“I just think John McCain is wrong on this. If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it” says chairman of the Homeland Security Committee
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.
Of course the rhetorical technique is transparent.
We aren’t preparing to interrogate Osama, we can’t really say that anything that has happened in years can be tied to his personal involvement and we aren’t likely to take him alive. We caught the first 9/11 bombers, we stopped a massive Millennium plot to hijack airplanes without resorting to pulling out fingernails and putting men in cages for years and the only President to have failed to stop an attack on our soil by foreigners since 1941 has been George W. Bush.
<>This isn’t about Osama anyway, it’s about people picked up off the streets of
Kabul or
Mosul who may or may not know anything. It’s about being stupid enough to believe that anything you extract by torture is reliable enough to be useful and that people who look forward to dying are going to spill the beans if you dunk their heads in the toilet.
I don’t particularly like John McCain, but I agree with him and the finally willing to speak up Colin Powel, that such treatment of prisoners is counterproductive, that it further diminishes the standing or our country, casts doubt on our worthiness to prevail and that it exposes our troops and even civilians to atrocious treatment.
Like the unnamed Biblical Pharaoh, Bush is not going to let go of the notion that he can make us safer by treating prisoners of war like criminals. That’s of course just what happened to McCain and others like him who were captured by the Viet Cong. Like that Pharaoh, Bush is unlikely to be persuaded by toads, lice or locusts and is still hoping that he can get by on the observation that we have not been invaded since 9/11 even though the most plausible plots were stopped by foreign countries without our help and without our spying and without our torture.
It’s not some divine action that has hardened his brain, it’s the knowledge that if we are attacked next Wednesday, he can claim it was because of his torture and spying on Americans. If we are not, he can claim it’s because of him. Either way he wins, either way we lose.
2 comments:
Hilarious to hear another "tough guy" chickenhawk Republican who can't wait to get in their and torture someone. Capture Osama bin Laden? Bush isn't even concerned about him anymore. And by the way he has a bodyguard whose only job is to kill him before he gets captured. on top of that, it was such a great idea to capture Saddam and put him ontrial wasn't it? Before this is over Saddam will be aquitted and file a wrongful prosecution claim and then either open a small coffee shop in Seattle or take control of Iraq again. I would say he should hire Johnnie Cochran in his lawsuit but he's dead - just like Saddam and Osama should be.
Bush not interested in finding Saddam? Sure he is. When he said he wasn't, he really was only he was just saying that. Bush needs him alive though, and that's why we didn't bomb that "funeral" because when Osama dies and the mayhem goes on, who can Bush blame it on?
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