Audio By Carbonatix
“We need to find out how this information was gathered,” said Marco Rubio to the Tampa Tribune, referring to the intelligence on Osama Bin Laden’s courier that led to last Sunday’s raid. “Again, this is not for the purposes of saying we were right and you were wrong. It’s for understanding what works and what doesn’t.”
Didja catch that? That was Marco Rubio, a popular Republican statesman, admitting that he doesn’t know whether waterboarding was essential to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Why can’t more Republicans talk this way?
Rubio is absolutely right, of course. We don’t know
whether waterboarding yielded the necessary intel. Those who do know
aren’t talking specifics, and they should. Not because the revelation
that torture worked in this particular instance would constitute proof
that torture is always, or even ever, a good idea — the costs to
America’s credibility and moral authority may (may!) outweigh the
benefits to our national security incurred by Sunday’s operation. We
need to know simply because it’s impossible to have an intelligent
debate on the subject without possessing the relevant data.
Contrast
Rubio’s mellow inquisitiveness to the horrible presumption of House
Homeland Security Chairman Peter King, who insisted earlier this week on
The O’Reilly Factor that:
…we obtained
information several years ago, vital information about the courier for
[Osama]. We obtained that information through waterboarding… It came
from an overseas prison where Khaled Sheik Mohammed was being
interrogated. Waterboarding was used, and it was during the
interrogation of Khaled Sheik Mohammed, through waterboarding, that this
information was learned.
Two possibilities present
themselves: Either King was sharing top-secret info that the
administration was trying to hush up or else he was babbling.
(Everything I’ve read suggests that the info from Khaled Sheik Mohammed
came from “standard interrogations”
performed months after he was waterboarded, though what info may have
been revealed by other waterboardees remains a mystery, at least to me.
Too many stories have been published this week for me to stay completely up-to-date, so if
anybody’s got some clarifying info, please don’t hesitate to post in the
comments.)
King’s comments typified the reaction of the gung-ho torture crowd
whose collective dissembling has gotten a little disheartening. Many
thanks to Rubio for not claiming to know what he can’t know. Humility is
the essence of wisdom.
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