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Nov. 15, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
November 15, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
Well, that's what you're gonna get here for a second.
Now I know I'm just this heck from Wisconsin who gets to do this program, and there are a lot of people that are supposed to be smarter than me.
But I remember what they taught me in the fifth grade or whenever it was about how our government was supposed to work, and right now it's getting all screwed up because everybody wants to run everything.
But before we get to that, on yesterday's program when I had the privilege of sitting in, I praised Hillary for dragging Bill along to Jordan and touring the wreckage from the suicide bombings that occurred last week, and I applauded her for her strong statements of condemnation, which is about the best thing that has come out of the United States government since the bombings in Jordan.
I thought that she hit exactly the right notes.
I thought that symbolically it was very powerful, and it convinced me that she's going to be a lot more formidable as a candidate for president in 2008 than I thought.
Don't misunderstand me.
I don't like Hillary.
I am not a fan of hers, but I thought it was a master stroke.
But what it was in the end was a photo op.
There is nothing wrong with photo opportunities.
Nothing wrong with it.
Their symbolism and symbolism does have value, particularly when you're talking about moral struggles like the rightness or wrongness of the use of terror to achieve your goals.
So photo ops do have value, that's why politicians engage in them.
There is an importance to them, but there is also substance.
And while Hillary did pull off her photo op brilliantly, over the last twenty-four hours, Condoleza Rice, our brilliant Secretary of State, the best Secretary of State of the last 100 years, got that deal done in Gaza.
I have been the ultimate skeptic on the Israelis and the Palestinians ever being able to get along.
Seems like every time there's ever a deal, the Palestinians violated and you go back to square one.
This might actually work.
She got there and she went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and they accepted a deal which has something to do with who has control of certain roads in and out of the Gaza Strip, which is one of the two areas that is controlled by the Palestinians now, although within the borders of Israel.
It has been a remarkably contentious thing.
This was not a photo op.
The work of diplomacy of going over and trying to talk some sense to the Palestinians and trying to talk some sense to the Israelis and going back and forth and finding some language is not seen.
You don't see it on television.
All you might get is the photo op where they stand next to one another, and when the deal is done, maybe you'll get the handshake.
It's not a photo op.
It is the work of substance.
So while Hillary was out there doing her show, the fact of the matter is the Condoleza Rice brokered a deal that might make Israel safer, perhaps for the first time since that country was ever in existence.
Yeah, there are there there is symbolism, but this was substance, and it is a real coup.
Having said that, having said that, it's time now for our lesson, our fifth grade lesson.
And I was a little kid, they explained to me how our government worked.
We have the judiciary, which interprets the laws and decides whether or not laws have been violated.
We have Congress, which passes the laws, and we have the president that proposes budgets, proposes laws, and is the commander in chief of the armed forces.
Simplistic, but that was pretty much how I was told it would work.
Everybody wants to run everything now.
Samuel Alito is being condemned because he dares to suggest that the role of the Supreme Court is precisely what the Constitution says it is.
The Senate has now decided that they want to run American foreign policy.
They not only want to run the war in Iraq, they want to run American foreign policy and they just want to take over.
Today, almost as we speak, they voted 79 to 19, passing some resolution, sense of the Senate or whatever it is, saying that the administration needs to spell out its plan for ending the war in Iraq.
Okay, I suppose they should spell it out.
You know what they have?
They've spelled it out again and again and again and again.
We will stay there until the new Iraqi government is strong enough to keep the peace on its own.
We are gradually going to strive to try to Strengthen their security forces and their military so that they can hold the line on their own, then we will leave.
In the interim, we are there to protect that government and keep it as strong as possible and knock back the insurgents who want to topple it for their own terror-minded means.
That's been the plan all along.
It's the plan now.
And everybody knows that's the plan.
This resolution is merely an attempt by a bunch of Republican senators to make it appear as though they're not under the thumb of President Bush.
Well, it's not their job to decide how the war in Iraq is going to end.
