Actually I’m referring more to extreme interrogation techniques than to torture. Torture is cutting off fingers, ripping off fingernails or intensive electrical shock. Water-boarding is an extreme interrogation technique.

The fact that the CIA used water-boarding to extract information from a couple of terrorists has gotten a lot of play in the media lately. Despite the fact that the government claims that the extracted information allowed terrorist attacks to be averted, most of the media accounts have been highly critical of the use of water-boarding. (But they seem to have been more worked up over the fact that the CIA destroyed video tapes of the interrogations. If they think it’s so bad why do they want to watch it?) They seem to be saying that saving innocent lives does not justify scaring the crap out of a known terrorist.

If you think you’re opposed to using extreme interrogation techniques under any circumstances, consider the following scenario: Your daughter has been kidnapped. Due to a lucky break the police have arrested a man they are certain is the kidnapper. Although he won’t tell the police where he is holding your daughter he has told them that she is locked inside a large tank that is slowly filling with water. He says that she will drown in 48 hours if the police don’t meet his demands, which are to be given a million dollars in cash and transportation to a country of his choice. He says that he will tell the police the location of your daughter when he reaches his destination.

Would you bet your daughter’s life that the kidnapper will keep his promise? Or would you encourage the police to use some innovative forms of persuasion to convince the kidnapper to reveal her location?

Considering the possibility that the kidnapper is lying and your daughter is already dead, would you discourage the use of torture because doing so would make you as bad as the kidnapper? Or would you want the kidnapper to suffer as much as your daughter likely did?

If you would choose to take the so-called high-road on this I’m glad you’re not my parent. If it were my daughter in this situation I would choose to use any non-life-threatening means available to break the kidnapper.

In principle this scenario is no different than dealing with a person that you know has information critical to preventing a major attack on our country that could kill thousands of people. The key element in both is that there is no doubt that the person has critical information and is refusing to give it up.

I believe the reason so many people in this country condemn the use of extreme interrogation techniques under any circumstances is that they don’t have a clear stake in the outcome. It’s a lot easier to take the high moral ground when neither you nor close loved ones are directly threatened. We should all take the time to consider whether our moral stances would survive if the bad stuff is happening to us.

Fox News reports:

An 8-year-old boy expecting to catch a plane home is denied entry for appearing on a terrorist no-fly list, reported MyFoxKansasCity.com.

Bryan Moore was set to catch his first plane trip when he arrived at an airport in Cortez, Colorado to fly home after visiting his sister, said the report.

“They almost got me scheduled in and then the lady just bowed her head and said, ‘We can’t get you on this plane, you’re a terrorist,’” Moore said.

…

“It’s not really fair that I couldn’t get home because another man in the world was a terrorist,” Moore said.

Great Lake Airlines eventually cleared up the situation, but the plane had already left, making him wait another day to come home.

It seems that the soon-to-be third grader has more common sense than anyone at the Transportation Security Administration or Great Lake Airlines. How can an airline official not quickly conclude that the Bryan Moore on the no-fly list must be a different Bryan Moore than the 8-year-old Bryan Moore trying to board an airplane? Does Great Lake Airlines use robots as gate keepers?

Why would the TSA even put the name Bryan Moore on a no-fly list without further identification? There must be hundreds of people named Bryan Moore in this country. There is at least one in my small town. In fact, he lives just down the road from me. Perhaps I should keep my eye on him.

I suspect that the reason the TSA puts any name on the no-fly list is to cover their asses; if someone named Bryan Moore blows up an airplane they can say that we were warned. They can’t possibly believe that it will deter a determined terrorist. Almost all terrorism incidents are perpetrated by young (but usually not 8-year-old) middle eastern men. Not many of them are named Bryan Moore. Middle eastern people seem to change their names with the weather anyway; when you read about some middle eastern suspect he usually has several aliases.

To be effective, and to prevent stupid inconveniences, a no-fly list has to contain more about the person than just a name. The approximate age of the person is a no-brainer. Lacking a photograph a physical description would be helpful: dark hair, swarthy complexion, angry eyes — in other words, looks like a terrorist. If the TSA doesn’t have more information about a person than just a name, the name shouldn’t be on the list.

