If Cheney is lying now, he is lying about whether or not any important or useful information was obtained thru the use of water-boarding. No such information has been released to the public, so we don't know the answer to that question.
We did not use water-boarding in World War II, or in any of our other wars, yet we always managed to obtain the information we needed from enemy POW's, using other methods.
Several key CIA agents have testified recently that there are much better ways than coercion to obtain vital information from enemy combatants. Creating a rapport between the CIA interrogator and the prisoner works much better than the use of coercion in obtaining reliable information.
So, Obama contends that, even if Cheney can ultimately show that water-boarding did in fact produce some useful information, the same information, even more complete and reliable, could have been obtained by using less coercive methods.
Using water-boarding and other coercive methods hurts us by giving the enemy a propaganda and recruiting tool, which Al Quaida has been using effectively. If we don't need to use these methods to obtain reliable information, then why hand the enemy the gift of an anti-American propaganda tool to use against us?
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So you dont believe that other interigation methods were used before waterboarding?
As for the propaganda, we are talking about a group of people who hate Americans so much that they are willing to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. I dont think waterboarding played a roll in recruiting these nut jobs. It was probably are forgein policies we had in place that lead to the 9/11 attack. In fact, if they knew they would spend time in our jails, they wouldnt even think twice before attacking us, again.
The CIA agents you are talking about were all trained in interogration techniques that we use on U.S. citizens. The information from those techniques are completely different than the information from terrorists. We need the information here in the United States for prosecution vs. saving civilian and military lives.
During WWII and previosly the world has never seen organized terrorist groups like Al Quaida and the Taliban. They belong to no country and wear no uniforms. They live among us and use our freedoms against us. Their mission is to scare us into giving away our freedom. Example: homeland security and the patriot act.
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