How to get info from a terrorist

luger01

Wall Street JournalBY JAY WINIK Tuesday, October 23, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT In 1995, a little-known operative, Abdul Hakim Murad, was arrested in the Philippines on a policeman's hunch. Inside Murad's apartment were passports and a homemade bomb factory--beakers, filters, fuses and funnels; gallons of sulfuric acid and nitric acid; large cooking kettles.Handed over to intelligence agents, Murad was violently tortured. For weeks, according to the book "Under the Crescent Moon," agents struck him with a chair and pounded him with a heavy piece of wood, breaking nearly every rib. But Murad said nothing. He taunted them. So they forced water into his mouth. They crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts. Even then, he remained silent. In the end, they broke him through a psychological trick. A few Philippine agents posed as members of Israel's Mossad and told Murad they were taking him to Israel. Terrified of being turned over to the Israelis, he finally told all. Then and only then. And what a treasure trove of information it was. One of his roommates was Ramzi Yousef, a mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now serving a 240-year term in a U.S. prison. More ominously, Murad recounted a horrific plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Manila, simultaneously blow up 11 U.S. airplanes in the Pacific, and fly another plane, loaded with nerve gas, into the Central Intelligence Agency. One wonders, of course, what would have happened if Murad had been in American custody?It is no idle question. Today our international might may be at its zenith, but we as a nation have never been more vulnerable to debilitating and destabilizing attacks at home. As the U.S. ponders a largely hidden enemy, potentially armed with bioweapons--anthrax, plague, even smallpox--and perhaps a radiological bomb, one of the most important decisions the nation faces is how we balance the security measures we need to forestall future attacks with America's much-cherished doctrine of civil liberties.

badboybob

Don't need all that stuff. Just force feed the * with pork.

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So many guns to buy. So little money.