Radical Islamic jihad is clearly a threat to the security of our country. The jihadis openly acknowledge that they intend to destroy us. They have already shown that they can kill thousands of Americans in a single operation. They most likely are planning attacks that might kill many more. They will succeed if we don’t maintain an extraordinary level of vigilance of the threat they pose, and attack them swiftly and decisively when their nefarious activitites are uncovered.

The insidious Islamization of our country is underway. Islam is not nearly as pervasive in America as in Europe, but the Islamists are making progress here. A CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) spokesman* is on some television or radio show almost every day demanding an apology for some perceived offense. New mosques are being built every year. Muslims are demanding more and more concessions to accomodate their religion. They want a place to pray at school and at work. They want facilities to wash their feet. Taxi drivers don’t want to accept passengers carrying alcoholic beverages or dogs. Some brands of Islam want their women to be allowed to fully cover themselves in all public places, including banks.** All this underscores the fact that Islam is incompatible with our culture.

Many Americans would probably agree that radical Islamic jihad is a very real threat to our national security. But how many would agree with me that the insidious Islamization of our country, and the rest of the world, is a much greater threat to the survival of our free and open secular society?

The jihadis can inflict a lot of pain and suffering but they don’t have the slightest chance of bringing down our country through their overt acts of violence. Even if they succeed in killing millions by detonating a nuclear weapon in one of our major cities, it will not cause Americans to surrender to their demands. If you think our regime change actions against Afghanistan and/or Iraq after 9/11 were a bit over the top, just wait until you see what will happen if we suffer a nuclear attack. The politicians will have to retaliate in kind for one good reason: They know they will be thrown out of office if they don’t. Yes, the jihadis can hurt us but they simply don’t have the capacity to destroy this country.

The Islamization of our country, though, is a whole different story. Its approach seems to be death to our culture by a thousand paper cuts. No single act is enough to draw much attention, yet the collective effect of thousands of these single acts is enough to cause real change. This week a story broke about a school in San Diego that has set aside a period during the school day for the students to pray and worship. The students are segregated by sex and religion. It appears that this was done to accomodate the Muslims, but it would be too egregious to allow just the Muslims to pray. Until now we thought that the public schools were no place for the practice of religion.

I believe it’s possible that the insidious approach is the real plan of the Islamists and that the overt jihadi acts are a smoke screen. Islamists aren’t stupid. They know that we will stumble over one another trying to be the first to prove that we don’t blame Muslims in general for the violent acts of a few. One way to do that is to accede to the demands of the Muslims not directly affiliated with the jihadis. Another way is to call Islam a “religion of peace.”

I might be wrong about the grand plan but I’m fairly certain that Muslims believe that it is their duty to try to convert others to Islam. Of course, Christians are proselytizers too, but I haven’t heard any tales lately of Christians trying to force people to convert. Muslims have been known to restrict the behavior of non-believers. Christians also have a history of attempting to impose their standards on others — the so-called blue laws come to mind — but their influence has been waning for decades.

I’m just not ready for another religion to gain a foothold and start eroding our freedom to live our lives as we see fit. We need to be vigilant of covert attacks on our culture as well as overt attacks on our person.

Related post

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*My first thought was to use the term ’spokesperson’, but then realized that is not necessary when referring to a Muslim organization.

**How many banks have been robbed by people masquerading as Muslim women?

CBS News reports:

Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter south of Baghdad, and the two pilots were rescued with minor injuries, the military said Tuesday.

The OH-58D Kiowa Attack helicopter was brought down by ground fire on Monday. After an Apache helicopter rescued the two pilots, a U.S. warplane dropped two 500-pound, laser-guided bombs on the downed craft to destroy it, the military said in a statement.

