Vince Flynn’s “Protect and Defend”
Vince Flynn has written yet another fast-paced, terror thriller Protect and Defend. Like all such books, you suspend belief a bit to get from here to there, but after 9/11, its not so hard to imagine the unimaginable. I enjoyed the book.
Flynn is a bit controversial because he’s a conservative, and Hot Air blesses him with the quote of the day (via the Washington Times), where Flynn notes that he didn’t remember any Irish-Americans having fits over Tom Clancy’s portrayal of the IRA as terror thugs. Flynn has come under fire for presenting radical Islamist terrorists in feature roles as radical Islamist terrorists. Somehow, that upsets non-radicals.
But I was more impressed that he has put forth the hard facts regarding torture and waterboarding:
Torture, or aggressive interrogation, is only as good as the interrogators. Take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance. He got waterboarded and he sang like a canary … he ended up naming operatives and giving up a treasure trove of financial secrets as well as plans for future attacks. … I know Amnesty International would disagree with me, but every American needs to ask themselves, ‘If you could turn back the clock one week [before the September 11 terrorist attacks], would you want Zacarias Moussaoui to have been interrogated by waterboarding?
Flynn’s comments fly in the face of the common myth that “torture doesn’t work because they’ll tell you anything to get it to stop.” That’s a disqualifying statement only for the use of torture when seeking a confession to a specific crime … the oft-quoted “Inquisition example”. If asked if you worship Satan, you will admit that indeed you do, even if you know it means your ultimate death.
In a perverse way, that’s proof that “aggressive interrogation” works. Not because it compels people to “say anything you want them to say”. If you can get a person to admit they are a Satan worshiper knowing they will die because of it, do you really think they will be able to refrain from telling you who is also in their terror cell, and where the laptop is that has the email contacts? Of course not, they’ll tell you everything, and then some: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is said to have given erroneous information as well as good information. But the good information he gave was very good, indeed.
The debate about methods of torture has to be moved to the moral arena, where it belongs. And I have many more problems with torture than Flynn evidently does. Just because torture works doesn’t mean its acceptable.
I favor the approach by liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz, who would retain the right for the President, or perhaps even the VP, Speaker of the House or a Supreme Court Justice, to authorize “aggressive interrogation”. The thought is that seeking approval from one of the leaders of a branch of government could be done quickly enough, yet it provides the check against “creeping acceptability” of the techniques by those who engage in it. That makes it truly reserved for the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and also for “high value” subjects such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
