Would you violate the law to stop this? How about "Waterboarding"?
Stuart Taylor Jr has a thoughtful article on the issue of the War on Terror an how we deal with those prisoners of that war. To read the entire article click on the title for a link Below are some quotes from that article.
Interrogation: Anti-Bush Overreaction
By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal
Monday, Dec. 17, 2007
Imagine that U.S. forces capture Osama bin Laden or a high-level lieutenant in Pakistan next month and hand him over to the CIA, amid intelligence reports that a massive new Qaeda attack on America may be imminent.
Does Congress really want to make it unlawful for the CIA to threaten to slap Osama bin Laden (if he is captured) in the face?
Should it be illegal for CIA interrogators to try to scare the man into talking by yelling at him? By threatening to slap him? By pretending to be from Egypt's brutal intelligence service? What about turning up the air conditioner to make him uncomfortably cold? Or denying him hot food until he talks, while giving him all the cold food he can eat?
These methods would all apparently be illegal under a rider that the House-Senate conference committee added to the annual intelligence authorization bill. It would bar the CIA from using any interrogation practice not authorized in the Army field manual's rules for military interrogators. This would mean prohibiting almost all forms of coercive interrogation, including many potentially effective techniques that come nowhere near torture and are now clearly legal.
We've come a long way since September 2002, when Nancy Pelosi, then a House Intelligence Committee member and now the speaker, listened without a peep of protest while being briefed about the CIA's use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on Qaeda leaders.
Now almost all Democrats (and some Republicans) denounce waterboarding as illegal torture. They are probably right -- although you can bet that after the next 9/11 they will backtrack faster than you can say "unprincipled." ..........
But it would be irresponsible in the extreme for Congress to do this. And Bush is right to threaten a veto. .....
If Congress binds the CIA to provisions such as this, it will not only be prohibiting a light slap in a Qaeda leader's face; it will also be prohibiting a threat to slap him. This, even though threats clearly fall outside the legal definition of torture, with the exception of threats specifically intended to cause fear of "imminent" death and "prolonged" mental harm.
Does Congress really want to make it unlawful for the CIA to threaten to slap Osama bin Laden (if he is captured) in the face? Or to put him through the indignity of being served MREs until he cooperates?
This is not to say that the CIA should be free to subject all its detainees to any and all interrogation methods short of torture, and of the "humiliating and degrading treatment" prohibited by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. But the CIA should be able to come a lot closer to that line than the military.
So instead of binding the CIA to the Army field manual, Congress should require it to make public its own list of permitted and prohibited interrogation techniques, perhaps with a classified appendix to avoid giving terrorists a road map for resisting. Congress should then codify the CIA manual as law, with any changes that Congress may consider necessary.
This CIA manual should allow yelling, threats, and other intimidation techniques that clearly do not rise to the level of torture or violate Geneva's Common Article 3
Leading experts on the laws of war have also suggested persuasively that Congress should make a special provision for emergencies, allowing the president to authorize specified interrogation techniques for specified detainees that may violate Geneva -- but not the torture ban. To ensure political accountability, the president should be required to give the Intelligence committees a written finding detailing both his justifications and the authorized techniques.
What about the hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario, or other dire circumstances in which illegal torture appears to be the only chance of averting catastrophe? Consider former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou's astonishing account in interviews aired by ABC News on December 10 and published in the next day's Washington Post.
Captured Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah successfully resisted various high-pressure interrogation tactics for weeks in 2002. Then the CIA waterboarded him. He broke after about 35 seconds, and soon was sharing information that, Kiriakou claimed, may have disrupted dozens of attacks and saved many lives.
But as Kiriakou added, the waterboarding also probably amounted to torture. So unless we choose to disregard Kiriakou's account, we have five choices in cases such as this: 1) We should evade the law by pretending that this was not torture, as Bush has done; 2) We should make torture legal in such cases; 3) We should imprison the interrogators (or the superiors who gave them orders) for crimes, on the ground that they should have stood by and waited for the possibly preventable mass-murder attacks that they expected; 4) We should imprison them for crimes even if we think they did the right thing; 5) The president should pardon them. I would choose Option 5. But the question now before Congress is much, much easier: Should it be illegal for CIA interrogators even to threaten the likes of Zubaydah with waterboarding, or with any unpleasantness at all?
-- Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Opening Argument" appears. His e-mail address is staylor@nationaljournal
The President should pardon them now before Congress spends the next two years in a "witch hunt" and the further emasculation of our intelligence agencies.
