The misplaced guilt about waterboarding

A Chicago area talk show host declared to the world Friday that waterboarding is “absolutely torture” after putting himself through the experience while on the air and videotaped for posterity.

WLS AM 890’s Mancow Muller said he wouldn’t have voluntarily undergone the waterboarding in the Chicago radio station had he known it was so bad.  “I don’t want to say this … absolutely, it’s torture.”  You can watch the YouTube HERE.

Sure, the waterboarding demonstration was a publicity stunt, but it gave us a taste of how psychologically traumatizing waterboarding is.  It showed us how it could frighten information out of those whose lives are threatened by their own co-horts if they succumb.   And it shows us how serious our enemies are about destroying Western culture as we know it.

On one hand, Americans are being made to feel guilty about frightening terrorists to extract information that could save lives.  The only permanent marks of this type of torture is on the minds of those who would harm us. 

But the loved ones of every victim at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the fields of Pennsylvania will also have permanent psychological scars from enemies whose reason for living was to terrorize and paralyze America.

There’s no doubt waterboarding is traumatic.  But so were the last moments before Flight 99 crashed into that Pennsylvania field.  So were the seconds before men and women leaped from the burning World Trade Center.  

Perhaps only the people that perished in the airliner as it suddenly veered into the Pentagon were mercifully spared psychological torture on September 11, 2001.   

Why are those ACLU lawyers and Bush critics who are so quick to condemn techniques that have protected us from other equally-horrific terrorist plots as concerned about their fellow Americans’ welfare?There’s a serious disconnect between those who insist on protecting predators over innocents. 

Perhaps the televised images of the burning World Trade Center did make us all uncomfortable and cause us to recall the feelings of grief and helplessness that grasped all Americans that fateful September morning.  But there’s no question now that the psychologists were wrong to insist images stop being broadcast.  We should have seen those images more.  If we had, perhaps our own trauma would have seared those images on our psyches and we as a nation would be united and compelled to do everything to prevent those horrifying acts from ever happening again with resolution and determination, rather than the misplaced guilt that guides our policymakers decision-making today.

Our enemies in the war on terrorism have now become bolder and are now taking advantage of our precious freedom of religion and using it against us.  Three radical extremist Muslims were arrested this week for plotting to destroy a New York Jewish synagogue.  Their bitterness about their lives leading to time in prison was tapped into by America-hating radical Muslims that are free to proliferate in our American prisons.  To find that a new angry and revengeful crop of anti-American terrorists are being grown within our own prison system should sober us and cause us to understand the ongoing and growing threat we face.

Waterboarding is a technique that should be used in only the most resistant cases.  But the option should remain available to those on the front, who are determined to protect us from those who would harm us and bring us psychological trauma. 

The war on terror is not over, no matter what President Obama and his administration want us to believe.   As Americans, we must stay alert and on guard, because the enemy that has declared jihad on America has not yet been defeated. 

And when Mancow recovers from his experience, he’s likely to agree.  We shouldn’t feel guilty about defending ourselves.

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