Think Feinstein is having fun?
Welcome to your nutjob constituents, Di!
Meanwhile, despite that waterboarding hasn’t been used in years, and only on three al Qaeda members who were not US citizens, so many on the left are having hissy fits, such as Talk Left. Pop back in a little later this afternoon, and see what the intellectuals at the Democratic Underground think of waterboarding their kids.
I can’t stand Code Pink but on the issue of waterboarding – it is torture. It’s illegal, immoral and any information gained as a result from its use is inherently unreliable.
President Theodore Roosevelt recognized this over 100 years ago:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6647.html
There’s a great post about this issue written by a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) here:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
If the results are unreliable, why did we get such good intell out of it?
If you were given a choice of waterboarding a known terrorist to get info that would save the lives of 3,000 Americans, would you?
Teach, basing an interrogation policy on a hypothetical (and extremely unlikely) scenario isn’t very useful. As a former Military Intelligence officer I can tell you that kind of information is almost never “known.” Gathering useful operational intelligence is an extremely complicated and painstaking process. It requires patience, experience, sometimes luck and above all very clear parameters.
In the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, after being waterboarded he told of al Qaeda’s links with Saddam’s WMDs. The CIA later found out Al-Libi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment. Al-Libi has been identified as one of the primary sources of faulty prewar intelligence regarding chemical weapons training between Iraq and al Qaeda that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Shaykh_al-Libi