alleged treatments of enemy combatants contained in the report, and the indications that those treatments didn’t work anyway, have, once again, called into question America’s claims about maintaining its “moral authority.”

“The report’s full of crap,” former Vice President Dick Cheney remarked on Fox News.

Oh, he hadn’t really bothered to read the report, but, to him, it was “crap” anyway.

When asked about the vicious treatment given to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed mastermind of 9/11, Cheney tersely replied, “What are we supposed to do kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘please, please tell us what you know’. Of course not.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times while he was in the CIA’s custody. It’s thought that waterboarding only produced false and misleading information.

If Cheney HAD kissed him on both cheeks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably would have given up more information than that.

If you douse somebody 183 times with water, until they think they might die, they’d probably admit they’d built the Titanic, and sunk it in the same day.

Waterboarding was used by the Gestapo and the Japanese during WWII.

One American officer, Col. Chase Jay Nielsen, had been subjected to it at the hands of his Japanese captors while he was a prisoner of war for 40 months.

In January of 1946, Col. Nielsen testified in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in Shanghai, China. “I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death,” Nielsen claimed about being waterboarded.

The Japanese soldiers who ordered Nielsen’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were hanged.

There’s been a lot of Republican/conservative pushback to the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Torture Report.”

None of it seems to make much sense.

Even if those detainees had given up lots of usable intelligence, they had still been tortured.

That hasn’t stopped members of the Bush administration, and the intelligence community, who supported those questionable “enhanced interrogation techniques” from fanning out across the 24-hour news cycle and trying to make some case for “keeping America safe, no matter what the cost.”

Nicole Wallace, who served as the Communications Director for the George W. Bush administration, hatched the silliest of arguments on MSNBC.

With the release of the report, she claimed that, “Debates like the one we’re now having will endanger American lives.”

Yet, on the same show, and on the same day, she emphatically contradicted herself. “The notion that what we do affects the behavior of terrorists, is a lie. It’s a lie perpetrated by political correctness, and by liberals, and it’s dangerous,” Wallace shouted.

So, it’s the “liberals” and the “politically correct” who’ve been wrong all along.

Not those people who tortured, but won’t admit it. Not those people who doled out wholesale vengeance, in the name of “keeping America safe.”

If only liberals and those people who’re politically correct are the ones who’re appalled by the world’s response to this nation’s tactics, then how do Wallace and her political allies account for the words of one man, who, himself had been tortured during the Vietnam War – John McCain?

“I know from experience, that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence,” McCain said the day the report was released.

Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net

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