Marc Thiessen by Courting Disaster

Author:Courting Disaster
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-31T11:22:46+00:00

Beyond questions of fairness, making our safety dependent on the willingness of interrogators to break the law and suffer prosecution for their actions is not a responsible national security strategy. Decisions about which interrogation techniques are lawful and appropriate are the responsibility of our elected leaders. For President Bush to have followed this advice would have been to shirk the responsibilities of his office and refuse to make the hard choices. That was something Bush was not willing to do.

Some disagree with Sands and McCain, saying that it would be better to let an attack happen than to use enhanced interrogations in virtually any circumstances. One such person is Alberto Mora, the former Navy General Counsel who has become a hero of the human rights community for opposing enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.

Alberto has been a friend for many years-we worked closely during my days serving on the staff of Senator Jesse Helms and were allies in the fight for democracy in Cuba and the defense of the Cuban embargo. Over a long Sunday lunch in October 2009, Alberto and I discussed when, if at all, he would support coercive interrogations (which he refers to as “cruelty and torture”).

Alberto told me he started asking himself this question when he was engaged in the debate at the Defense Department over interro gation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. At first, he thought that there were circumstances in which he would take essentially the same position as John McCain. “I thought, okay, so what is my position about cruelty and torture? What would I do in a ticking bomb scenario? My view at the time, and still to some extent today, was that if I was truly in a ticking bomb scenario with a nuclear device in New York City, and so forth, I might very well be the individual who applies the pliers and who applies the electrical wire. But I certainly wouldn’t ask my country to change our laws and our values in order to shield me from the consequences of that action. The application of torture should always be illegal. But there may be some cases, which haven’t happened yet, where it may be moral to apply it.”

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