No second chance

Victor Davis Hanson asks:

How is assassinating a suspected terrorist — and anyone unfortunate enough to be in his general vicinity — with a drone missile morally or legally different from waterboarding a confessed terrorist at Guantanamo Bay? At least the waterboarded suspect survives the ordeal.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report failed to disprove the CIA’s contention that only three detainees were waterboarded. A small number of detainees were subject to sleep disturbance or excessive temperatures. In contrast, drone strikes ordered by Obama may have assassinated thousands.

Is one act more heinous than the other? Most people would prefer to be waterboarded than vaporized. Drones blow up everybody nearby. Waterboarding does not affect other nearby prisoners who are not being interrogated.

If the wrong suspect is waterboarded, he can be exempt from further such interrogation. If the wrong target is blown up, he has no second chance.

Did saving American lives distinguish between the two practices? We do not know. But the suspects incinerated by drones never had any opportunity to be interrogated. Their knowledge of terrorist networks went up in smoke with them. However, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the waterboarded mastermind of 9/11, may have offered information about several supposed copy-cat operations to follow.

What, then, are the major ethical and legal distinctions between drone assassinations and enhanced interrogation techniques that might explain the radically different media and political responses?

I can think of at least three in the present political landscape.

One, Americans rarely hear much about the killing of suspects in distant countries. But they can obtain firsthand accounts of treatment of those in U.S. detention facilities. The cliché “out of sight, out of mind” explains some of the present selective outrage.

Two, Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a one-time vocally anti-war senator and an iconic liberal hero. He is assumed not to have wanted to blow up thousands of suspects, yet it is all too easy for many to believe that Bush, the Texas conservative, must have wanted to harshly interrogate confessed terrorists.

Three, the committee members who compiled the newly released report are all Democrats. Their investigation targeted a CIA program launched by a Republican administration. In the pursuit of their seemingly predetermined findings, they relied solely on documents and chose to not interview CIA personnel.

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