OBAMA'S TORTURED LOGIC
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/05/11/obamas-tortured-logic?utm_medium=email&utm_source= Email+marketing+software&utm_content=476871385&utm_campaign= Newsletter+5%2f11+_+hitkdk&utm_term= Obama's+Tortured+Logic
By Mark Hyman
Reviewed by David Jones

Writing for American Spectator, Mark Hyman excoriates President Obama’s judgment that various interrogation techniques constitute torture. His analysis alternates between bemused headshaking with a touch of sardonic wit and teeth-gritted conclusions that the decision has significantly damaged U.S. security.  

Hyman is most effective in comparing the various “increased pressure” methods (hands on the side of the prisoner’s face; leaning against a wall at finger tip distance; confinement in confined spaces; frightening with an insect) with the practices of parents, gym teachers, fraternity brothers, and mischievous children.  He notes that all of these techniques – in forms more severe than practiced on the detainees – have been used for training U.S. military personnel to strengthen their will to resist interrogation and bolster their self confidence if captured. He sneers that criminalizing these procedures would result in indictments of American parents, gym teachers, university administrators, and fraternity members.

Even the infamous “waterboarding” is (accurately) depicted as more psychological than physical pressure. Hyman noted that it was applied briefly to a limited number of terrorist suspects with dramatic, life-saving success. In contrast, he points out, literally tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen and women have been waterboarded since the early 1990s. He consequently scoffs at over-the-top media (specifically the New York Times) contending that it “darken[ed] the country's reputation [and] blur[red] the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them.”  Really? No clear moral distinction between those who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 and those attempting to prevent a repeat of the attack?

For Hyman, U.S. interrogation techniques were essentially trivial when compared with what once was regarded as torture: arm breaking; gang rape; hot wired genitals. For him it is the equivalent of Bush 41’s kinder, gentler thousand points of light as applied to interrogation.

Ultimately, “torture” is an ends-versus-means issue. All interrogators are not salivating sadists; a cooperative subject is preferable to one who is hostile and recalcitrant. But what happens when the subject is unresponsive to polite, “Miranda rights” levels of persuasion? Do critics of these now forbidden techniques believe that the United States should accept another 9/11, or multiple 9/11s, rather than employ torture? Do they believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact? Or do they believe that in extreme cases, e.g., the classic example of a concealed weapon of mass destruction, interrogators should deliberately break the law – opening themselves to prosecution – in a last resort effort to find the WMD?  If the president authorized torture – and the effort failed to discover the WMD before it exploded – should (s)he be impeached?

These are hard questions and, for good reason, those in authority prefer to avoid precise answers. They are not, nevertheless, trivial concerns, and President Obama’s politicized decision to limit interrogation techniques constrains the government’s flexibility in facing national security challenges.