Defending Your Life

I've been reading some of the commentary leveled against the deal reached between the Congress and the White House to continue to use coercive interrogation techniques to extract information from certain high-value terrorists we have captured.

I left a version of the following as a comment (not yet posted) at the ABC News Blog The Blotter in response to criticism of the program there, and I think it sums things up nicely:

...the simple fact of the matter, as Brian Ross has stated in other forums, is that the six techniques advocated for by the CIA do work very effectively. Ross has stated that 14 terrorists have been interrogated using these methods, and all 14 have given up useful intelligence that has saved American lives as a result. None of these terrorists have been permanently injured using these techniques. Not one.

The White House and Congress have merely asked that these effective techniques be continued, to save the lives of our friends and neighbors.

Most Americans have a Jacksonian view of dealing with our nation’s enemies. We will afford every right and privilege afforded by the laws of war to an honorable enemy soldier captured on the field of battle. If you fight America honorably, we will treat your honorably, even though you are our enemy. At the same time, if our enemy dismisses the agreed upon common decencies and rights, there are no legal moral or ethical reasons that we should treat them with kidd gloves at the expense of our own lives.

If our enemies are dishonorable, attacking innocent men, woman, and children instead of legitimate targets, then our gloves will come of as well, and we have the right to engage you in total war with all the methods at our disposal to defeat you. And yet, the United States has conducted an exceedingly restrained and honorable war against terrorists and the nations that support terrorism.

Even though we have the unquestioned capability, we have not launched the large-scale carpet bombing campaigns against cities and civilian populations that we did in the Second World War. We use precision-guided weaponry whenever possible, with protection of even enemy-sympathetic citizenry always at the forefront of our mission planning. Our honored military veterans are fully aware of the great pains we take to minimize civilian casualties, even though the pains we take to ensure the safety of innocents often puts our soldiers lives at risk in exchange. We have without a doubt, and without contradiction, the most lethal and compassionate military force that this planet has ever seen.

But even though we are compassionate, we recognize that to survive as this great and compassionate nation, we cannot be weak and cowardly, as many would clearly like us to be.

The techniques we use are unpleasant and coercive, but they are not torture, and it is both dishonest and disheartening to see our own media attempting to blur the line in such a way to make all such life-saving intelligence gathering techniques a crime.

By their own repeated, long-standing and well-documented series of abuses of basic human rights and dignities, the terrorists we have captured have forfeited any right for human treatment, and yet we consistently treat them better than we do domestic criminals in our prisons and jails.

We are clearly on moral ground here, no matter how willing many people in our own nation are willing to give that ground away.