Why I now support water boarding.

This past weekend while a coalition of local groups were holding a Circle of Peace here locally to remind all this is the end of the fifth year of war against Iraq, president Bush was unceremoniously vetoing a bill passed by congress that would have prohibited further water boarding and other coercive techniques used by the CIA to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Suddenly realizing the value of using such extreme techniques of torture as an information gathering tool to glean intel from terrorists, I now support the president in his veto of that bill. That's because of the lingering questions that have been bouncing off the walls of my brain for years that, to date, have no answers. It is my hope that by maintaining these torture procedures we may one day get the answers to those questions.

Here are but a few of them:

• Why was the August, 2001 President's Daily Brief warning of imminent terrorist attacks in the U.S. using commercial airliners ignored?
• Why on September 11th, after learning the second World Trade Center tower had been hit by a plane, did the president continue to sit reading "My Pet Goat" with a classroom of second graders for seven minutes afterwards, twitching nervously in his seat with the goofiest expression on his face, as people in NYC were jumping to their deaths from the 100th floors of those buildings as the better of their only two options?
• Why did the president refuse to testify before a senate 9/11 committee regarding the events of that day under oath?
• And why did he refuse to testify alone before that senate committee investigating 9/11; why did he need to do it in the presence of his vice president, Dick Cheney?

Until such time these questions can be asked under the right conditions of the right terrorist, they will continue bouncing around inside my brain. And their answers, sadly, forever blowing in the wind.