Boumediene Interview

ABC News has an interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, the accused terrorist who is now free and living in France, after being held for 7 and a half years at Guantanamo. Boumediene is seeking money from the U.S. government, and naturally says he was tortured -- a claim that should be taken with a grain of salt. But he had one particularly interesting thing to say.

he understands, to a degree, how the attacks of Sept. 11 prompted strong reactions from the U.S. government. 

"The first month, okay, no problem, the building, the 11 of September, the people, they are scared, but not 7 years. They can know whose innocent, who's not innocent, who's terrorist, who's not terrorist," he said. 

"I give you 2 years, no problem, but not 7 years."

Unlike many of our own leftists and other terrorist rights supporters, even Boumediene understands that the U.S. had to take strong action against suspected terrorists. Jake Tapper has a post up called, "Guilty Until Proven Innocent?" Yes. That's exactly the policy the U.S. should follow with regard to suspected alien terrorists. But Boumediene is correct. It should not have taken 7+ years to figure out whether he was or was not a terrorist. That's just incompetence. 

I don't know what if any evidence we had against Boumediene other than his identification as a terrorist by the Bosnian government. Unlike Binyim Mohamed, who was clearly associated with Al Qaeda, it appears possible that Boumediene may actually have been completely innocent. If he was tortured he shouldn't have been. And if the U.S. government truly believes that he was innocent, he should be entitled to significant compensation.

Another Great Guantanamo Story

ABC News reports that one of the prisoners held at Guantanamo, who was released to Afghanistan in 2007, is now

a Taliban leader who is in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan

How many more of these stories are we going to have to hear? When this individual was captured, he was

Armed with a gun and sitting in the car of an alleged Taliban leader, Rasoul insisted to American authorities he was forced to carry the gun by the Taliban.

Hey, maybe he was in the car of a Taliban leader because he was a Taliban leader himself? I guess that didn't occur to anyone. Here we are sending drones into Pakistan in order to assassinate Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. We consider this so important that we are willing to kill numerous civilians and risk destabilizing Pakistan. But when we have a Taliban leader in custody, instead of executing him, or at the very least keeping him locked up, we let him go. Is it any wonder we aren't doing better in Afghanistan?

John Yoo reacts to Obama's Orders

Former justice department official John Yoo just published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal criticizing Obama's orders involving the closure of Guantanamo and the restriction of CIA interrogations. This article will inspire howls of rage among left-wingers, since they view Yoo as the evil torture lawyer who facilitated the evil Bush administration's torture policies -- what they tend to refer to with ridiculous hyperbole as the "torture regime."

Yoo makes some good points, the most important of which is that

Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, I think he's correct about that. Yoo goes on to argue in favor of pretty much every Bush administration policy regarding detainees and interrogation. I disagree with him on a number of matters. For example, I think his argument goes way too far in maintaining that we won't be able to get any good intelligence without coercive techniques.  But I think it's admirable that he has the courage to continue to defend unpopular positions. 

So far I've seen only one major left-wing site reacting to the op-ed, Think Progress. I skim it occasionally, and it's not exactly a bastion of rational thought. Their post entitled, "Torture Lover John Yoo Excoriates Obama For Banning Torture," does little more than personally attack Yoo for supposedly loving torture -- completely ignoring the fact that people like Yoo don't believe many of the techniques in question even constitute torture. But there was one notable statement.

numerous intelligence experts and real interrogators agree that, far from being “the most effective intelligence tool,” torture simply doesn’t work.

This factually untrue assertion that "torture simply doesn't work," sometimes backed by a simlar appeal to authority logical fallacy, is repeated over and over, especially on the left. That's one reason I have posted several articles on torture and will be posting more.