WATERBOARDING AND DRONE STRIKES

Remember how outraged liberals said they were when they learned three al Qaeda bigwigs were waterboarded?

If so, you may wonder why liberals have said so little about the report Monday (2/04) on the vague criteria the Obama administration uses to justify killing American citizens suspected of terrorism.

Waterboarding is an "enhanced interrogation technique" in which the prisoner is strapped tightly to an inclined board, his feet above his head. After the prisoner’s face is covered with cellophane or a towel, water is poured onto it.  Water doesn’t actually enter the prisoner’s mouth or nose, but the prisoner feels as if he is drowning.

Waterboarding creates so much panic few can resist it for long. CIA officers and military personnel who’ve been waterboarded as part of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training lasted just 14 seconds, on average, before breaking.

After they were waterboarded, the al Qaeda big shots disclosed information that prevented follow-on attacks on Los Angeles and London, according to intelligence officials.  A scene in the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" indicates Osama bin Laden’s hideout was located in part by information obtained from waterboarding.

No matter, said outraged liberals. Waterboarding is torture. When we use their techniques, the terrorists win. Our international reputation is besmirched; our civil liberties endangered.

To describe firsthand how awful it is, several journalists arranged to be waterboarded. Which supports the argument waterboarding isn’t torture.  No journalists have volunteered to have their fingernails pulled out, or to have electrodes attached to their genitals.

Torture, according to Merriam-Webster, is "the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure."  Federal law (18 USC 2340) defines torture as "severe mental or physical pain," and further defines mental pain as "prolonged mental harm." Because waterboarding inflicts neither physical pain nor prolonged mental harm, it isn’t torture, said the Justice Department during the Bush administration.

My point isn’t that liberals are wrong about waterboarding (though they are).  But if their concerns about waterboarding were genuine, they’d be alarmed by Michael Isikoff’s revelations.

The Justice Department "white paper" on which Mr. Isikoff’s story is based "portrays an administration prepared to justify the killing of U.S. citizens on gut feelings," said Reuters columnist Jack Shafer.

A federal judge agrees. The Obama administration has justified the killing of American citizens in drone attacks "in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions," she said last month.

The Bush administration briefed Congressional leaders on the waterboarding of the al Qaeda bigwigs. (Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal, was caught in an embarrassing lie when she denied this was so.) But the first time members of Congress saw the Justice Department white paper was when Mr. Isikoff appended a copy of it to his report.

The New York Times and the ACLU sued to gain access to Justice Department memoranda on drone strikes.  She was unable to order their release, said Judge Colleen McMahon, because of "the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for the conclusion a secret."

Civilian deaths from drone strikes are in "the single digits" each year, the administration claims. But outside groups (relying on arguably specious sources) claim 10 to 15 percent of the 2,500 to 3,000 killed in them have been noncombatants.

Drone strikes dodge the difficult questions about detention which plagued President  Bush.  But they do terror suspects rather more harm than waterboarding would.  And it’s difficult to interrogate a dead terrorist.

There’s no evidence drones have been used to kill any U.S. citizen we all wouldn’t agree is a terrorist.  But it is unconstitutional as well as unwise for the government to kill a U.S. citizen without "due process of law."  That President Obama asserts the power to do this without oversight from Congress should alarm genuine civil libertarians.

"The notion that the government can compile a list of citizens for killing, not tell anyone who’s on it or how they got there, is simply un-American," said James Joyner of the Atlantic Council.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.