The Mavericks Agree To Continue To Torture Detainees

Lee P. Butler

“I had a single test for the pending legislation, and that’s this: Would the CIA operators tell me whether they could go forward with the program, that is a program to question detainees to be able to get information to protect the American people,” President Bush said in the aftermath of the torture debate debacle.

“I’m pleased to say that this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America from terrorist attacks, and that is the CIA free to question the world’s most dangerous terrorists and to get their secret’s,” the President added.

As you can probably imagine, liberals are outraged over the fact that terrorists will continue to be treated like terrorists, only now it may be possible with the acceptance of congressional approval.

Just as the media was barreling full-steam-ahead promoting John McCain and his merry men of mavericks as being the great champions of stopping the Bush administration from using torture to interrogate terrorists who were being unfairly detained and were denied their constitutional rights, the engine fell out of their boat.

Instead of turning the vessel around, they ran sails up the mast and forged ahead. According to one report, “The administration had sought to more narrowly define the U.S. obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949,” which is about as close to fair on this subject as the media has been to date.

The problem has been that every conceivable method used by the CIA in interrogating terrorists, including those utilized daily in America by police departments, has been characterized as torture by liberals, the media, and McCain’s mavericks.

Once the new legislation cleared the committee, those same people were beside themselves and even questioned Senator Lindsey Graham as they wondered if, “other aggressive techniques such as sleep deprivation or playing loud music,” would continue to be allowed, because to these liberals those are also ‘torture’ tactics.

Before liberals had time to realize what had happened, they were opining about how the White House had caved under pressure from the mavericks. They quickly discerned that only a couple techniques that had been used, would actually end and that interrogating terrorists was once again an acceptable practice in the arsenal to defeat terrorism.

The New York Times was clearly deflated by the ‘deal’ when they wrote, “Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying to path to wiggle out of its one real concession. About the only thing Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush’s agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant.”

The ‘wiggle room’ they referred to was in relation to terrorists getting an ‘unclassified summary of classified evidence’, instead of the terrorists getting full access to all classified documentation which is the way liberals prefer it to be, since protecting terrorist ‘rights’ is more important to them than protecting Americans.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, was livid. “The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.”

In the first place, they down-graded their usual terminology in describing terrorist interrogations from ‘torture’ to ‘abuse’, which is common use of vocabulactic mendacity by liberals, especially when they believe they are losing position in an argument.

Second, anyone can create their, ‘own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions’, because there is no clear definition of what is acceptable and what is not, including the fact that terrorists are not covered by its parameters.

Terrorists also have no ‘rights’ given by the U.S. Constitution, but liberals don’t think so. This would to be basic common sense, if you are not an American Citizen, you are not protected by our Constitution. Period.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, “In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senator intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some no citizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.”

That comment was in response to the Canadian, Maher Arar, who was recently found to not be a terrorist after the Canadian government originally accused him of terrorism.

Herbert was offended by this case and charged Arar was, ‘kidnapped by the U.S. government and sent off to countries that specialize in the evil arts of torture’, completely disregarding the fact that Canada had wrongly accused him of terrorism and America had no choice but to act on that intelligence and arresting a suspected terrorist is not the same as being ‘kidnapped’.

But, of course, Herbert in his infinite wisdom, instantly knew that Arar wasn’t an ‘evil’ terrorist just like those innocent terrorists being held at Gitmo who are being tortured by our own government.

So it should have shocked him and all other liberals when John McCain said, “The agreement that we’ve entered into gives the president the tools he needs to continue to fight the War on Terror and bring these evil people to justice.”

To liberals, extremist Islamic terrorists aren’t evil, but poor, uneducated, innocent people who have nothing else but a desire to stop the tyrannical control and oppression of the mighty United States.

Yet, the majority of prisoners at Gitmo are college educated, rich, Middle Easterners who just simply hate America and they have misguided belief that they have to destroy the infidels (us) because their religion tells them so.

To prevent that, we have to do everything at our disposal within reason. Harsh interrogation tactics have to be utilized to get the intelligence needed to stop an attack before it can be carried out.

Even the mavericks saw the logic in that, so they agreed to continue to torture detainees.

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Lee P Butler is the Vice Chairman of the Richmond County Republican Party where he resides with his wife and three children and has been published in several outlets including The Richmond County Daily Journal, OpinionEditorials.com, The North Carolina Conservative, The Lasting Joy, and is the owner/publisher of leepbutler.com.

lee@leepbutler.com