OPINION : Intense Interrogation

By Roger Madon

There is a debate going on among the American people whether enhanced interrogation, read torture if you choose, assisted in the finding of Osama bin Laden.  From my perspective that’s really not the issue at all.

The Left is doing all it can do to prove that enhanced interrogation had little if anything to do with the finding of bin Laden.  For the purposes of this discussion I will agree.  So what?  So what, the Left says.  Well if enhanced interrogation had nothing to do with the finding of bin Laden, then the best possible argument for using it is defeated.  Ok, so what?  So what?  Then what’s the point of using it, the Left insists.  

The point is that when the prior administration decided to use enhanced interrogation on very specific terrorist prisoners and having obtained the opinion of the prior administration’s legal counsels, it did so at a very dangerous period time, specifically in the aftermath of 9/11, when the administration believed that no other method to obtain information from these terrorists had worked and that future attacks were imminent.

Is the Left saying that under any conceivable circumstance, where the lives of millions of Americans are at stake, that any administration is absolutely prohibited from using enhanced interrogation and that any person having performed such act will have committed a crime, will be indicted, convicted and sent to jail?  I don’t think so.  

The debate is over.

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