FBI Interrogator: Waterboarding was unnecessary with Zubaydah
In the debate that has erupted on enhanced interrogation techniques since Barack Obama released the OLC memos, we have demanded an honest debate with all of the information on the table…….

burt on April 22, 2009 at 9:09 PM

CBS, as with all of those who want to play this “the information coulda been obtained elsewhere”stuff, must think we will have to wait for these thugs to write their memoirs, and then wait for the English translations to come out on Amazon.

Call me crazy, but I’d rather not wait that long.

I think, for me, the biggest issue is government incompetence. You simply can’t expect to build a good organization when you whip them around.

Nobody who is really talented would agree to make this a career. Reading about what happened the last time the administration took after the CIA, most of those people are ending up broke from legal fees.

AnninCA on April 22, 2009 at 3:58 PM

Maybe the CIA should start recruiting interrogators from the ranks of anyone crazy enough to take a job at AIG. AIG employees have fewer rights than terrorists, so they’ll be easy to throw under the bus if coercive interrogations ever come back to haunt the Obama Administration.

The dangerous thing about putting liberals in charge of military or intelligence operations is, they can never put their heart and soul into the work. Their ideology stipulates the use of military force is so abhorrent that only a nation of surpassing moral perfection can legitimately employ it. America only has this moral perfection when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. That’s why the same people who agonize over wet towels on the faces of captured terrorists were serenely untroubled by Bill Clinton raining bombs on Serbia from 30,000 feet. Those same people like to scream about “Bush’s illegal war of choice” against a country that “wasn’t threatening us,” but shed no tears for Slobodan Milosevic. If Barack Obama personally waterboarded a fourteen-year-old Somali pirate tomorrow, Hillary Clinton would hail him as an epic hero, and the same people trying to sue the entire Bush Administration, one CIA agent at a time, would build a statue in his honor. There’s an old saying that war is diplomacy by other means. For Democrats, war is politics by the same old, tired means.

I don’t think liberals can be trusted to run *anything*, but they should especially be kept far away from the military, and even farther away from intelligence gathering. Their fetish for admiring themselves as enlightened citizens of the world, and their discomfort with boorish, primitive nationalism, makes it very difficult for them to see America as a righteous nation entitled to defend itself against enemies, or even admit there are “enemies” as the rest of us understand the term. They value their standing as Citizens Of The World far more than they prize their identity as Americans – you can bet your lunch money Obama still doesn’t think he did anything wrong on his embarrassing, sniveling creep around the globe, and was very comfortable sharing a laugh with good old Uncle Hugo over the colorful things he says about the United States.

For the Left, a United States under attack is treated exactly the same as the victim of a home invasion robbery: the proper position to assume is a defensive cringe, understanding the motivations of the robbers is essential to dismissing enlightened justice, and the use of deadly force in self-defense will be punished far more severely than the original crime. You’re not supposed to fight back. You’re supposed to file a complaint with the proper authorities and wait for your legal team to work out a court date with the robber’s legal team. Liberals don’t want useful intelligence from terrorists… they want to hear their list of grievances.