So, I am thinking waterboarding has just become the new extreme sport for Islamo-fascists. Heck, you could do theme parks in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia - all based on the waterboarding experience.
Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.
You know - this solidifies two things for me:
1) John McCain needs to shut up about torture - it is perfectly clear that his ranting about this is to draw attention to himself, not trying to correct an “injustice” in our intelligence collection techniques. He is doing the exact same thing on interrogation techniques that he did to us on immigration. I bet you a month’s pay if the polls showed that the American people thought waterboarding was a great means to extract intelligence from high-value detainees, John McCain would tell us how he has “learned a valuable lesson”.
2) Our Islamist enemy consists of a bunch of pansies because the Code Pink idiots took more than 35 seconds.
In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida’s waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002.
He described Abu Zubaida as ideologically zealous, defiant and uncooperative — until the day in mid-summer when his captors strapped him to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane and forced water into his throat in a technique that simulates drowning.
The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.
“He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers,” Kiriakou said.
Man! Thirty-five seconds of hell on earth and you get a personal visit from Allah!? Why are we not selling this?
Here is another things to digest. I was always taught that the minute you put your hands on a detainee, anything that person says is suspect. However, our enemies have become much more sophisticated and every technique we have ever taught interrogators is studied and an “antidote” developed and trained for. Our techniques have to change as well. To spend weeks with a captive and get nothing but philosophical monologues vs. getting relevant results in 35 seconds is huge. Especially when the captive is in exactly the same health today as he was the day before his capture.
Our military basic training puts thousands of our young men and women through more rigorous and physically demanding forms of “torture” than 35 seconds of water boarding. Heck, SERE training is tougher than what waterboarding has been described and demonstrated as being.
Because of all of these things coming to light, I am much more supportive of the practice than I was when the perception we were being fed was that there were these hours-long torture processes happening - you know, like in the movies. But this information is divulged at a cost, even so.
Twenty years ago, the name of the Director of Central Intelligence was classified. Now, we have the guy publicly defending the actual techniques used by interrogators. This means that in terrorist training camps across the world, someone is developing a syllabus for the next generation of terrorists on how to resist this technique. Tougher terrorists necessitates tougher interrogation techniques.
So, keep ranting about waterboarding. Force the intelligence community to adopt even tougher methods of extracting information.