It's the job of the president to decide that for better or worse.
And whether you think the president is doing a good job running the war in Iraq or not, you don't need micromanagement by 100 members of the United States Senate who don't know anything about running a war and are do and are passing their resolutions primarily to impress the media and constituents back home rather than having anything to do with how to win that war.
While they're doing that, other members of the Senate are now trying to figure out what our policy is with regard to turing.
Terror suspects.
Essentially they're saying you can't do it.
Now this started with McCain.
Most of this stuff starts with McCain.
And now it's been joined by a number of other senators.
Lindsey Graham, who's also a Republican from South Carolina, and has become part of the McCain click, which is getting to be dangerous.
McCain has like four or five or six acolytes, and Lindsay Graham was actually a very good senator, is getting dangerously close to just being another McCain in there.
Anyway, Lindsey Graham is proposing legislation or proposing an amendment that would link up with a bill from a Democratic senator from Michigan named Carl Levin, who's been in the Senate for about a hundred years, that deals with what rights detainees have in terms of their access to the federal courts.
This is coupled with the McCain Amendment, which essentially forbids the use of torture in dealing with detainees.
The problem with the McCain Amendment is that it has the force of law, as opposed to simply being a code that government agents, including the military, have to abide by.
I don't think they should be involved in this.
I don't think the Senate should be dealing at all on the issue of torture or interrogation techniques or any of it.
First of all, we don't torture.
It's not something that's part of our playbook.
We do not do it.
We treat the individuals that are in our custody better than any nation in the world that I'm aware of.
You're better off in the hands of the American military than just about anybody else's military.
And that's been accomplished without any input whatsoever from the Congress.
We don't do torture.
When we do abuse detainees, we punish the people who do the abusing.
Talk all you want about Abu Ghraib.
Well, what happened at Abu Ghraib?
The military found out about it.
The soldiers who were involved were prosecuted, and they've been sentenced.
And at Abu Ghraib, you didn't have anything that rose to the level of torture anyway.
Mistreatment, yes.
Humiliation, yes, abuse, yes, but nothing rose to the level of torture.
Here's my problem here.
Here's my problem here.
With making these blanket statements that you will never engage in torture, that any military agent who does so is violating federal law, that any CIA agent who engages in it is violating federal law.
Terror is different.
This is not solving a murder.
This is not determining who the rapist in your local community is.
Terror is different.
Most crime that we have in our country, our system deals with on a reactive basis.
Somebody commits a murder, you try to find out who did it, prosecute him or her and punish them.
Terror is different.
There frankly isn't much point in determining Who it is that just committed the latest act of terror.
For one thing, they're often dead anyway.
The purpose of our fight against terror has to be not reactive the way it is with other crime, but proactive.
Try to stop it.
And while I don't think we should be using torture, it's not who we are, and it's not what this country is all about.
I don't want to tie our hands and say never with regard to any tactic.
Because it may come back to haunt us.
Imagine the following.
Imagine we get our hands on two or three or four leaders of Al Qaeda.
And we have very good intelligence that something's about to happen.
And it's going to be bad.
I'm willing to justify using extraordinary techniques in order to try to find out what that is.
I don't know what those techniques are because I can't come up with a precise example of what it is that we would be talking about here.
But I don't want to tie our hands.
And I sure as heck don't think that the Senate of the United States ought to be making these determinations now in the abstract in Washington, D.C., not knowing what we're going to be confronted with in two, five, ten, fifteen or twenty years from now.
And they shouldn't be meddling around in this.
Rather than worrying about what the language says or what the language doesn't say.
McCain should butt out, Graham should butt out, Carl Levin should butt out.
They all should butt out.
The determination of what is an appropriate tactic and technique to use with regard to terrorists is a decision that should be made by the president with latitude given to the advice and input of the military.
And then we as Americans should judge whether or not we've gone too far.
But I don't like this notion of putting everything down in black and white and establishing all of these rules that go on to have the force of law.
