Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=325121124043870
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, April 20, 2009 4:20 PM PT
National Security: The establishment media are obsessed with the newly revealed details of our enhanced terrorist interrogation techniques. Their most important detail is the many American lives they saved.
Read More: Global War On Terror
There's nothing like a big number in a top-of-the-fold headline to sell newspapers — and seal misconceptions. The supposedly big news of the weekend regarding disclosure of declassified memos specifying the methods used by the CIA to question captured terrorists was that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded a combined 266 times.
That number certainly is big if you think about what most media and leading Democrats have been telling us about use of the water board. They claim it constitutes torture, that no one can resist such a pseudo-medieval practice for more than a few seconds — yet at the same time it doesn't really work.
But the number itself refutes those accusations. If KSM was forced to undergo such a drowning sensation 183 times in the course of one month about a year after the 2001 attacks, and Zubaydah 83 times in the course of a month the summer before KSM's sessions, it suggests the interrogators were getting places.
The released paper makes that clear. The May 30, 2005, memo from the Justice Department to the CIA, for instance, noted that "no technique is used on a detainee unless use of that technique at that time appears necessary to obtaining the intelligence."
Khalid and Zubaydah were two of only three detainees on whom waterboarding, "the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques," was used. Yet the number of sessions employed makes it clear that as harsh as the method is, it clearly can be resisted, especially if a terrorist has been conditioned to do so. Otherwise, so many repeated sessions would be unnecessary.
As the guidelines of the CIA's Office of Medical Services stated, "The general goal of these techniques is a psychological impact, and not some physical effect." The OMS described the "specific goal" as being to "dislocate" the terrorist's "expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive."
Unfortunately, by making the details public and thus available for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups to study, that "dislocation of expectations" becomes impossible for future terrorist detainees.
This is an incalculable blow to U.S. national security.
As former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out last week, half of the U.S. government's knowledge of al-Qaida's structure and activities is the fruit of enhanced interrogation.
That information let the U.S. and other governments foil numerous 9/11-style operations, saving hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives.
We understand that people have legitimate concerns about the U.S. being involved in torture. But enhanced interrogation — a reasonable (but now rescinded) response to the deadliest of threats to our homeland — should be seen for what it is: a tough, but effective, way to save lives.
And those devoted U.S. government personnel who took part, who saved so many, deserve medals.
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