The tapes and Democrat amnesia

Linda Chavez:

JOSE A. Rodriguez Jr. is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA. These allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, Rodriguez's name will likely be dragged through the mud; he'll be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up.

I think he deserves a medal.

According to information that has leaked about the tapes, Rodriguez, then head of the agency's clandestine operations, made the decision to destroy the videos in November '05. The tapes themselves were made in '02, months after 9/11.

Looking back, it's very easy to condemn the extraordinary measures our government took to try to save lives in the wake of 9/11. A collective amnesia seems to have set in on what conditions were like in '02 when those CIA interrogations took place.

Most Americans fully expected that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were just the beginning of a terrorist war on American civilians. After all, we were being told by nearly everyone in a position to know that the question was not if we would suffer another major terrorist attack, but when.

By the time the CIA interrogated Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, the East Coast had been hit not only on 9/11 but by a series of anthrax attacks. Sniper John Allen Muhammad, a convert to the Nation of Islam, and his sidekick, Lee Boyd Malvo, had also gunned down 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area.

So what exactly did we expect the CIA to do when it captured high-level al Qaeda operatives? Read them their Miranda rights, provide them with free lawyers and place them in a cell with cable TV?

...

The current liberal frenzy over these tapes is another reminder of why they should never be put in charge of national security. They don't have the constitution to defend the Constitution against foreign enemies and they tend to so those doing so as domestic enemies of the constitution. All those raising a ruckus over the destruction of the tapes are in fact proving the wisdom of destroying them. Will any of them give us a straight answer on whether they want terrorist to have Miranda rights?