Monday, October 29, 2007

Torture on NRO

A couple of articles about torture at NRO:

Clifford D. May writes:

On one extreme of the debate over interrogating terrorists are the Jack Bauers, those who – like the lead character in Fox's hit series 24 – think you do whatever it takes to get the information you need from someone plotting mass murder. At the other extreme is the antiwar Left: They wouldn't harm a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head to save Disneyland at Christmas.

Those of us who hold views somewhere between these poles ought to be having a serious discussion about what methods should be permissible and under what circumstances. But that's become close to impossible. A case in point: I was on The Abrams Report on MSNBC last week to discuss whether Judge Michael Mukasey, during congressional hearings, should have said whether "waterboarding" "simulated drowning" constitutes torture and therefore must be prohibited.

(source)

Andrew J. McCarthy writes:

Jonathan Turley has penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times claiming that Michael Mukasey, President Bush's nominee to become the next attorney general, should be disqualified for failing to condemn waterboarding as torture. According to Turley, Judge Mukasey's confirmation-hearing testimony was evasive, and the nominee flatly lied to the committee when he said he did not to know what was involved in the technique called "waterboarding." The accusation about lying is noxious and what passes for legal reasoning in Turley's piece is especially shameful for a George Washington University law professor.

To begin with, interrogation tactics used in top-secret Central Intelligence Agency programs are classified. The fact that Professor Turley, Judge Mukasey, I, or anyone else may know, as a general matter, what waterboarding is does not mean we know how it has been practiced (assuming it has been practiced) by the CIA. Just a brief perusal of the available literature on the Internet demonstrates that there are variations – and those are just the ones we know about.

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