Because we're dealing with something that we've had no experience with in the past, and we're dealing with interrogations that are largely aimed at finding out what is going to happen in the future rather than finding out what has already happened.
No, I don't support torture in order to get a confession from a murderer.
If the murderer is in custody, and we have an idea of who the murderer is, you've got a pretty good ability to stop that murderer from striking again.
That's not the case with terror.
That's not the case with terror, and our focus on the war in the war on terror has to be aimed at stopping it from happening in the future, and that may mean the use of techniques that we wouldn't use in solving crime.
And I want to make it clear, I am not coming out and advocating torture.
What I am against is the Congress coming up and passing laws that tie our hands about the use of any of these techniques in the future when we do not know what we're going to confront.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush on EIB.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
I want to talk about this notion of a congressional ban on torture.
But very important to tell you about the Adopt a Soldier Program.
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All you have to do is go to Rush Limbaugh.com and sign up.
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It's Russia's way of getting his content and full access to everything that he does into the hands of our men and women who are serving active duty in the military.
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Hello, Mark.
This is George Bauer in Los Angeles.
And I want to disagree with you on the torture issue most strongly.
I served my country in Vietnam, and I spent the better part of a couple decades as a reserve officer.
And uh torture is just never allowed, never excusable, and never necessary.
I don't know that I've said that it is.
I just don't want Congress making this a federal law.
I truly don't want this, excuse me.
I'm not sure what you're doing.
I mean, right now it is not approved as part of the Army Field Manual.
It's not something that we use.
We don't have any instance of torturing anyone.
There have been instances of abuse, but nothing that would rise to the level of torture.
So I my my objection here is to making this federal law because you say that there's never an instance where it may be used.
I don't know that you can say that because we can't uh imagine every single instance that would ever come down.
Well, let me explain to you my position.
Uh torture produces an uncertain result and invites uh uh counter response.
Now we understand that our good friends uh don't care about our position.
They're going to use torture whenever and if ever possible because they enjoy it.
Uh my position is that chemistry is a wonderful tool and we ought to use it.
And psychology is a wonderful tool and we ought to use it.
I understand there's unfortunate.
Okay, fine.
Let's imagine George, I want you to imagine the following.
Let's make this September 10th of 2001.
And let's imagine that our intelligence community had done a better job in figuring out that September 11th was in the works.
Let's imagine we got a tip that something was going to happen, but we didn't know what it was.
In the meantime, we had picked up Mohammed Atta, who was one of the 9-11 suicide bombers and the ringleader, and we had picked him up.
And we knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know what.
Do you want to rule out the use of torture and trying to get him to spill the beans on what was going to happen?
You know, they were intending to hit the Capitol building of the United States.
They knocked down both towers of the World Trade Center and they flew into the side of the Pentagon.
It was one of the most traumatic events in American history.
If we had had Mohammed Atta a day in advance, what do you want to do?
Read him his rights and ask him pretty please.
Do you want to tell us if you guys are planning to do something tomorrow?
Or do you think perhaps in that situation, some techniques that we normally would never use might be acceptable?
Well, let me say this.
Uh first of all, uh not being a citizen, he's not privy to those rights, so we don't have to read them as rights.
Number two, well, actual actually, the uh Graham legislation does apply, the Graham Amendment does apply to foreign detainees.
That's who we're talking about here.
Well, what I'm saying is that chemistry works.
It may have some unfortunate side effects.
I'm just a I'm just asking, you're gonna answer my question.
Would you be willing to throw aside the rule book in a situation that I describe if you have Mohammed Ata the day before nine-eleven?
No, I wouldn't have to be able to do that.
Well, I I would be because maybe you would have been able to stop the 9-11 hits from occurring, and that's the problem that I have here.
Rather than coming up with these arbitrary rules, I want to have allow our government to have the freedom to call a couple of audibles when it comes to the put you can up the ante here.
What if we hear that somebody's got a dirty bomb?
