Speaking of Evil….
Dick Cheney is still upset at the Obama administration’s decision to stop using some of the overt torture techniques pioneered by the previous administration:
On Sunday, Cheney said he remains concerned that the Obama administration has stopped using some of the techniques first instituted during the Bush years.
“I’m still concerned about the fact that a lot of the techniques that we have used to keep the country safe for seven years are no longer available, that they’ve been sort of taken off the table,” Cheney said. “It’s not clear to me today if we still have an interrogation program to put someone through.”
Cheney said the Obama administration should be willing to use waterboarding and other enhanced techniques.
“I would advocate it,” Cheney said. “I would be a strong supporter of it.”
In the same article, a senior White House adviser obliquely responded to the claim made by some pundits on the right that torture committed under George W. Bush helped in gathering the intelligence that led to the assassination of Obama bin Laden:
But White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” said the administration would not reconsider its prohibition on waterboarding.
Donilon, who appeared on four different Sunday shows, said a range of intelligence-gathering measures led to the successful mission, and that no single technique, such as waterboarding, was a determining factor.
“An operation like this is the result of hundreds of pieces of information and intelligence over time,” Donilon said on “Fox News Sunday.”
That’s not good enough, though. As Cheney pointed out, it isn’t even possible to interrogate prisoners without waterboarding, mock executions, and hanging people by their wrists from hooks in the ceiling. And he isn’t the only one saying this. John Yoo totally has Cheney’s back on this one:
John Yoo says President Obama is too afraid of the politics of Guantanamo Bay to capture and interrogate terrorists.
The former George W. Bush administration lawyer, Yoo wrote the infamous torture memos used to justify the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were a central legacy of Bush’s Global War On Terror. He now says that the killing of Osama bin Laden will go down in history as one of President Obama’s biggest national security fails.
Yoo told CNN on Thursday night that the special forces team sent to kill bin Laden should have instead taken him alive and kept him as a source of future intelligence. Failing to do that, Yoo says, cost the U.S. a valuable asset. That was a mistake, Yoo says.
“If they were going in with no options other than to kill him, then that’s a problem,” Yoo told CNN’s Eliot Spitzer.[...]
Yoo told Spitzer “that a deliberately small force was sent in” to Abbottabad, Pakistan by the White House because “they don’t want to capture high-level al Qaeda leaders.”Why? As Yoo said in his op-ed, the administration is terrified of backing the Bush administration’s moves in the war on terror.
“Capturing [bin Laden] alive would have required the administration to hold and interrogate bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay,” Yoo wrote, “something that has given this president allergic reactions bordering on a seizure.”
You can see how weird that would be from Yoo’s point of view — Pres. Obama having seizure-inducing allergic reactions to an experience that gives John Yoo multiple orgasms.
6 Responses to “Speaking of Evil….”
Hi Kathy,
It isn’t often that I find myself even partially in agreement with John Yoo, but I do agree that bin Laden could have provided valuable intelligence.
Where I part ways with Yoo is on the subject of torture and all the unnecessary partisan nonsense he threw in the hopper.
I have to say I don’t understand this response, Elijah, given the fact that the Navy SEALs recovered a TON of intelligence from OBL’s house after he was killed. This has been reported so many times, and with such emphasis as to the value of the intelligence. I have heard and read this so many times since the assassination: This is, according to administration officials, a vast intelligence haul, potentially the most valuable ever gathered in one place at one time since 2001.
What more is it that you think OBL could have provided from a prison cell? I don’t get it.
Kathy
What is in the mind of a person often exceeds that which s/he commits to the memory of his/her computer. That is particularly true of secret organizations and one so paranoid as to not have telephone or internet service…and to burn its trash.
It was, as you say, an intelligence bonanza, but I believe there was more to be had from the living mind of the person who created and ran the organization.
Just my view. You’re welcome to disagree.
Thank you for your continued support in threads on my recent articles. It has been very much appreciated.
tidbits
I respect your view, but in order to believe that this could have happened, one needs to assume that OBL could actually have *been* interrogated in such a fashion as to get any of that information from his living mind, and I don’t have faith that this would have been possible given that in this country we seem to have lost the ability to do so. If OBL had been captured alive, do you believe our leaders would have been capable of agreeing where to take him or how to question him or who would do that? I sure don’t.
Kathy
Yes, you raise questions I have asked myself about where to take him.
As for questioning him, I have a perspective on bin Laden not shared by all. Newsweek had an article that said, among other things, that we Americans tend to overstate the power of our enemies. I tend to agree with that. bin Laden in my view did not have the super human powers so many ascribe to him.
I view him as a coward. Hiding out as he did, no longer communicating with the world. Living in fear. No super human, just a scared little sociopath. I think he’d have broken down quickly with a skilled interrogator…no “enhanced methods” necessary.
The real issue – and the best argument for killing him,which I have heard from no one -
is where to keep him without endangering the U. S. from his sychophants as they resort to terrorism in an attempt to blackmail us into releasing him.
Yeah, good points, all. And if you want to know my own piece of personal truth, I don’t see a heck of a lot of moral difference between OBL and Dick Cheney, e.g. Dick Cheney is restrained somewhat by the particular governmental infrastructure he operates in. Take that away, and I quite believe he’d be capable of mass murder. I think he’s a sociopath. I really do.