Washington Post:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," WaPo quotes an unnamed "U.S. official present during the early briefings" as saying. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.'"
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until our current period of madness has passed -- if we give up everything we stand for to protect ourselves, we'll be protecting nothing. We need freedom. We need to protect human rights. We need to rely on the rule of law, regardless of how powerful the lawbreaker is.
That's the whole damned point of America. It's the point of the US Constitution -- the first national constitution ever written, anywhere in the world. The whole damned point of America is that it's all about rationalism and the law. It's all based on a single series of laws. It is a logical and legal construct. It's designed to keep us free and protect our rights...
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