Last week Senator John McCain gave a passionate speech on the Senate floor dispelling rumors that information leading to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was garnered from the "enhanced interrogation" method known as waterboarding, or more accurately, torture. Senator McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 5 1/2 years and was subjected to torture at the hands of his captors during this period, if anybody holding elected office today is an authority on torture and its effectiveness it is John McCain. Not so according to former Senator Rick Santorum, a 2012 Republican Party presidential hopeful, who claims in during a radio interview conducted Tuesday that "everything I've read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten from information from people who were subjected to enhanced interrogation." He went on to add "he (McCain) doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."
Of course Mr. Santorum is no longer in government and would not be privy to any official information regarding the assassination of OBL or the discovery of information leading the US to Bin Laden, but like most other public figures who are no longer in government he claims to know for certain that torture played a vital role in our killing of Bin Laden. The fact that John McCain is a sitting US Senator and that his floor speech was based on information given to him directly by CIA Director Leon Panetta seems to be of no consequence to Mr. Santorum.
I can fully understand former Bush administration officials who proclaim that torture led us to Bin Laden, they violated US and international law by waterboarding detainees and don't want their legacy to be that their policies not only didn't lead us to Bin Laden but hindered our efforts in obtaining vital information and put the lives of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan at greater risk. They are willing to continue to lie even when presented with factual evidence of events leading to the raid by SEAL Team Six in an effort to save face. But I fail to understand why Rick Santorum would even address this issue, the politically safe thing would be to congratulate those involved in killing OBL and leave it at that. Yet Mr. Santorum sees the need to align himself with a position held by an unpopular former administration and to slander a respected Senator and former POW in the process. And Mr. Santorum does this with absolutely no evidence to support his position, even when presented with the facts provided by CIA Director Panetta that not only was the prisoner who fingered Bin Laden's messenger Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti not waterboarded, the US wasn't even in possession of nor interrogated said prisoner.
I have yet to see a current or former interrogator support waterboarding methods, most all of them agree that torture did not lead us to Bin Laden and that techniques such as waterboarding hinder our intelligence gathering efforts. Yet some media outlets give credence to those former politicians who never participated in interrogations nor have any intelligence experience over those who actually interrogate or have interrogated prisoners. Not only is Mr. Santorum wrong factually he is wrong to claim that a former POW who was subjected to torture "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works." It is because of this that we must demand that Rick Santorum apologize not only to Senator McCain but those members of our armed forces and intelligence services who know first-hand that waterboarding doesn't work. He cannot be taken seriously as a candidate for president until he's willing to embrace the facts.
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