Hang on.
And we thanks for the call, George.
I appreciate it.
What if we hear that somebody has a dirty bomb and we have in custody members of the group that have been dealing with that individual?
That dirty bomb is out there, but we don't know where the person is.
You know, I I I'm willing to hold the guy's arm behind his back.
I'm willing to poke him a couple of times if necessary to get that information.
I'm not suggesting that that should have been done at Abu Ghraib.
I'm not suggesting that when we get some insurgents in Iraq, soldiers ought to go in and just viciously start attacking them.
I'm not suggesting that we get involved in sad sadism.
I just don't think that federal law ought to be ought to be something that comes into play here, and I don't think that the Congress of the United States is in a position to make these distinctions and determinations as to what we're going to do in the future because we do not know what we're going to be confronted with in the future.
The Congress does have a role here.
The Congress's role is to set broad overall policy with regard to our military.
The Congress's role was to authorize that we send troops to Iraq.
The Congress can't micromanage that war in Iraq.
And I don't think that the Congress ought to be making determinations about in techniques of interrogation.
We have a president who can do that.
We have a military that can do that.
And if we think they've gone too far, if we think they've gone too far, if we believe that the military has abused this discretion if we believe the president has abused the discretion, we have the ability to deal with that.
It's called an election.
But I don't want Barbara Boxer and Dick Durbin deciding what we're going to do if we have a terrorist in our hands.
That's why we have a president and that's why we have an American military.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The Senate today has passed 79 to 19, a resolution that says the president has to make clear his plans for ending the war.
In the meantime, the McCain Amendment is moving forward.
That's the thing that would ban the use of torture by the American military.
Vice President Cheney is trying to get the CIA exempted.
I don't think they should be meddling in either.
I don't think that it's their role.
To Auburn, California, Fran, Fran, you're on EIB.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thank you.
Um I've been listening to your show this morning.
I completely disagree with the last caller.
I pretty much agree with everything that you've said this morning.
I do have one problem though.
My wife and I have all long been supporters of Lindsay Graham.
We believe that he has done great things for the Republican Party and uh is completely on our side on most issues.
I would like to know more about what what you've brought up that he's working with Levinon, who we can't stand.
Um I'm almost wondering if Lindsay Graham is not trying to make sure that things are being done in the right way.
Sure, I agree with you.
What Graham is and understand, I'm talking about two separate pieces of legislation here.
The uh the uh prohibition on the use of terror is one thing, and the resolution that was passed today is a compromise struck by Graham and Levin.
You're right.
Graham is trying to water down what Carl Levin was attempting to do.
Graham's plan, for example, uh says that anybody who is a detainee at Guantanamo does have the ability to challenge their designation as an enemy combatant in a federal court, and it also allows an automatic conveil of e appeal of any conviction handed down uh by the military if the term was over ten years.
It is giving detainees rights that we would normally accord criminals.
It's not giving them a lot of them, and it's not giving them as many as Levin would give them.
I just think that he shouldn't be involved in this sort of thing at all.
But you're right, Lindsey Graham is a very good member of the United States Senate.
The other resolution that's out there is the one that John Warner is advancing, and that's the one that passed today that has comes up with this plan for ending the war on Iraq.
I think that the resolution's rather pointless, since everyone knows what the plan is for ending the war in Iraq.
If you're suggesting that we come up with a date, that's stupid.
Why would you tell the enemy precisely when you're going to uh you're you're going to leave?
It would affect their ability to, you know, to plan.
To Wichita, thank you for the call.
I appreciate it.
Let's go to Wichita, Kansas, and Carl.
Carl, you're on EIB.
Well, I'm here in Windy, Wichita, and wanted to revisit the torture subject.
All right.
When you take that off the table, and the terrorist knows that the person will go to jail for torturing them, they're not going to say anything.
Because they can't be touched.
Much like children in school that can't be spanked any longer.
They act up, much like people that live in states that murder people that were capital punishment is not an option.
