Meeting The Terrorist-Jihad Challenge

"We have not concluded that it is the use of EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them."
"The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by detainees is in my view unknowable... I believe effective non-coercive methods are available to elicit such information, methods that do not have a counterproductive impact on our national security and on our international standing."
John Brennan, chief, Central Intelligence Agency

"[Waterboarding is] not as permanently damaging as other forms of torture [like] pulling out fingernails."
"Would I waterboard again Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 killings and beheader of over 40 people? Would I waterboard him if I could have a good chance of saving thousands of Americans or for the matter, other allied individuals? Yes."
Robert James Woolsey, former head of CIA, 1992 TO 1995

Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing. Photograph: Bob Strong/Reuters

Bitter censure rains down from all directions on the Central Intelligence Agency and its authorities and agents from the American liberal-left, while the Republican side, which resisted and warned that if the Senate intelligence committee that investigated the allegations of torture committed by CIA agents against enemy aliens would have unwanted repercussions, has led to further polarization between the two political groups in the country. And concerns over global security.

What good could possibly come of publicly airing the conclusions that a Senate panel comprised of Democratic critics of a previous Republican government held responsible for tarnishing America's reputation? Who exactly is it that tarnished that reputation? The American public was already in possession of allegations and admissions that a level of harsh interrogation teetering on torture was taking place in the handling of Islamist terrorists. This is the Democrats distancing themselves.

This at a time when the country was reeling from the horrific fact of a disastrous atrocity visited upon their interior with jihadists gaining the opportunity through a simple, well-executed and cunning plan to hijack passenger planes in flight to sacrifice passengers in a plan to destroy two symbols of American financial strength and political enterprise along with all human beings who might be present in those buildings. Making of the terrorists celebrated martyrs in the world of raging Islamism.

In various part of the Middle East, southeast Asia and North Africa there was wild celebration at the success of the al-Qaeda mission. While in other parts of the same geographies the assaults were held to be the result of a U.S./Israeli conspiracy.  Nothing quite as satisfying as witnessing at second-hand through the playing and replaying of the images of wild destruction of two enormous towers, landmarks on the New York skyline, and people leaping to their deaths from the crumbling structures; the great and powerful America brought to its knees in traumatic grief.

It would take much to melt the hearts of Westerners at the very thought of those who planned and carried out that outrage dying the deaths of heroes, but on the other hand, those suspected of mass murder, mutilation, human carnage on every scale of brutal medievalism, rape and pillage, causing terrified masses of human migration, being harshly interrogated does the trick. No one who is the least bit civilized looks forward with anticipation to the potential of wreaking revenge by causing pain to those suspected of having engaged in brutality against them.

But the more likelier we are to forgive and make excuses for radical extremists in their self-proclaimed, religious-dictated mission to destroy, maim and murder while creating victims all over the world, including that of the Muslim world in their fanatical obsession with the purity of Islam reigning over all in a global sovereign imperialism, the more we commit by default to enabling those engaged in that mission. If there is an opportunity to acquire useful information in preventing any such further attacks, any means of acquiring that information can be useful.

The Western ideal of 'clean' conflict is a mirage in any event, one we prefer to subscribe to, likening war with hell, which it is, but a hell that attracts those who enjoy that prospect of making hell for others who will not and do not and plan not to share their values of destruction and conquest through submitting to a virulent Islam. In Sudan alone hundreds of thousands of suffering people have been sacrificed to a vision of Islamism and Syria has joined the fray of lunatic atrocities.

The soul-searching and breast-beating over the 'failure' of the CIA to uphold the supposedly honest traditions of treating enemies who will not hesitate to slaughter whom they target in their quest for a global caliphate, with calm and kind consideration bespeaks a type of self-defeating lunacy in and of itself. Mr. Brennan was appointed by President Barack Obama to head the CIA. If he and the agency are to be censured, was this the president's intention, or was he appointing someone he trusted to do the work that needed to be done in a manner found useful?

This is a president, after all, who prefers to anoint lightning raids on jihadists holding Americans and other nationals prisoner for ransom, ransom that no American administration has found fit to pay. This is a president, after all, who sees great utility in action, in dispatching Navy SEALs to finish the job that his predecessor missed out on, in holding Osama bin Laden to account. This is a president, after all, who sees great utility in the use of drones for effective assassinations of enemy leaders, even if civilians also die in the process.

And it is instructive to recall that it was before Mr. Obama became president that the CIA's use of 'excessive' force in interrogation was brought to a halt. As president, Mr. Obama merely made it, two years later, illegal to pursue such nasty persuasions as water-boarding. This is the man, after all things considered, made it a pledge that his administration would work toward bipartisanship. While all his decisions since then have driven deeper wedges into the partisanship lack of collaboration in running the country.

Here are the Democrats, in a last desperate attempt to besmirch their Republican counterparts, portraying their administrations as morally indefensible in their treatment of enemy aliens conspiring great harm to America, and doing so on a very thin edge of a wedge upon which they themselves teeter.