On the 20th January CNN viewers were witness to Christiane Amanpour obfuscating a debate on American use of waterboarding in interrogating terrorists.

Weekend comment

By Mike Adams.

There had been a tense back and forth between Amanpour and Marc Thiessen, former top speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Thiessen confronted Amanpour for an earlier claim by her that Americans used water torture à la Khmer Rouge. Amanpour seemed somewhat agitated by this. While Thiessen was clarifying American interrogation methods, and answering on whether waterboarding constituted torture, Amanpour interjected the following: “It is what the Israelis use, the waterboarding”.

She then proceeded to challenge the other studio guest, Philippe Sands, international lawyer, by asking: “Philippe, how do you answer Marc on this?”

The lawyer wasn’t sidetracked by Amanpour’s insidious reference to Israel, but addressed the issue at hand – waterboarding as torture and the fact that Thiessen supports the use of this “enhanced interrogation technique”.

Amanpour seems to have created a precedent for getting out of a tight spot for TV show hosts – slanderous defamation of Israel, also called Israel-bashing. I would have liked to have given Amanpour the benefit of the doubt, but we all remember the distorted picture she gave of the Jews in the “God’s Jewish Warriors” segment from August 2007.

That particular program was an extended display of her hostility toward Israel. In my quest to find out why Amanpour could possibly link Israel to waterboarding, I came across an interesting article by Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator.

The article had appeared in the Wall Street Journal on the 7th November 2007, and was entitled “Democrats and Waterboarding”. I want to quote part of it to get across my point.

“Recently, Israeli security officials confronted a ticking-bomb situation. Several days before Yom Kippur, they received credible information that a suicide bomber was planning to blow himself up in a crowded synagogue on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

After a gun battle in which an Israeli soldier was killed, the commander of the terrorist cell in Nablus was captured. Interrogation led to the location of the suicide bomb in a Tel Aviv apartment. Israel denies that it uses torture and I am aware of no evidence that it did so to extract life-saving information in this case.

But what if lawful interrogation failed to uncover the whereabouts of the suicide bomber?

What other forms of pressure should be employed in this situation?

This brings us to waterboarding…”

After reading this, I saw how Amanpour may have connected some non-existent dots. Anyway, it seems to me that Amanpour is doing herself a disservice. She is, after all, a celebrated international journalist hosting her own show on CNN. Although she’s an American citizen, she is born of an English mother in London, England, and lived her early years in her father’s country, Iran. She is Persian by ethnicity, but professes a Christian faith.

Married to a religious Jew

In her youth she attended and graduated from New Hall School, a Catholic all-girls boarding school in Chelmsford, England. Her Israel critique cannot be disconnected from her background, but it all gets quite complicated on learning that she is married to an American Jew, James Rubin, who holds to his Jewish beliefs.

He was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s right-hand man during the Clinton administration, and is at present an informal foreign policy advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama. He is nominally pro-Israel, but supports a two-state solution with the Palestinian Arabs ruling Israel’s heartland, Judea and Samaria.

James Rubin and his Jewish compatriots in New York and elsewhere will soon feel the tug toward the fatherland. The God of Israel is calling His children back home. The world’s Islamofacists are chasing them. It will be question of whether Rubin will be able to stand the pull or the push. His Israel-bashing wife will then pose a serious challenge.

Christiane Amanpour equates Israel with waterboarding. In her fantasy world she imagines that Israel has an army of holy warriors that would like to persecute political opponents and criminals, especially Persian-born fanatics whose names begin with the letter A.