So I do think I I agree with you.
Now, I I think that it's important to note that we're not torturing anybody as it is.
We are not doing it.
I just don't like the notion of having Congress coming in and adding a set of rules on the books that aren't there.
And I also don't want to foreclose the option of engaging in torture or some technique that somebody might might interpret as torture.
And understand if you're going to make this a federal law, that means it's going to be interpreted by a bunch Of liberal federal judges who are going to try to determine whether or not a technique that was used actually fits the definition of torture.
And I think that that moves us into a very, very dangerous territory.
I agree with you.
If you are a member of Al Qaeda, or if you are an Iraqi insurgent, and you're caught, you may well be fearful of what we're going to do to you.
Do we have to tell them again and again and again, hey, if we catch you, we're going to be real, real nice to you, so you may as well not cooperate with us.
I mean, what what what's you what's the point that McCain is even trying to achieve here in coming up with this torture resolution?
It's not a problem, is it?
Where are we torturing anyone?
We're not.
So what's the point in doing this, other than Senator McCain and other members of the United States Senate get to post for holy pictures by saying, we aren't for torture.
Well, we're not torturing anyone.
Let's, you know, let's have McCain come out in favor of every kid graduating from high school, too, as long as we're going to pass meaningless resolutions.
The problem here is that he wants to put something into federal law that doesn't need to be in federal law, and that we keep bending over backwards to tell people who are very, very evil, who want to kill all of us, that we're going to be real nice to them and give them all these rights if we ever catch them.
And I don't think that's wise.
Thank you, Carl.
Springfield, Illinois, Matt.
Matt, you're on EIB.
Hey, I'd like to give you a mega ditto from uh Dick Durbin's hometown.
Um, I know that.
You know, I know Dick Durbin.
I lived in Springfield for five years.
I know Dick Durban, I knew him before he got to the United States Senate, and uh I had no idea that the Dick Turbin I knew was going to grow up to be this Dick Durbin.
Yeah, well, I call his office a couple times a week and rant and rave about stuff, but uh hey, I wanted to weigh in uh that caller that uh spoke earlier about Vietnam and these sort of things.
Um I spent uh two and a half years in the Middle East, including twenty months in Iraq, and uh the people there do not respond to uh the jail or just being incarcerated or any type of uh little talking we can do to them.
It's it's like uh imposing some kind of high school detention on them.
And I'm sorry, were you gonna say something?
No, I I I laughed.
I thought that was funny.
Oh, okay.
Um But the the big thing I wanted to say is that one of the differences between Vietnam and uh and what we're dealing with now is more than just the terrorism.
We're talking about a whole mentality of these people.
Remember that they have they are oppressed in the in a in a kind of way that's a mental oppression that drives them to do such things as uh, you know, the the bombings where they blow themselves up or or all kinds of crazy things where they sacrifice their their children and yeah, I think that that's correct.
And I again I don't want to be misinterpreted here as advocating torture.
I just object to the Congress butting into this area.
I know what Senator McCain's motivations are.
He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Terrible things happened over there to our soldiers, and we want to take the moral high ground.
But you must understand that when you're dealing with terrorists, you're dealing with individuals who often are willing to die for their cause, are zealots, they are they are truly the definition of a true believer, and I don't want to take certain tactics off the table if they could be used to prevent future terrorism.
I don't think there's any point in going down to Guantanamo and starting to torture any of those individuals.
They don't know anything.
They've been at Guantanamo for a long time.
But if we captured one of Bin Laden, if let's if we captured and aid to Zarkawe right now, and we knew that Sarkawe was going to launch a major strike in the city of Baghdad.
Do you really want some congressional law to hamstring our military interrogators?
Or would you allow the president to make an executive decision as to what we're going to do to try to gather information from that top ally of Zarkawe?
I don't want federal law to get in the way of using our common sense here.
