KSM Mocked Captors

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States back in 2001, was reported to have mocked his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogators [1]. His tactic was simple and silent. KSM, while being waterboarded, would count off seconds on his hands, restrained, until he got to 40, where the legal guidance says that it can go no longer.

A former aide to President George W. Bush named Marc Theissen recalled an excerpt from his best-selling book, "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe & How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack", on Tuesday's Enterprise Blog:

"Those familiar with the CIA's interrogations say there is no way we could have gotten KSM to talk without waterboarding... A high-ranking CIA official told me, ‘Everyone will tell you, even people opposed to the program, that [KSM] was not going to talk otherwise. I mean, this was one tough mother. He would get waterboarded and they would watch his fingers because he'd figured out how long it was going to last, and he'd just count on his hands how long he had to hold out.'"

Thiessen wanted people to know that it is important that interrogations of high value prisoners could be rendered ineffective if they knew the tactics. Thiessen said when it comes to these interrogations, to get good and credible information, "the key to the success of breaking these people is that they can't know what they're facing. And if they do know, they can resist it."

Osama bin Laden was the world's most wanted terrorist and criminal. The United States itself had put a $25 million bounty on his head. It is believed that his location was found by such "harsh" tactics like waterboarding.

If you can't tell by the title of Thiessen's book, he is against President Obama's decisions to scale back on some of the more confrontational methods of interrogation, which he made in 2009. General James Jones, the national security advisor for Obama at the time, however, agreed with the president's decisions. He said, "this debate will continue and we will see where it goes."

So, what is waterboarding? The process of waterboarding is pretty simple. A captive's face is usually covered with a thin material such as cloth and is immobalized on his/her back. Water is then poured over the captive's breathing passages, making the person almost immediately gag and believe that they are drowning [2]. Though it can cause brain and/or lung damage and oxygen deprivation, I believe that waterboarding is very important for the security of our country. It has allowed our authorities and armed forces, the people that keep us safe, to find out about threats against our nation and to our ground forces abroad.

It's controversial in this increasingly soft and liberal world, but sometimes things need to be done when things need to be done. The way I see it is that if it allows you to stay safe at home, watching television and playing outside with your dog, day after day, you should be thankful for it.

-Luke


[1] Source: Fox News Article
[2] Source: Book, Safire's Political Dictionary