This incident reveals that our military is clearly not in control of the situation in Iraq. First, one of our attack helicopters is shot down by ground fire. Second, our military felt it was necessary to destroy the chopper from the air rather than put forces on the ground to secure it. Third, nothing is said about dropping 500-pound LGBs on the insurgents that shot it down. More than four years into a war against a backward country the size of California our military has to take desperate actions to rescue downed pilots and keep an aircraft from falling into enemy hands. And they’re not even certain who the enemy is.

Most likely, the reason they didn’t drop bombs on the insurgents is that by the time help arrived on the scene the insurgents had disappeared — into the civilian population. This underscores the problem with the situation in Iraq: We don’t have the conviction or courage to do what has to be done to control the country, and the principal reason we don’t is that we shouldn’t be there attempting to control the country in the first place.

Taking control of Iraq will require extreme measures like we used in World War II. In Germany we devastated entire cities with our bombing campaigns, killing most of the civilian men, women and children living there. In Japan we destroyed two cities with atomic bombs. Then it was generally believed that without those measures the loss of our freedom and independence as a nation, if not most of our lives, was both likely and imminent. This is not the case with Iraq at this point in time. If Iraq ever becomes a direct threat to our country we can attack them then with the conviction and courage to do what is necessary to neutralize that threat.

When the British hostages are recovered from Iran, Britain should immediately launch an attack against Iran. They should punish them severely from the air and sea and then quietly withdraw. Iran should not be allowed to take such a hostile action without consequences. Britain should not accept the humiliation that the USA accepted (that is, Jimmy Carter accepted) during the embassy hostage situation in 1980. If we had retaliated appropriately then (yes, Ronald Reagan could have done that after he took office in 1981), Iran might not be the troublemaker that it is today.

Whether or not the Brits wandered into Iranian territory is irrelevant. Rational nations don’t initiate international incidents over miscalibration of GPS devices. If the Iranians sincerely believed that their GPS coordinates were correct and the Brit’s were wrong, then a simple warning to the Brits on-scene should have been sufficient to deal with the breach. It is clear that the Iranians wanted to provoke an incident.

Since this is a maritime incident, Iranian ports would be appropriate targets for the attack. But no, they can’t do that because it might disrupt the flow of oil from Iran. In fact, attacking any target in Iran might provoke them to shut off the flow of oil to Western Nations. Maybe the Brits aren’t willing to be held hostage to their thirst for oil. But many in the USA would rather have pretty beaches than energy independence. Maybe the Brits will have the courage to weather some short-term consequences of an attack to gain the longer-term benefits. After all, Iran is as dependent on selling its oil as the West is on buying it.

Tony Blankley and others have reported that a battle has been lost in the war on terror. He says that the Pakistani government has “signed the terms of the Waziristan Accord with the northern region of its country called North Waziristan. It was, effectively, the terms of surrender by Pakistan to the Taliban and al Qaeda, which dominate North Waziristan. Pakistan has negotiated a separate peace — the eternal danger to any wartime alliance.” The accord allows the Waziristan region to operate independently of the Pakistani government and would appear to relieve President Pervez Musharraf of any responsibility for its security.

I’m not as convinced as Blankley and his sources that this is all bad news. Consider the possibility that this move is designed to allow Musharraf to save face when the US invades the region to capture bin Laden and/or shut down the Taliban operations in that region. Musharraf has publicly opposed large scale operations by the US military in his country. Now he can say that since they asked for autonomy he is not obligated to protect them.

I realize that this supposition might appear to contradict one that I made in Hunt for bin Laden? about two weeks ago. Then I raised the possibility that our government didn’t want to capture bin Laden because they have him under surveillance. Perhaps they have decided that it is time to shut him down and bring him in.

There has been a lot of talk recently about how the United States should seek the moral high ground in its foreign policies. I’ve heard it in regard to waging the war on terror. I’ve heard it in regard to President Bush’s desire to clarify what constitutes acceptable interrogation techniques under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. It’s most always discussed in terms of how other peoples of the world will react to our words and actions, not in terms of how we will regard ourselves.

