A question from a pantywaist liberal
I suppose we pantywaist liberals have Robert Graham (May 11 Fence Post) to thank for enlightening us on how real men squeeze information out of hostile al-Qaida operatives. As a liberal, I was just totally clueless about how universal and effective waterboarding is in getting men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to “spill their guts” to us good guys.
It must be one heck of a technique. It’s been used by some of the best in the business, including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, the KGB, Hussein’s Iraq and the Khmer Rouge. Which raises an interesting question: When the Taliban or al-Qaida manage to capture our guys and gals in a firefight, and they subject them to the same waterboarding techniques that we use in order to gain information on the locations of our forward positions, should we become upset? Or do we just treat the torture as the harmless, run-of-the-mill equivalent of what we do to their insurgents?
Oh, and if we manage to win this conflict, do we prosecute their interrogators as war criminals for waterboarding our troops, or ignore the crime because it’s now become an acceptable intelligence procedure of warfare? So Mr. Graham, could you help us pantywaists out on this one, please?
David Werdegar
Naperville