Wishful Thinking

The American Thinker ^ | May 01, 2009 | Randall Hoven

[Scanian]

There's the old joke about an economist's plan to get out of a pit he was thrown into: "First, we assume a ladder." There has been a whole lot of assuming going on, from alternate energy to non-harsh interrogations.

Regarding interrogations, a principled person who, for moral reasons, is against grabbing a person by his shirt collar and pulling him suddenly toward you (the "attention grasp," now proscribed), would accept the downside of his stance: potential failure to obtain actionable intelligence that could save many lives. A principled person would accept this tradeoff. That's what "principled" means.

But our current leaders reject that there is a tradeoff. Robert Gibbs, President Obama's spokesperson, said, "Nobody could ever likely tell you that any information derived couldn't also have been derived from another means." Our leaders simply assume there are other methods, non-harsh, that would obtain that information.

Do they have any evidence to support the contention that other methods would work? It seems just about everything was tried on KSM, yet nothing worked until he was waterboarded. Is there some non-harsh, untried, technique that would have persuaded KSM to tell us about the plot to kill everyone in the 73-story Library Tower in Los Angeles? Mr. Gibbs leaves that as an exercise for the reader.