Byron York: When waterboarding works

About a year ago, I had dinner with a man who played a key role in the U.S. war on terror.

The talk turned to allegations of torture. He said that our policy should be that we do not torture. And we should adhere to that policy.

Unless, that is, a truly special situation comes up and we decide that we have to violate that policy in an extremely narrow set of circumstances.

Then, we explain what we did — by that, I think he meant the executive branch would be open with members of Congress — and move on.

What he couldn’t understand was the determination, on the part of some lawmakers, to pass a law that would deal with any and all situations in the future. It’s just not possible.

I thought of that this week when John Kiriakou, a former CIA interrogator, went public with the story of how U.S. officials dealt with Abu Zubaydah, the logistical chief of al Qaeda and a top planner of Sept. 11.

Kiriakou told his story to ABC News’s Brian Ross, and the network posted the full, unedited text of the interview on its website.

Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Shot three times before being caught, his life was saved by U.S. doctors. When he recovered, Kiriakou was among the first to speak to him.

CIA interrogators tried a variety of techniques of escalating severity on Zubaydah. Each one had to be specifically authorized in advance at the highest levels of the CIA.

Still, Zubaydah resisted. Finally the interrogation worked its way up to waterboarding.

After the waterboarding session, Zubaydah was a different man. “He told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night,” Kiriakou said, “and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured.”
U.S. interrogators, fearing another major attack — remember, this was just months after 9/11 — worked fast. According to Kiriakou, Zubaydah provided information that helped stop a number of al Qaeda actions.

“It did. The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

Kiriakou didn’t actually do the waterboarding. He declined to be trained in how to do it — although he actually underwent the technique as part of his preparation.

Back then, he thought waterboarding was necessary. “As time has passed,” he told Ross, “I think I’ve changed my mind. And I think that waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn’t be in the business of doing.”

“What happens if we don’t waterboard a person and we don’t get that nugget of information, and there’s an attack on a -— on a movie theater or a shopping mall or in midtown Manhattan, you know, at rush hour?” Kiriakou asked, apparently of himself. “Then — then what do we do? I would have trouble forgiving myself.”

According to most reports, the CIA waterboarded two people — Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. In the end, Ross asked, did Kiriakou think it was worth it?

Interesting article.

During that period of time, a number of complaints were made in the media that torture techniques were used at Guantanamo. I was frankly curious at the odd nondenial-denial method the military used to respond to the accusations. I smiled with suspicion.

Later, it turned out that indeed a great deal of the information came instead from electronic intercepts, and that relatively little came out of Gitmo. The press never figured out that this made Gitmo even more important... as a smokescreen- red herrings for low-I.Q.journalists.

From the military's point of view, the last thing they wanted was for the enemy to begin the inevitable wondering about where we were getting all of our info, and start thinking about comm security.

It may have been why the administration had refrained from decisively stating that only a very few cases had occurred where the practice of waterboarding was actually used. Sometimes it may not hurt to let the idiot-pack of the media obsess upon the "outrage of the year", and divert any thinking terrorist, (an oxymoron, I know), from becoming too suspicious at how relentlessly they are being rolled up.

Still, the media did do their part, when they discovered to their horror that the intelligence services of the west were having successes with communications intercepts. They immediately, frantically and loudly took to their microphones to warn the enemy and the world that this was, in fact, occurring.

What the war-planners will most likely carefully protect, is the sad truth that American military lives are being traded for time, to forestall the necessity to kill multi-millions of muslim dupes. By buying this time for the muslim on the street to see that the only thing extremism will bring them is grief, loss and death, they have waged an increasingly successful campaign to change the minds of millions in Iraq.

The surge would have been pointless until the timing was just right. The Iraqi people had finally had enough of terrorists; had seen first hand what they brought, and were ready to cooperate in driving them out.

What no one seems to want to print, is that these same realizations are even more importantly being pondered by every other muslim in the world.

As I have noted before, the Imperial Japanese Command, in 1942, sent the following message to the Japanese soldiers being fed into Guadalcanal, and being promptly and continuously destroyed there by U.S. Marines, who had them trapped into a battle they couldn't afford to lose, and couldn't back away from:

"To His Imperial Majesty's Forces- From now on the eyes of the entire world are upon you. Do not expect to return from this island- not a single man- until victory has been achieved. Show the qualities of steel, or of rock, and hit the enemy so hard that he will not be able to get up again."

The japanese soldier called Guadalcanal "The island of death." But they knew what only a few in the U.S. seemed to know. And that is that the locals will only cooperate with you if they see both an inevitability that you will eventually win... and that they will be happy that you did. Once the pacific islanders, and the world, saw the barbarity of the japanese, AND, the fact that they were by no means invincible, they lost the momentum and the initiative. They were successfully pressed to never again regain it, and forced into unending defeat and retreat.

But what had the poor Guadalcanal islanders done to deserve invasion? They hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor...

And yet, as in present day Iraq, they found themselves the crucial piece of real estate that the conflict would rage around. Must unavoidably rage around.

It broke the back of the japanese offensive and exposed the japanese vulnerabilities to the world. After that it was never again attractive for the bystanders to throw their lot in with the Empire of the Rising Sun.

That war, this war, and to some extent perhaps all wars, are about forcing the enemy to rethink his prospects of bettering himself by inflicting violence on others.

And the enemy, the idiot press cannot comprehend, consists of not only every murderer... but every muslim, and every treacherous liberal, who thinks to aid and encourage them.

Later they will realize that this was the easy way.

The hard way will involve more death than any of us can yet comprehend.

Ask the villagers around Nagasaki what suicide bombers did to their prospects of a negotiated peace.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.