Letters to the Editor
omooex
Published Letters: 977 Editor's Choice: 5
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Please can we just ignore shooter, and of course, my post
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You'd be surprised how fast some of these people would go away if you ignored him completely...
In other news I'd like to weigh in on the democrats. This may sound conspiratorial, but it wouldn't it be a good idea, if you were running things, to have an institutionalized opposition party? I mean we all know that business is so intertwined with government as to be inextricably linked, they are calling the shots and funding both parties.
Maybe the decomcratic job is to make sure we have a place to vent our votes too when things get too crappy. I mean if you look where both parties came from, neither has core values that last longer than a generation.
Maybe its just a shell game. When the Dems begin to appear like corrupt apparatchiks, then just watch the Republicans become the progressive party.
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Paul Daniel Ash & Ignoring Shooter
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I beg to differ. I've posted a dozen comments in the past few days and get no response. I'm no genius; I consider myself a progressive who's been around the block and been involved in movements and episodes and come out wiser. I certainly disagree with so-called liberals and people who call themselves progressives on diverse issues. I hate the Democratic party perhaps even more than I hate the Republican party; if that were possible. While I see my points constantly ignored, the infantile rantings of those like shooter seem to attract all the attention.
If I want to engage in a diatribe against political hackery, obnoxity and lies, I'll yell at the tv screen while watching Hannity and Colmes, thank you. I come here to have my knowledge expanded with people who actually are interested in veracity and getting to the bottom of things. People who want to examine their own beliefs and see if they make sense. I like to think that I bring up some good points that are outside of the mainstream and conventional wisdom, I would love to actually have a conversation about them.
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Torture is the least efficaceous interrogation technique
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Police get confessions all the time from the hardest-assed people in the world. Just look at the current OJ trial...three gangsters all offered incredibly light sentences if they just fingered OJ. And guess, what? They did it in record time. If you see how Israel gets so-called terrorists to finger their colleagues, its by blackmail and extortion and bribery. And it works really, really well; I recall cases where they got people to rat out their own family members. Just to note--yes, the Israelis are bastards and their involved in oppressing the "terrorists", but they actually are really effective in stopping ticking time bombs and they outlawed all torture a few years back.
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Changing positions...
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Indeed; recall Kennedy's missile gap hysteria. If I know my history, there were only three southern democratic senators who refused to sign a pact vowing to fight segregation in the 50's.
And if I recall, in the late 90's, the Republicans played the isolationists, while Kerry was screaming that we needed to invade Iraq as soon as possible. Nothing changes in a sense but the rhetoric.
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False Logic
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I find your argument flawed:
First, there is no indication that waterboarding convinces its victims to "talk"--only to do or say anything that will make the torture stop.
Second, the fact that it makes prisoners "talk" has no bearing on whether or not its torture. There are non-coercive methods of interrogation (as I noted in a previous post that no one seems to have read)that work great in countries that actually are involved in routing terror acts on a regular basis. Israel has a complex system of bribery and blackmail, that is insidiously effective. For many years Israel used both these tactics and torture, but gave up on the latter with only an increased efficacy in stopping attacks. Again, i want to say I think Israel is oppressing the people it calls terrorists and that subject people have a right to defend themselves.
Standard police work, in any case, works fine with the illusion of coercion. Once they get you alone in a room--especially if you are an "enemy combatant" with no access to constitutional protections--they can basically tell you all kinds of fanciful stories about what is going to happen to you or where are you are being taken or what is happening to your cousin or wife. Simply keeping you in a cell for three days without contact will probably make you pretty receptive. Although, I think of that as torture to begin with.
In a last note, countries that are most notorious for torture--Iran, Chile, El Salvador, etc., relied largely on torture not to extract information but as a terror tactic to convince would be insurgents to give up the ghost. Certainly, you would re consider your goals if your friend came back from detention talking about how they electrocuted his testicles for three days.
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Dogfather...Semantics
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem here is semantic.
Well, I think your logic wouldn't convince a Mukasey or Gonzalez. I think Rumsfeld put it best when he said something along the lines of..."what's this that I hear about making people stand up for hours at a time being defined as torture? I stand at my desk eight hours a day and I'm a 150 years old." Or something like that.
The logic inherent here is as follows: there are non-traditional interrogation techniques that make people uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is enough to make terrorists talk, given that they are all sissies who fold as soon as we threaten to withhold their diet pepsi. The argument and its underlying assumption are absurd to begin with; applying logic to it only makes it angrier.