These Are the Impulses Which Must Be Fought

The following (in italics) is an excerpt from news stories about President Bush's March 8 radio address on why he vetoed a bill barring the CIA from waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques:

Bush, who used his weekly radio address to announce the veto, said the program had helped stop plots against a Marine camp in Djibouti and the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and plans to fly passenger planes into a Los Angeles tower or London's Heathrow Airport and city buildings. "Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," the president said.

"I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack," Bush said in a statement.


This was my response which appeared as a letter to the editor in the Daily News, Bowling Green KY on March 21:

Even in our hyperpartisan political climate, only the most strident Bush supporters could not be sickened by the president's veto of a bill that would ban the CIA from using torture techniques such as waterboarding. In his March 8 radio address, Bush hid behind the term "lawful" to describe the CIA enhanced interrogation program and continued to claim the widely discredited plot to fly planes into a Los Angeles tower as one of the program's successes.

The presidency that pressured the CIA to produce intelligence findings that supported an invasion into Iraq cannot be trusted when its attorney general calls waterboarding legal, nor can its claims of foiled terrorist plots be taken at face value. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has stated that he knows of no terrorist attack disrupted by the CIA's enhanced interrogation methods. He added, "I do know that coercive interrogations can lead detainees to provide false information in order to make the interrogation stop."

The Daily News endorsed waterboarding "in a time of war" on March 11, and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg characterized U. S. use of waterboarding as a few well-spent minutes. These are the impulses which must be fought. Even if the information obtained is factual, we forfeit our moral standing in the world by sub-human treatment of detainees and create more monsters than we may catch.