Prisoners' discomfort worth saving lives
Brendan McNamara
Issue date: 9/18/09 Section: Opinion
In 1993, terrorists attempted to kill my dad.
He was working in the World Trade Center when terrorists attempted to blow it up with a truck bomb that they put in the basement.
Fortunately, he wasn't harmed. One of the men responsible for this attack was named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid was a pretty sick guy. In 2002, he murdered over 200 tourists, most of whom were in their 20's, at a night club in Indonesia. He masterminded the September 11 attacks. He planned and organized terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and East Asia. And the day before we captured him, he was the brains behind many active terrorist operations that were going to take place around the world.
But after the failed World Trade Center attack, America had him. We could prevent these attacks. But how would we get him to talk?
Interrogation requires great combination of skill, psychology and empathy to get your prisoner to confess. Usually, being nice to prisoners is all you need to get them to help. In 2002, we kept sending massive amounts of Chinese food and porn (a winning combination) to one of our al-Qaida prisoners, and he responded by literally calling up his Yemenese terrorist friends and leading them to an ambush where our drone was waiting for them.
Empathizing with your enemy works. There are exceptions. Khalid was one of them. Khalid hated us. He captured an American reporter and literally sawed his head off.
We couldn't build rapport, and we needed to get information out of him to prevent terrorist operations that were underway.
So, we did this thing called waterboarding. I always thought that waterboarding was that thing in the movies where you dunk someone's head underwater. It's not. It actually looks really undramatic on video.
Basically you put a wet washcloth on the person's face, and their body tenses up like they are drowning, even though they are fine. Marines do it to haze each other.
Well, we tried every other technique in the book before with no success, but once we did this, Khalid sung like a canary. He spilled info on every terrorist operation he knew about. With this information our counter terrorists were able to stop attacks here and abroad and save lives. He gave us critical information on the state of al-Qaida organization and how it was run. It was, in the words of Borat, great success!
He was working in the World Trade Center when terrorists attempted to blow it up with a truck bomb that they put in the basement.
Fortunately, he wasn't harmed. One of the men responsible for this attack was named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid was a pretty sick guy. In 2002, he murdered over 200 tourists, most of whom were in their 20's, at a night club in Indonesia. He masterminded the September 11 attacks. He planned and organized terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and East Asia. And the day before we captured him, he was the brains behind many active terrorist operations that were going to take place around the world.
But after the failed World Trade Center attack, America had him. We could prevent these attacks. But how would we get him to talk?
Interrogation requires great combination of skill, psychology and empathy to get your prisoner to confess. Usually, being nice to prisoners is all you need to get them to help. In 2002, we kept sending massive amounts of Chinese food and porn (a winning combination) to one of our al-Qaida prisoners, and he responded by literally calling up his Yemenese terrorist friends and leading them to an ambush where our drone was waiting for them.
Empathizing with your enemy works. There are exceptions. Khalid was one of them. Khalid hated us. He captured an American reporter and literally sawed his head off.
We couldn't build rapport, and we needed to get information out of him to prevent terrorist operations that were underway.
So, we did this thing called waterboarding. I always thought that waterboarding was that thing in the movies where you dunk someone's head underwater. It's not. It actually looks really undramatic on video.
Basically you put a wet washcloth on the person's face, and their body tenses up like they are drowning, even though they are fine. Marines do it to haze each other.
Well, we tried every other technique in the book before with no success, but once we did this, Khalid sung like a canary. He spilled info on every terrorist operation he knew about. With this information our counter terrorists were able to stop attacks here and abroad and save lives. He gave us critical information on the state of al-Qaida organization and how it was run. It was, in the words of Borat, great success!
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Brendan McNamara
posted 12/21/09 @ 1:37 AM CST
For the record: The editor kinda went crazy on this piece and put in the headline which made it look like I support water boarding. I tried the best I could not to take a position on the issue since I was trying to illustrate that this debate is about choosing a lesser evil in a lose-lose situation. (Continued…)
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