I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
The Waterboarding Debate Continues
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James Taranto posted this great piece in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:
Administration officials and sympathizers have continued to fire back against the argument that the Osama bin Laden raid vindicates the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As we noted Friday, the counterarguments have been notably weak, and that continues to be the case.
Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace asked him: “Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits–why is that over the line?”
Donlon tried to evade the question by giving a long justification for the shooting of bin Laden, but Wallace pressed the matter:
Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?
Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.
Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?
Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.
Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action–for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.
Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Wallace: You said it was against our values.
Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.
Writing in The Daily, the usually sensible Judith Miller offers this bit of sophistry:
Effectiveness should not be the sole standard in determining how America treats terrorist suspects [sic] in detention.
Terrorism, after all, was an effective tool for bin Laden, at least for a while. That made it neither moral nor politically justifiable.
This analogy is completely empty. Not only are bin Laden’s means (murdering civilians en masse) not comparable to America’s (frightening mass murderers in ways that pose no actual threat of physical harm), but the ends are not comparable either. The objective of an al Qaeda attack is not to save civilians.
The atrociously poor quality of the arguments against enhanced interrogation are all the more reason to think the bin Laden raid vindicates it.