And if it ever happened, if the American people found out that we had some plotters of a major terrorist act in our hands, and we didn't do anything, we didn't use everything at our disposal, and then a terror hit occurred the next day or the next week, everyone would be screaming, why didn't you do something?
Why didn't you break their arms?
Why didn't you pluck Their eyeballs out anything, get the information.
But rather than put ourselves in a situation where we have to second guess ourselves like that in the future, I just want the Senate to butt out of this.
I want the Senate to butt out of war planning.
I want the Senate to butt out of timetables.
I want the Senate to butt out of the techniques that interrogators are going to use.
It isn't their role.
We have a president and a military for that, and they are not abusing their discretion.
So therefore, what's the need to come in and do this?
These actions I think will have consequences, and they might be very bad.
And I I agree a hundred percent.
The one thing I the one thing I wanted to say is that I don't think McCain is doing this because he was tortured.
And I don't think it has to do with us taking the moral high ground with any of these uh politicians.
I think they're doing it for their own uh their own reasons of you know, re-election or you know, going through and appeasing to their to their uh whatever with you.
I have a very cynical view of Senator McCain, and uh, I'm not speaking for anyone other than myself.
I'm not speaking for Rush here.
I think that Senator McCain is addicted to proposing things that the mere that the that the mainstream media approves of.
And if the mainstream media approves of it, Senator McCain is likely to propose it.
But the resolution that he had passed had 90 votes.
It was supported by virtually every member of the United States Senate.
I think they should not be involved in this area.
They haven't figured out what to do about Social Security.
They are plan apparently don't they apparently do not want to extend the capital gains tax reduction that helped create the economic recovery.
These are the things that they're supposed to do.
They can't even figure out how to run Amtrak.
These are the duties of the Congress.
When's the last time we actually passed the federal budget as opposed to keep working off of these continuing resolutions?
They don't know what to do now because they're being told by some of their leaders that they can't put all of their pork in.
These are the kinds of things that the Congress ought to be messing around with.
They don't need to be rewriting the Army Field Manual, and they don't need to be going over to the White House and saying, Mr. President, we need to know what your plan is for ending the war.
He's said it over and over and over and over and over again.
If I know what his plan is, for the life of me, I don't know why.
Teddy Kennedy and John Warner and the rest of them do not know it.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I was telling you about Russia's Adopt a Soldier program.
You know, if you have a relative who is active duty military, you can sign up on their behalf by going to Rush Limbaugh.com.
Uh so if you've got a son serving somewhere or a daughter serving somewhere, you can do it on their behalf.
What we need, though, is the name in the database for those of you who are not in the military and don't have a relative in the military.
We'd like you to go to Rush Limbaugh.com, and if the spirit moves you, to sign up for a discounted subscription to Rush 24-7, which includes the Limbaugh letter.
There are a whole lot of people in the military who think like we do on a lot of these issues, and it would be nice for them to get some material into their hands that isn't always criticizing them, telling them everything that they're doing over there is wrong.
Uh it's one of the focuses for Russia's program.
There's been a huge response so far.
The ultimate goal would be to get one of these subscriptions in the hands of literally everybody who's active duty military who would like one.
So let's move forward with that.
I've been talking about the Senate's nitpicking and ankle biting at President Bush with regard to passing resolution saying passing law really that would ban the use of torture, ban something we're not doing.
They passed the resolution today in the Senate, seventy-nine to nineteen, I believe was the vote, meaning you had Republican and Democratic votes saying the president needs to come up with a plan to determine how what our exit strategy is for ending the war in Iraq.
There's a reason why they're doing this.
Now, there's a reason this didn't happen last year.
Bush's popularity is way down.
In the meantime, you've got this mantra.
Bush lied, Bush lied, Bush lied, he came up with he lied about getting us into the war that's been going on and on and on.
That the left will not drop.
New York Times lead editorial are right back on it.
They're never going to drop it.
They're going to stay on this forever.
They're still dogging Reagan for heaven's sakes on Iran-Contra.
They never give up on this stuff.
