Did You Know That The Senate Refused To Outlaw Waterboarding In 2006?
And did you know that a 1994 criminal statute prohibiting torture specifically included war as an excuse to use it? Of course you didn’t, because the media doesn’t report those inconvenient truths and the liberal politicians now grandstanding on the issue certainly aren’t going to bring it up.
But Victoria Toensnig brings up those facts and more in the Wall Street Journal today. Her conclusion:
…now, safe in ivory towers eight years removed from 9/11, critics demand criminalization of the techniques and the prosecution or disbarment of the lawyers who advised the CIA. Contrary to columnist Frank Rich’s uninformed accusation in the New York Times that the lawyers “proposed using” the techniques, they did no such thing. They were asked to provide legal guidance on whether the CIA’s proposed methods violated the law.
Then there is Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who declared that “waterboarding will almost certainly be deemed illegal if put under judicial scrutiny,” depending on which “of several possibly applicable legal standards” apply. Does he know the Senate rejected a bill in 2006 to make waterboarding illegal? That fact alone negates criminalization of the act. So quick to condemn, Mr. Robinson later replied to a TV interview question that he did not know how long sleep deprivation could go before it was “immoral.” It is “a nuance,” he said.
Yet the CIA asked those OLC lawyers to figure out exactly where that nuance stopped in the context of preventing another attack. There should be a rule that all persons proposing investigation, prosecution or disbarment must read the two memos and all underlying documents and then draft a dissenting analysis.
The problem with the debate over “torture” (I maintain that waterboarding is not, in fact, torture) in America today is that it stopped being about sound policy a long time ago. Instead, it has become a convenient emotional weapon to be used by liberals against the Bush administration and Republicans. These people care more about scoring political points than they do about national security.
Or, at least, in public they do. In private many of them such as Nancy Pelosi pragmatically embrace waterboarding as the sort of thing that sometimes needs to happen to save lives.
