The House Repubican Conference asked today, “What did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?”
They let the Speaker answer for herself:
Via HotAir
Dang. I was hoping they’d include the part where Pelosi started seeing things and jumped at the podium.
Oh well.
More… Joe Hard sent this in on torture and Speaker Pelosi:
Ann Coulter recently pointed out, “As non-uniformed combatants, all of the detainees at Guantanamo could have been summarily shot on the battlefield under the Laws of War.” Either dead, or alive in Guantanamo, what would be your choice?
I remember early on in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, hearing of how the terrorists in Guantanamo were for the first time in recorded history, gaining weight. In the book Auschwitz, by Laurence Rees, the author describes the Germans treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in World War II. Per Rees beginning on p. 64,
“In the first seven months of the war against the Soviet Union, the Germans took 3 million Red Army prisoners. In the course of the war as a whole they took 5.7 million, of whom a staggering 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity….(there is evidence that the Germans had) a deliberate attempt to place the Soviet POWs in an environment where it was inevitable that large numbers of them would die.”
…Soviet prisoners became the first inmates to have their prisoner number tattooed on their bodies…. Of the 10,000 Soviet prisoners who began building (the prisoner of war camp) Birkenau…. only a few hundred were still alive the following spring…. (One survivor stated that) the average living time for a Soviet prisoner in Birkenau was two weeks.
This is just one example in world history. Can you only imagine the fate of prisoners of war in other conflicts since the beginning of warfare?
Now let’s look at the complaints of the left and the ‘torture’ techniques used by America in the War on Terror. As Ann noted in her column, the torture techniques involved “attention grasps”, “walling”, “insult slaps”, and “water boarding”. None of these techniques appear over the top.
Water boarding doesn’t seem any more dangerous than swimming with my older brother in the public city pool in my youth. He was the master dunker and willing to hold my head under water much longer than I am sure any terrorist was held under water at Gitmo. Also, anyone who pledged a fraternity in college was posed with more humiliation and physical abuse than any of the ‘torture’ techniques noted above. Maybe that’s why we didn’t have any terrorists in the fraternity I pledged in?
Most sane Americans believe that if it is going to save lives, then get the information using any of the techniques noted above and use almost anything else. Most sane Americans would rather choose waterboarding a terrorist than witnessing another attack like 9-11.
It was very damaging to release the documents that the Obama team released that described US practices for interrogating terrorists. These documents provided terrorists detailed information on what they can expect if they are ever captured by US forces. I am sure the same is not the case for any Americans captured by terrorists. What sort of information do you think the terrorists will offer up now knowing they cannot be harmed in any way?
The current US practices of obtaining information in the war on terror were not illegal or out of line.
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