Please Don’t Use Rough Interrogation Unless the Bomb Might Be Near Me

We’ve been over this scenario a thousand times. Your grandson has been kidnapped and is trapped in an unknown place underground with limited air to breathe. You have the kidnapper’s accomplice who knows where the boy is, but isn’t talking. Your grandson has hours and perhaps minutes to live if the guy doesn’t tell you where he is.

So far, Congress cannot seem to grasp that interrogators might occasionally face a situation like this. Yes, we respect the basic human rights of all persons, and yes, western and American values make us recoil from the thought, but when we face a monster, and in the case of Islamic fascists a great big group of monsters, we have to get down in the muck with them to defend ourselves and our values, because both our lives and our values will be gone if we don’t.

Somewhat influenced by what a small group of idiots did at Abu Ghraib, and what a large group of idiots who call themselves journalists think, almost all Democrats and a few RINO Republicans are holding up a reasonable definition of the techniques that our intelligence interrogators can pursue in the questioning of captured terrorists who might have information to shut down a ticking bomb. They, and Senators McCain and Graham need to get a grip. It’s not often that I have agreed with Alan Dershowitz, the renowned attorney and Harvard professor, but, unlike many of his liberal colleagues, he can think through certain issues:

Alan Dershowitz: Should we fight terror with torture?
(Excerpts)
London Independent | July 3 2006

The United States' Supreme Court has ruled that military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay breach the human rights of inmates. But in an age of suicide bombings and mass civilian casualties, do our laws themselves need to be rewritten? Are we just ignoring the unpalatable truth: that the survival of our society may depend on the legalized torture of terror suspects? Here, America's leading liberal lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, presents the case for radical reform:

"The great American justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr once remarked that "it is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past." The rules of law regulating how civilized societies protect their citizens from aggression were not laid down as far back as the time of Henry IV. They were enacted, in significant part, following the two awful wars of the 20th century in which massive numbers of civilians were targeted for death and murdered in cold blood. The human-rights revolution of the mid-20th century was largely a reaction to the human wrongs of the Holocaust.

The period between the end of the Second World War and now has seen more profound changes in the nature of warfare than occurred from the time of Henry IV to the beginning of the First World War. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of massive retaliation. This threat has been the staple of military policy since the days of the Bible. Because suicide terrorists cannot be deterred, they must be pre-empted and prevented from carrying out their threats against civilians before they occur. This change in tactics requires significant changes in the laws of war - laws that have long been premised on the deterrent model….

Consider, for example, the United Nations Charter, drafted in the aftermath of Germany's aggressive war between 1939 and 1945. Article 51 confirms "the inherent right of individual or collective [to] self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member." The use of the word "occurs" would seem to require a nation, seeking to act in compliance with the charter, to wait until it is actually attacked before it responds in self-defense. But what should a democratic nation do if it becomes aware of an imminent threat of attack by a group of suicide terrorists in a distant part of the world? Surely it should not simply wait until an "armed attack occurs" and then engage in retaliatory self-defense. First, there is often no known entity to attack, since the suicide terrorists have died and the leaders who sent them have gone into hiding among civilians and may well be preparing renewed terrorist attacks. Second, there is no good reason for a democracy to have to absorb a first blow against its civilian population, especially if that blow can be catastrophic. Third, there is little possibility that potentially catastrophic first blows can be deterred by the threat of retaliation against a phantom enemy who welcomes martyrdom….

Here Mr. Dershowitz spells out in unmistakable terms the problem faced by President Bush since 9/11:

The problem is that the current laws regulating the detention of combatants are near useless when it comes to this motley array of detainees. These detainees simply do not fit into the old, anachronistic categories. Most are not classic prisoners of war. They were not part of a uniformed army under the command of a nation. But neither do they fit in to the classic definition of "unlawful combatants". They are not spies or saboteurs, as those terms have been understood in the context of conventional warfare. Nor are many of them simple "criminals", subject to ordinary trials under the domestic law of crimes. They comprise a new category - or set of categories - unto themselves. They cannot be held as POWs until the end of the war, because this is a war that will never end. They cannot simply be released, because many of them would quickly volunteer to engage in suicide terrorist missions against their former captors, as some already have done. Most cannot be tried as criminals, because their actions took place outside the jurisdiction of the detaining nation. Those who have valuable, real-time information will be interrogated, and - short of the absolute law against "torture" - there are few, if any, rules governing the nature of permissible interrogation when the object is not to elicit "incrimination confessions" for purposes of criminal prosecution, but rather to obtain "preventive intelligence" for the purpose of pre-empting future terrorist attacks."

To read the entire article, click here.

On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume pointed out that President Bush has asked that the definitions created by Senator McCain’s bill last year, and signed into law, be the definitions used. Astonishingly, Senator McCain objects. Something is wrong with this man.