Who’s Avenging KSM?

So, the waterboarding of KSM led to the recruitment of more terrorists? Where is the empirical evidence supporting that proposition? Or, does Obama mean that the propaganda efforts of our enemies and the obsessive compulsive myopia of our own media feeds anti-American sentiment which, in turn, helps terrorist recruitment efforts? What type of individual says: “Those evil Americans are waterboarding KSM, a mass murderer who says he personally beheaded Daniel Pearl – I’m joining al Qaeda!” Are there really such people who become terrorists to defend KSM’s “rights”? Would they not become terrorists anyway? If anything, one could make a stronger argument that it is Obama’s preferred approach to interrogation, detention, and prosecution that has undermined our counter-terrorism efforts. One of Obama’s favorite examples in favor of Article 3 trials for terrorists is Ramzi Yousef, the man convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and now held at a Federal supermax prison. Yousef was given the same legal protections and due process rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, but “the will of our enemies to fight us” was not sapped, instead Yousef’s uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed would orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. Before 9/11 it was routine to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem, and the FBI and the federal courts were therefore the government’s primary tools in confronting the threat. Yet the attacks only increased — the embassy bombings, the Cole, the Khobar towers — culminating in the attacks on 9/11. All the while al Qaeda recruitment was booming. Obama can claim that the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention methods undermined America’s alliances and hurt America’s standing in the world, but if there is any evidence that those methods served as a recruitment tool for terrorists or increased the will of our enemies to fight, he has yet to produce it. And no reasonable person could possibly believe that were it not for waterboarding, al Qaeda could be expected to treat a captured American soldier in a manner that complies with Geneva Convention standards.