They're going to hammer and hammer an hammer, and it's taking a toll on the president.
So you've got a bunch of senators who don't want to be caught up in the crossfire trying to show their independence in President Bush by passing these resolutions.
Well, they shouldn't be messing around here.
They've got a separate job to do.
In the meantime, the president is continuing his fight back against the members of Congress who are suggesting that he lied.
He gave another speech today in which he shared quotes from Democratic members of the United States Senate in the days leading up to the to the decision to go to war with Iraq, showing that they were saying the exact same things that he was saying, and accusing them of attempting to rewrite history.
He's staying on this and fighting back because he does need to knock this story down because it is taking a toll on him.
I don't know if it's gonna work because the American people, I think, seem to have a desire to believe that the president did lie about this, but the fact of the matter was that everybody from Bill Clinton back in 1998 when he launched his attacks on Iraq to all of the United States Senators who voted the for approval of the war authorization, which was not only virtually, I think every Republican in the Senate, but many of the Democrats, they all said the same thing.
Not only that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that he was attempting to gain them, and that he was likely to use them.
It was all based on the same intelligence, and the president is trying to draw attention to the fact that he wasn't the only guy saying this.
Clinton said it in ninety-eight.
Democratic senators said it over and over and over again.
Jay Rockefeller even said before the war that hey, we're going to hit Iraq.
And here's why, it's because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
Now, I don't know if you can ever get this lie knocked down, but it is the reason why the president has been weakened politically on the issue of Iraq, and I think it's also the reason why the Senate is meddling around in these other issues related to Iraq that they shouldn't be involved in.
Back to the telephones, Tampa, Florida, Joe.
Joe, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, uh, you're exactly right.
Um the claim was made a little earlier uh by a caller that uh and that intelligence uh obtained under torture is unreliable.
And and the thing I wanted to point out was intelligence is always unreliable until confirmed by somebody else.
Even if you treat them nice, they don't usually tell you the truth.
So the whole essence of intelligence is confirmation.
So if you came up on September 10th with tips from other terrorists that something big was gonna happen and uh bring down these towers and uh and you had Mohammed Ada in your clutches and you didn't go and apply some severe uh methods to see if he confirms or deny it, there you are hurting the nation uh by not giving the intelligence community and the military community.
Yeah, I mean using using that example that you describe, I would argue that if anything, it would be immoral not to use it.
If you have the ability to sit to to prevent mass murder, if you have the ability to stop a terror organization from its greatest success of all time, you're not going to do it because somebody said that torture should never be used.
And the problem that I have here with making this the force of law is it may result in us not using certain tactics that might be a good idea for fear of what the consequences are going to be for an individual.
Now, using the example you described, let's imagine that September 11th wasn't going to happen, but we had intelligence and we thought something was going on.
And tactics that wouldn't normally you be used were used, and then nothing happened.
You can imagine people going ballistic and saying we're abusing people, we're do we're treating them uh in a sadistic fashion.
The alternative is to pretend that the war on terror is something that we're only ever going to react to rather than try to stop.
There isn't much point in trying to punish the individuals who hijacked the planes on 9-11.
They're all dead.
The point of our war on terror has to be to try to stop them from doing it in the first place.
And that may mean the use of tactics that we would not normally use in any other circumstance.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You know, this whole discussion we're having about torture and detainees and terrorists.
This isn't abstract.
This is real stuff.
There was just a terrible attack in Jordan only a few days ago.
The woman who survived because her bomb didn't go off.
We're not, we've now learned that three of her brothers were killed in Iraq fighting as terrorists.
Her brothers were killed in Iraq, so she tries to blow up Jordan.
You're not dealing with rational people here.
She wasn't trying to blow up Iraqis, she wasn't trying to blow up Americans.
She decided to go and try to blow up Jordanians.
You are dealing with irrational people who target innocent individuals who have nothing to do with their cause.
And I don't want to take certain packets off the table in an attempt to stop them.
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