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A FEW MINUTES WELL SPENT By Jonah Goldberg Date published: 3/9/2008
WASHINGTON-- Less than five minutes.That's the total amount One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks" according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaida's "military committee." Linked to numerous terror plots, he is believed to have financed the first World Trade Center bombing, helped set up the courier system that resulted in the infamous Bali bombing, and cut off Danny Pearl's head. A second was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the head of al-Qaida operations in the Persian Gulf. He allegedly played a role in the 2000 millennium terror plots and was the mastermind behind the USS Cole attack that killed 17 Americans. The third was Abu Zubaydah, said to be Osama bin Laden's top man after Ayman al Zawahri. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaida's terror camps and recruitment operations. He was waterboarded just six months after the 9/11 attacks and while the anthrax scare was still ongoing. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who witnessed the interrogation, told ABC: "The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." He divulged, according to Kiriakou, "al-Qaida's leadership structure" and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn't know much, And that's it. Less than five minutes, three awful men, five years ago. (We don't know how long, exactly, each was waterboarded, but reports suggest Zubaydah lasted between 30 and 35 seconds, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed lasted the longest--between 90 seconds and three minutes.) The reason these facts are important is simple. Human rights groups, the media, and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the war on terror have tried to portray the U.S. as a "torture state" that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles, and even its soul under a president who believes in an ominous-sounding "unitary executive" branch. We've gone down
That is just right - the moral relativism of the right, now
exposed. I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.... it
smells like... victory.
Excellent example of moral relativism on the far right--time, place, context determine moral meaning. Strange how an author of "Liberal Fascism" employs the Marxist dictum: The end justifies the means. Torture is not an American value or a Christian one. We sell our very soul as a nation to bend,twist, contort or justify it. How can a party that rabidly condemed Clinton's parsing of "What is...is" somehow find wiggle room for some of mankind's most depraved acts like greed, war and now torture?
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