Waterboarding: Everybody Wins

What a wonderful new law enforcement tool our national leaders have made available to us! It’s the dawn of a bright new age in which waterboarding is finally recognized as simply another useful tool in saving lives, and I say it’s about time. We should deploy this new instrument into our law enforcement policies in careful stages, starting exactly as we have, with those who are terrorists, or have been accused of being terrorists, or who might be terrorists, or who might have information about terrorists, or who might be able to accuse someone else of being a terrorist. Cautious and thoughtful introduction of the technique in limited situations like this allow us to more carefully tune it to achieve its greatest utility and to prevent, as it’s been made clear we must, potential targets of the technique from preparing to resist it.

But it’s important to begin considering its next stage of deployment and I humbly propose one I find as perhaps the most compelling: cases involving the report of an abducted child. This scenario perfectly exploits all of the best and most promising features of waterboarding: the speed with which it provides information to interrogators, its potential to save lives in time-sensitive situations, its harmlessness to those who undergo it, and the ease with which it can be applied with limited resources.

We know that minutes and hours matter in child abductions – the likelihood of recovering a child alive after a stranger abduction falls very rapidly as time elapses. We also know that police frequently lose precious hours and days trying to establish whether the parents themselves should be considered suspects. So making sure that police have all the information from parents quickly, makes all the difference in where police resources are directed early on in these situations, ultimately determining the survival potential for many of the children involved.

So here is how I see what should happen: upon reporting a child missing, police should immediately interrogate the childs parents with the technique of waterboarding. No more namby-pamby rapport building or good-cop, bad-cop routintes, or any other tricks of the police interrogation trade that, when they work at all, can take hours or days to generate information. Information extracted from parents by rapid resort to waterboarding will insure that police resources in these time-sensitive circumstances will be most appropriately directed to recovering children who are in mortal danger: no more wasted police time in corroborating a parents account of events, no more wondering if the parents were involved and squandering police resources and effort on lines of inquiry that go nowhere, no more guilty parents sending police off on wild goose chases, and no more coddling of monsters who are responsible for their own children’s deaths.

Indeed, as word spreads of the effectiveness of waterboarding in these situations as inevitably it must due to the blabbermouth liberal media, I think it is likely that criminally involved parents, will soon become less likely to seek out police involvement. This will, over time, give police so much more confidence in the accounts of abduction of those parents who do come forward with a willingness to be waterboarded to get an aggressive investigation underway, and with that confidence will come the resolve and the empathy that will result in many more of these situations ending happily.

Only those who are morally bankrupt beyond redemption could argue against such an approach in these situations. Waterboarding, is recognized by its proponents and practitioners as speedy, harmless and productive. It is inexpensive and so will save precious public resources and most important of all it will save childrens lives. Join me in contacting your representatives to demand WPACEW legislation now: Waterboarding Parents of Abducted Children: Everbody Wins!