Those that want to claim the moral high ground don’t seem to understand that this goal is both arrogant and absurd. It is arrogant to think that we can defeat a determined enemy without committing devious and heinous acts — at least devious and heinous in the eyes of those we seek so assiduously to impress. It is absurd to think that what we define as the moral high ground will be accepted as such by others. The only reasonable dividend to expect from attempting to conduct our foreign policy from the moral high ground is that we will feel better about ourselves when the dust settles.

There are millions of people who believe that what the radical Muslims did to us on 9/11/01 was wrong. There are also millions of people who believe that it was right, some of which even celebrated the attack. And, opinion is similarly, but inversely, divided over what we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq. One person’s right is another person’s wrong.

Earlier this week President Bush told the United Nations that we respect Islam. Of course we respect Islam. We also respect rattlesnakes, but it doesn’t mean we like them or dislike them. It means we are aware of the danger they pose. I wonder if this was one more attempt to appease the Islamists, or did he choose that word very carefully? Anyway, it’s time for straight talk with some of our potential enemies without a lot of posturing over who’s right or wrong or who’s good or bad.

Some people point to the Crusades and seem to argue that what the Islamists are doing now is just payback for what the Christians did then. Perhaps this is a valid viewpoint, but does Jack, who holds that view, gain any comfort from knowing that the reason Jim is threatening to kill him is that one of his ancestors raped one of Jim’s ancestors a hundred years ago? No person living today bears any responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Crusaders. The United States did not exist until several centuries after the Crusades. There is no moral high ground to be gained from guilt over the Crusades.

We don’t engage in war to be highly regarded. We engage in war to ensure the long-term survival of our country, our culture and our relatively high standard of living. We should just announce loudly and clearly that we like what we have here in the USA and we will fight fiercely to keep it. We should feel no need to justify our right to defend our way of life or our life itself.

The only considerations in crafting our policy toward irrational or fanatical threats to our national security should be the extent and imminence of those threats. No consideration should be given to their moral basis or claims. Neither should we take great risks in order to be viewed in a favorable light by the rest of the world. There is nothing wrong with selfishly defending yourself when harm is threatened.

The Democrats, and others, are constantly reminding us that the Bush Administration has not captured or killed Osama bin Laden in the five years since the 9/11 attacks. Never mind the fact that the Clinton Administration failed to capture or kill bin Laden for about seven years after the first World Trade Center attack and other attacks around the world. The Democrats point to practically every other action by Bush, especially the Iraq war, as the reason that bin Laden has not been captured or killed.

I wonder too how it can be that the most powerful and most technologically advanced nation on this planet can’t find and eliminate this man. But my mind turns to the possibility that there is a reason that he hasn’t been eliminated — other than not being able to find him or not being able to go into Pakistan. Considering what he has done to this country and what he proclaims he will do, it is not likely that Bush would be deterred from pursuing him in Pakistan. He would find a way to convince Musharraf that it is in his best interests to look the other way.

Consider the possibility that Bush doesn’t want to eliminate bin Laden — at least not yet. He may not want to eliminate bin Laden because they have him pinned down and are closely monitoring his communications and activities. And they may have infiltrated his organization. As long as he is isolated in a remote mountainous area his ability to manage his organization is severely limited, especially since he can’t use modern communications methods. As long as he is still in charge he won’t be replaced. Bush knows that if they eliminate bin Laden someone else will take over and they might not know who or where that person is.

In order to pull this off our government would have to get Musharraf to state forcefully and publicly that he won’t allow our military to enter the tribal regions where bin Laden is reported to be hiding. They would occasionally stage a raid based on an anonymous tip and report afterward that the actual target escaped just before the raid. They would occasionally announce that the trail has gone cold. When one of bin Laden’s operations is foiled they would announce that they just got a lucky break. They would have to do these kinds of things to make it look like they are working real hard to find and eliminate bin Laden, but not reveal that he is under close surveillance and his closest associates are giving up information — knowingly or unknowingly. They would continue this surveillance of bin Laden until his organization falls apart or when he attempts to leave the general area.

(Although I believe that the above is possible, it is pure speculation on my part. All that I know about the search for bin Laden is what I get from the media and the internet.)