Liberal bleeding hearts have long castigated the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation methods as useless claiming detainees subjected to such “torture” would say anything just to make the process stop. The Obama administration ceased all enhanced interrogations, but too late to stop information collected from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzī bin ash-Shībh during the Bush administration to pay dividends years later.
Intense interrogation, outside of the U.S. on KSM, including water-boarding, provided the first information that two trusted couriers lived with Osama Bin Laden. Further interrogations, including what many, including John McCain, called “torture,” lead to the CIA obtaining names of the two couriers.
The CIA verified the names and began tracking the two individuals as early as 2007. Despite what McCain and others claimed “doesn’t work,” the CIA knew well that the information collected through enhanced interrogation had already been proven and was yielding results unobtainable through any other means.
Ultimately it was the information on these two couriers that lead to the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The house had been a place of great interest for over 8 months. Through other intelligence means, enough additional information as to those living in the house lead the CIA to believe there was a reasonably solid evidence that Osama Bin Laden was in the house.
We can walk around with our noses up in the air, believing we are superior to those who would use such barbarous techniques, while our enemy will behead people without a second thought, but the fact is that today Osama Bin Laden would still be alive if not for enhanced interrogation tactics.
Anyone out there that’s thinking, “we would’ve got the information through other methods,” is being totally ingenuous. If the information was readily available show some evidence or stop speculating. The fact is that this information didn’t come from prim-and-proper methods.
Sadly, with Obama in the White House, Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Leon Panetta headed to the Defense Department, you can be sure that the worst an enemy combatant is likely to endure is a rousing tickling session. Thank God Dick Cheney and those in the CIA during the Bush administration felt there was valuable information to be gleaned from enhanced interrogation, or Osama would probably be sitting in his mansion watching Oprah rather than feeding the fish in the Arabian Sea.
If you’re to fight the world’s worst evils, you can’t act like you’re above the fray. Sometimes you have to get down and dirty. Today those captured in Afghanistan and those sitting in Gitmo know they’re not going be treated like those in the hands of the Bush administration. There is not only no fear, but no respect.
The reason for the Geneva Convention was to protect American soldiers captured in battle from being tortured, and, in turn, we would not abuse the soldiers of our enemies. However, in today’s world, the only entities following these rules are the good guys. Until and unless the government can show evidence that enhanced interrogation tactics don’t work, when we now have proof that they do, there should be nothing off the table.
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