I know a number of people who self-identify as "conservative" and whose opinion of drug laws is basically "Silly or not, it's the law and it must be obeyed".

The funny thing is that the same people seem to favor granting pardons to torturers.

Unfortunately, there are people making and enforcing policy who do exactly what you just did: They forcibly imposed their own opinions on the entire population of this country.

That didn't come out right, but I had already clicked "publish" before I noticed my error.

I did not mean to accuse JackSparx of imposing his opinion on anyone. What I wanted to say was that our policy makers made decisions exactly the same way JackSparx did: Pure baseless opinion.

Greenwald is wrong, drug use would increase under decriminalization

You're entitled to have an opinion, but it's nothing but an opinion without factual observations to back it up. You might not like Mr. Greenwalds facts, but any facts beat no facts.

Unfortunately, there are people making and enforcing policy who do exactly what you just did: They forcibly imposed their own opinions on the entire population of this country. One result is that the U.S. is the world leader in prison populaton. We have a larger fraction of our population in prison than any other country in the world.

And, just in case somebody argues that "that's just a treaty", let's not forget this:

United States Constitution, Article VI

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

P.S.

Obama has made it clear that he won't be using foreign aid as a bludgeon to force "christian" values on other people. The Pope responded by schlepping all the way to Africa to tell people not to use condoms, despite the fact that sexually-transmitted diseases are a horrible problem there.

What has the Pope said about the U.S. using torture? Zero. Zip. Nada.

You can tell where his priorities are.

Christians have millennia of experience at the art of weasle-wording their way around everything Jesus said. Just look at some of the stuff the Catholic Church itself has done, encouraged or condoned: The inquisition, burning people alive at the stake, the crusades, etc.

What really disgusts me is that people who thumped bibles and loudly proclaimed their moral superiority have vanished into the woodwork as this sordid story unfolds.

We need to find out everything that happened and make sure it never happens again, but then President Obama needs to do the right thing and offer a blank Presidential pardon to all those who engaged in acts, however repulsive, were meant to save the lives of perhaps millions of people.

I think you are contradicting yourself. Issuing a blanket pardon is a surest way to encourage a repetition of these atrocities.

Holding a truth commission and then issuing a pardon would be even worse: It would essentially be publishing instructions for "Here's how you can do it and get away with it".

Americans fought and died in World War Two to make sure people who did these kinds of things didn't end up running the world. Americans were right at the front of the effort to bring the nazis to justice at Nuremberg. The excuses that nazis offered during the trials sound a lot like the excuses being offered by Bush/Cheney apologists. The excuses were not accepted back then, and they should not be accepted now.

Perhaps if one could torture a person enough they could get a Bathist to confess that Saadam was linked to Alquida or the Taliban.

ISTR that such linkages were claimed during the propaganda campaign that preceded the war, but I don't recall seeing any evidence to justify those claims (which were later shown to be false).

As a SERE graduate, I can tell you that we are taught that ANY information you give, even lies or attempts to mislead, can and will be used by the enemy to thier benefit.

Yes, but what do you mean by "used"? A prisoner's confession under torture might be devoid of useful operational information, but still be useful as propaganda.

The American people were told that these people were tortured to get information that was needed to prevent further attacks. However, there are reasons to suspect that the real objective was to gather factoids that could be used to support the neocon fantasies of the Bush regime.

... but not as a means of extracting useful information. It is, however, great at extracting confessions for political purposes.

Sorry, guys, but your karma just ran over your dogma.

What a catastrophe.

In particular, don't assume that their $1.2 trillion investment in U.S. dollars is any guarantee that they'll prop up the dollar.

Americans are very reluctant to admit they have made mistakes, particularly when they have invested in the mistake. This often leads us to throw good money after bad. IMO, this is a result of our fixation on short-term results, often to the detriment of long-term strategy.

The Chinese are more accustomed to thinking in the longer term. They might be willing to write off their dollar investment, rather than digging themselves further into the hole the way Americans would.