Letters to the Editor
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I Don't Understand
The basis explanation for it all. We have a guy in our possession and we KNOW that he KNOWS about some imminent attack. And we must get that information. How do we know that he knows? Besides that, if we are to the point where we have been able to comfiscate the guy himself, we should know whatever the plan is.
Other than that ridiculous and tortured proposition it is torturing people who may know something.
Of all the slippery slopes, that one might well be the slippiest.
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Kind of a Dick, Isn't He?
Who knew?
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the scary part
It's American exceptionalism taken to an absurd and frightening extreme.
Is that to those with that particular viewpoint, our goodness is self-evident, and not even worth a thought, let alone scrutiny. It's like a recipe for evil. Take one measure of exaggerated threat , two measures of hesitant uncertainty, simmer slowly. Little happen. Add one measure of "Can't do wrong" and suddenly the whole thing explodes!
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Remember the America where we didn't debate torture?
When was that -- 1999? 2000?
Good times.
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HWJT
How Would Jesus Torture?
Seriously though, there is a great video somewhere in the bowels of YouTube that shows some rightwing hack volunteering to be waterboarded because it can't be that big a deal, right? He had a MD present and started filming only to last about 30 seconds before sputtering that he couldn't handle it....I think it's time for Ghoulinani to personally provide an example of the non-liberal media endorsed version of waterboarding
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Oh Captain, My Captain!
If Bush is captain of a ship fully aflame, rudderless and adrift on roiling seas with nary a sextant, or chart, or understanding of the heavens to guide him, Giuliani is the skipper who'll take her right over the edge of the earth into the black abyss.
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Okay Say
We torture the guy for a few hours. He finally spits out that such and such a building is being fire-bombed at noon on Saturday. So all the swat teams are sent in and the trap is set. Nothing happens.
Now what? Go back and start torturing him again?
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I don't understand all this crying on the part of liberals about "torture"..
Let me explain that although my personal philosophy of life is not easily described I'm closest to being a liberal than anything else.
The United States of America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Let me put that another way for emphasis, the land of the free cages a higher percentage of its citizens than any other regime on the planet.
And yet when I raise the issue I can rarely get any liberals to respond at all. It either bores everyone to tears or scares them, I'm not really sure which.
If there is anyone who thinks that torture is not routine in US prisons then let me disabuse you of that notion, Sixty minutes did a piece not too long ago about a man who died of thirst in prison. Occurrences like that, while not perhaps as severe, are happening every day in our prisons and jails.
We as liberals have this great outrage that foreign nationals are being tortured and yet seem to have no thought at all for our fellow citizens being tortured and caged by the millions.
We are like lawyers, straining at the gnat of torture by our intelligence agencies while swallowing the camel of routine torture of our own citizens.
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Well...
It's not like he was saying they should sodomize them with a toilet plunger in a police station bathroom. Yeah, that liberal media makes everything sound so much worse...
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Is Giuliani certifiable?
Doesn't he meet at least the minimum standards of "danger to self, danger to others, or gravely disabled?"
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Simply amazing
Growing up as a young "National Review" reading conservative- I was exposed to quite a bit of anti Soviet and anti communist tracts and authors. I feasted on authors that chronicled the crimes of Lenin and Stalin- guys like Robert Conquest and Alex De Jong and Solzhenitsyn.
I became quite familiar with Soviet torture techniques. And sleep deprivation was the central torture used to elicit confessions during the "Great Terror" of the 1930's. The "Right" had no problem calling such techniques torture back during the cold war.
I am struck by how similar the US government's language in reference to torture is to the Soviet government's under Stalin. Same sort of bureaucratic language. Same sort of abuse of definitions and terms.
The Soviet NKVD and later KGB had "Rules" for torture as well. Lists of "acceptable" techniques, lines that shouldn't be crossed, even the number of slaps that a suspect could get in one session. Theoretically the interrogators could be punished for crossing these lines but needless to say they seldom were as the whole process was subject to almost no scrutiny.
There is one big difference though, the Soviet government would never have dreamed to discuss these techniques in public. They were quite aware that what they were doing was criminally evil and something that had to be hidden, something that was shameful.
But we openly discuss this stuff. But we are actually having "Debates" about what should be indefensible. It speaks volumes about how sick we are as a society.
And as an aside- torture in Stalinist Russia was the engine that drove the "Great Terror". Without torture- there would have be no confessions naming more and more people as part of these imaginary "anti Soviet" conspiracies. Torture was vital is sustaining the terror.
That should be kept in mind in regard to why our government is so insistent on torture for "WOT" suspects. Without such tortures- how real would "Al Qaeda" be? They need to torture to keep the "Threat" alive and this is done by continual torture to ever expand the nature and scope of it- to keep our headlines filled with plots uncovered and conspiracies foiled.
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Re Is Giuliani certifiable?
Hell, for a good 30% of the electorate, that's a selling feature.
And, "danger to others" doesn't seem to disqualify one from the job...
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It Depends On Who Does It
That's probably the sickest part of this:
Well, I'm not sure it is either. I'm not sure it is either. It depends on how it's done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.
For all the talk about liberal relativism, the right wing nutjobs are the true relativists. "It's OK if we do it, but when they do it we have a problem."
It's OK if we waterboard people, but if Iran does it watch out!
It's OK if we meddle in Iraq when we were neither threatened nor invited, but watch out if Syria does it!
It's OK if we imprison people without trial or legal advice, but watch out if Myanmar does it!
These guys have no sense of what's right and what's wrong besides their own Daddyism.