Motley Moose – Archive

Despite repeated statements by voices on the US political Right about the need to torture terrorist suspects in order to get actionable intelligence, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – the Crotch Bomber – is singing like a bird from his US Federal prison cell near Detroit.

Mike Allen & Kasie Hunt at Politico have this:

The “underwear bomber” has begun cooperating with FBI counterterrorism agents and has provided “useful, current” intelligence, a law enforcement source told POLITICO. The source said: “It started last week, and has continued for several days. … We have been following up. The intelligence is not stale.” He certainly sees that there are incentives provided by the criminal justice system to cooperate.

Pat Buchanan and others on the political right are suggesting that the Crotch Bomber should be denied pain medication to extract information from him. Bush-era Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge is suggesting that holding him in prison and trying him in federal courts – as the Bush administration did with the like-minded Shoe Bomber – is a travesty, apparently believing he should be somewhere else where we can use (sic) “more effective means” of extracting information from him.

That’s not the American Way, guys, recent evidence to the contrary.  It’s the Way of other folks – the ones we traditionally fight against.