Waterboarding by the CIA…and the Congress that Knew

So we are going to go through a rather protracted public discussion of waterboarding this and waterboarding that probably to the point that teen-agers will learn how to do it and add it to their repertoire of recess activity.

More ominously is there now a terrorist alive who does not know that waterboarding is a physical/psychological trick and not the real thing forcing the hard boys of interrogation to resort to burying the buggers alive as the required logical extension of effective technique?

Already there have been more words written and uttered over what should be a clandestine activity legal or not moral or not ethical or not sanctioned or not than the slaughter of innocents past and future by terrorists for whom death to all others is the watchword of their wretched evil lives.

It is time to get a grip on reality people. CIA operatives have by the best public estimates available waterboarded only three terrorists producing useful intelligence and saving lives as a result thereof.

This week’s contrived liberal furor seemingly intended to destroy whatever shred of effectiveness and morale the CIA may have left turns on the reported 2005 CIA destruction of waterboarding interrogation tapes from 2002 principally of the captured al Qaeda henchman Abu Zubaydah.

Congressional investigations and hyperbolic outrage sprang forth with the speed of light although there is some indication that some members of Congress knew about the tape destruction since November 2006 or March 2007.

But wait. Aren’t Congressional Oversight Committees regularly briefed in detail and in secret on serious intelligence matters? Well yes they are.

Here’s what Joby Warrick and Dan Eggan of the Washington Post reported just last Sunday:

“In September 2002 four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S custody.

For more than an hour the bipartisan group which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

“Among the techniques described said two officials present was waterboarding a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day no objections were raised. Instead at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder two U.S. officials said.

“’The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough’ said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.”

Speaker Pelosi has refused comment on her reaction to the specific information regarding waterboarding that she was provided – long before she and many of her colleagues decided that it was politically expedient to declare the technique to be about the worst thing imaginable.

CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that the tapes were destroyed to protect the agents involved from retaliation. If the escalating witchhunt regarding waterboarding is any indication that decision was the prudent course notwithstanding a murky legal contretemps over whether the tapes fell into a category of intelligence material ordered to be retained.

We have been critical of the CIA and will be again for ineptitude for factional efforts to publicly affect policy for the politicized Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame debacle of both intelligence and justice. But not ever for trying to do the job that the CIA is thanklessly and dangerously assigned which is to provide intelligence to protect this country and its people.

Whatever mistakes the CIA may have made it deserves better than a public political witchhunt that cannot possibly help the ongoing national security needs of this country which far surpass the needs of elected officials for self-survival.

Can anyone think of a technique that might force the politicians to divulge what they knew and when they knew it? Yes but that would be wrong.