When President Obama Captures Bin Laden, Will the Loony Left Protest?

Looks like the loony left just can’t stop agitating for terrorists’ rights.

The U.S. should never mistreat ordinary prisoners of war. But from what I’ve read, the three terrorist master-planners subjected to the so-called “torture” of waterboarding by the CIA, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were by no stretch ordinary captives or foot soldiers. These were the top bin Laden deputies who provided the operational planning for the attacks of September 11th. After being waterboarded, they coughed up a great deal of information about the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist attacks that were in the works. According to the CIA, the interrogation of these men “made it possible for the U.S. to chip away at al Qaeda, link by link, disrupting its operations and saving lives.” It is worth noting that water boarding, the enhanced interrogation technique which has drawn the most objection, inflicts no permanent physical damage and is endured by U.S. service members training to become special forces at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resilience, and Escape School.

Privileged modern leftists in the West, protected from true evil by those who confront it, instead conceive of Dick Cheney and George Bush as the ultimate “evil.”  Insulated from life’s harsher realities, they take their security completely for granted. Their outrage is not for the terrorists who plotted the ghastly murders of thousands of American civilians, but for our leaders, who were faced with tough decisions following September 11th. That their characterizations of Bush and Cheney would be more appropriate to a game of Dungeons & Dragons than to serious analysis of policy reflects their naivete and refusal to tolerate nuance or complexity in evaluating issues–ironically, the very black-and-white, simplistic mindset they project onto the “Evil” Bush and Cheney.

Demonizing our leaders for making tough calls about the handling of hard core sociopaths who have dedicated their lives to the deliberate murder of civilians is foolish.

These terrorists were not waterboarded because Dick Cheney is sadistic. They were waterboarded because they were high value detainees who were thought to have – and who did have – information that led to the dismantling of terror plots and networks.

We are a nation of laws and should not descend to our enemies’ level. But we would have to go far, far lower than anything meted out to KSM or Zubaydah to do that.

All of which brings me to reflect on the leftists’ condemnation, today, of President Obama for not retroactively prosecuting the CIA officials who supervised the waterboarding of Mohammed and Zubaydah. How absurd.

Do they intend, once President Obama captures bin Laden, to whine if a hair on bin Laden’s filthy beard is harmed?

This entry was written by and posted on April 20, 2009 at 2:40 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: , . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>