The real significance of the discussion and the irony here is that the US military overwhelmingly opposes the use of torture. The abandonment of the Geneva Conventions previously advocated by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales, alledgedly for the purpose of protecting the country and our military personnel, has done huge damage to our security as a nation. Such conduct appeals to sadists and authoritarians with a personal need to punish the hostile or disobedient. It has negligible military or intelligence gatering utility. The military opposes the use of torture and mistreatment of prisoners simply becauses it weakens us and greatly strengthens our enemies will to fight. To illustrate my point, those of you old enough to recall the first Gulf War will remember the 100,000 plus Iraqi soldiers that surrendered to US and allied forces in less than 5 days. The single most powerful factor motivating direct surrender was their confidence that they would be treated more humanely by our side than by their own military authorities. It would have been a far bloodier fight on both sides if we had faced Iraqi units that expected to be tortured or killed by US forces. Our historical record of scrupulous compliance with the Geneva Conventions made a huge difference in terms of minimizing casualties while we accomplished all of our objectives. It will be a long time before we face an enemy that will surrender to us in that fashion again.

Our conduct thus far in the "War on Terror" will also make it very difficult to attract and maintain political support from the democratic nations with whom, up to this point, we could claim common cause.

Fortunately, with the President's popularity at such pathetic lows, even the feckless main stream media may be able to find the courage to ask at least a couple of relevant questions on this point.

If you can't abuse it?

Um, no.

If the terrorist (otherwise known as anyone non-whites and non-christians) captured a US general --- would the US Army be broken within 3 - 6 months?

Would we be forced to surrender within a year?

No?

Well, certainly 99% of our critical missions in Iraq would have to br scrubbed and, in fact, we'd be forced to pull out of the region entirely at leat temporarily, right?

NO! And why is that?

Capturing A SINGLE high ranking member of any group doesn't really "break" that group.

What does work?

Infiltration. Knowing the enemeies movements and plans as they occur every day, every hour. Spies and infiltration are the only tools that work over the long hual.

Capturing a single general or even 15 idividual members of any group is, for the most part, worthless in the long term because the Hydra just replaces them, changes all the locations, changes all the cell phone numbers and changes all their plans.

However, by inflitration and spying we'll always know what they will do.

Gosh, I figured that out and I'm not even the Secratary of Defense!

Why can't those Bush Admin morons reverse the spending priorities? Instead of spending, oh, 100 billion burning kids and old men in Iraq with cigars screaming, "Where's Osama!?!?" why not spend a few bucks inflitrating ACTUAL terror cells and getting ACTUAL information?

the non-article. "Maybe", "a little", "somewhat". It sounds like the author is trying hard to make a point, but is incapable of nothing more than a headline.

Poco

To summarize this interview, the president lied about:

1) the value of information obtained from Zubaydah

2) the stature of Zubaydah

3) the efficacy of torture

We can add these to a long lines of lies that have come from the president's mouth, the most recent one revealed with his belated admission of secret CIA prisons.

But, we should not allow ourselves to habituate on these lies, to ignore their distastefulness simply because of their great frequency. Nor, should we inadvertently whitewash the president's lies in phrasings like "recalibration" or in explainations about the complexity of the issues that underlie them. Saving face, proximity to an election, compexity are not excuses for presidential double-speak, truth-twisting, and lying. The president of the united states should be held to a far higher standard.

Koppelman characterizes one of our best anti-terror techniques, the threatening of a suspect's children as being "one of the dark moments in the so-called war on terror."

Really?

That's about as quaint an idea as the Geneva Convention. In this post 9-11 world there can be no quarter given, period. We break into private homes in Iraq and grease civilians all the time. We bomb wedding parties because one of the hundred or so guests may be a terrorist suspect. We hold an M-16 up to an 8 year-old girl's head and threaten to blow her brains all over her mother's chador if she doesn't tell us where her husband went.

It works! She'll start singing like Pavarotti. If she won't talk, then go ahead and send the little one to Allah and grab her next kid. If you run out of kids and she still hasn't fessed up, then shoot her too. Hell, we kill whole families at roadblocks for so much as looking cross-eyed, so what's the big deal?

There's no reason to get squeamish about this. We are in a real war. You stupid, gutless liberals want to weep for these people but you don't care anything about the American children killed on 9-11.

God bless President Bush, Vice President Cheney and our very competent and hard-nosed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We're lucky to have all of them protecting our freedom.

You liberal whiners might as well move to the Middle East to be with your Al Qaeda leaders.

Ducard: "Your enemies will not share your compassion."

Bruce Wayne: "That's why it's so important. It's what separates us from them."

It says something about the nature of the extreme right wing in this country that I cannot be sure whether the comment by "Joe" is Swiftian satire or a Coulter-esque rant . . .

If our media had not rolled over on this "war" you would think

that some one would have done a docomentery program showing techniques

such as water boarding. How this administration gets away with keeping

the carnage off the TV is beyond me. I really think if soccer mom's had

to see this on the nightly news as I remember the viet nam war's nightly reporting,

Bush's rating's would be in single digit's.