Church Report

Fire of Liberty

Here's a good piece by Jed Babbin in The New York Post on the 11th investigation on possible abuses of War on Terror detainees. The investigation, known as The Church Report, revealed that the various charges of officially sanction torture and abuse being bandied by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Patrick Leahy are completely overblown. Yes, there have been documented acts of abuse but they are very rare and generally occur outside of the realm of interrogations.

While Babbin has written a fact-filled and powerful piece that shoots down the canards of the left and conspiracy mongers he also lays a good argument on how the fear of prosecution has prevented our interrogators from applying legally approved tuff measure. Just see for yourself:

As the Church report shows, the terrorists are trained in our interrogation methods and how to resist them. When we use more aggressive techniques — as we did in the case of two "high-value" detainees at Guantanamo who resisted standard interrogation for months — the new techniques "successfully neutralized the two detainees' resistance training and yielded valuable intelligence."

Church said in a conference call Wednesday that our interrogators are now "clamped up" — declining to push interrogations as hard as they legally and morally can and should for fear of the next investigation that will come along.

We are punishing innovative interrogators, such as the two women at Guantanamo Bay, "who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually-suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees' religious beliefs." Why should we punish those women? Why should we respect terrorists' religious beliefs when we — and a growing number of their co-religionists — say they are perverting their religion by their terrorism?

The most important finding Church makes is a negative one: that there is no universal definition of torture or abuse. American and allied interrogators shouldn't have to work in fear of prosecution under vague laws and treaties. So long as they do, they will remain "clamped up" — less effective than they must be if we are to get the actionable intelligence we need to save lives.

Thank God that we have individuals like Jed Babbin, who is willing to get his arms dirty in presenting the guts of these expensive but informative investigations. It sure beats a biased news article by The New York Times.