Letters to the Editor
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Amateurs
The torturers in the video weren’t doing it right…
the cloth was wadded up and forced into the victim's
nose and mouth.
Proper waterboarding is a subtitle thing; the cloth should
be stretched across the victim’s face. When it is soaked
with water, it allows the victim to exhale but not to inhale.
The victim can hold his breath, but once he exhales he can’t
inhale again. The lungs are empty of oxygen rich air
and the feeling of suffocation is immediate.
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I'm really waiting for someone in Congress to grow a spine
This entire spectacle is so absurd it defies belief.
Our entire government has descended into a flurry of ass-covering that is so complete that we cannot even find a candidate for Attorney General that can "define" an accepted form of torture as torture. It all comes down to accountability and it is more than clear that the Bush Administration and it's enablers are dead set on not being held accountable for anything they have done.
I would love for McCain to stand up and read Nance's letter from the NY Daily news today in the Senate chambers and then just state that he agrees--- and ask the rest of those hopeless, spineless congressmen and women to join him in refusing to vote for this AG nominee. Joan is right-- if he can't call waterboarding for what it is, he needs to go back to retirement.
It's an amazing thing, my late father was a constitutional attorney, he died suddenly a few years ago at a relatively young age and for the first time I am somewhat at peace with losing him because what is happening in this country would have killed him in a much more painful fashion. Disgusting.
JT
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God Have Mercy On My Soul
But I wouldn't mind seeing Frank Luntz waterboarded. Just for a minute or two.
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And
Krauthammer.
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Waterboarding
Doesn't it seem outrageously obvious that the very best way to help President Bush establish appropriate "torture boundaries" is for him to undergo at least what this reporter voluntarily endured. Oh sorry, that would take a measure of courage which he has yet to locate - along with Bin Laden.
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The video
It gives you an idea, but you still have to use some imagination to visualize what it's like to be waterboarded by people who hate you, who are quite capable of killing you, who enjoy your terror and pain. This was an experiment, black hoods notwithstanding, in which friendlies waterboarded a friendly.
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Joan's excellent waterboarding policy vs. our worst nightmare
Okay, so let's review. If we had in custody a terrorist who had planted a dirty bomb in a major American city, and this terrorist knew precisely when it was due to explode, Joan would sacrifice that city just so we wouldn't ruin our terrorist's day with the threat of drowning.
I guess we'd just "reason" with him. Yeah, that would work. But you know what? This dirty bomb thing would never really happen, would it? It's not like they hate us so much that they're willing to die to take out, oh, say, 3,000 Americans along with both World Trade towers. Or say, Washington DC, with a nuclear bomb. Ha! That'll be the day!
Besides, even if our worst nightmare ever came true, thanks to deep thinkers like Joan, we'd all have our priorities in order -- "No waterboarding, Johnny! I kinda like this Islamofacist knucklehead! So stop interrupting us! Can't you see we're playing Scrabble!"
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So in the meantime it's probably still going on
With or without an AG. And Congress continues to just hunker down and wait for Jan 2009. We should accept that we essentially have no government, no real functioning on until then and beyond. Worrying about Mukasey is a no-op.
Aren't there like 4 or 5 top Admin spots that are empty right now? And isn't there no effort to fill them (e.g. Veteran Affairs?)
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virtue
How would we know that the guy knows something? So you torture him and whatever he says doesn't pan out. Then what, re-commence torture?
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Notorious
Perhaps I should have prefaced our worst case scenario with the fact that this not-so-hypothetical terrorist is quite proud of planting the dirty bomb and has gleefully admitted it (and why not -- it's his ticket to 72 virgins).
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virtue
Also we need further clarification on the following hypothetical------There's 1,000 people in some Afghan village. We know that one of them knows of a massive terrorist strike somewhere tomorrow........I assume we commence torture on the entire village.
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Sure virtue...
sounds realistic --- somehow we have actually grabbed *the* terrorist mastermind that knows exactly where the bomb is placed and the exact time that it is going to go off --- and we managed to do this ahead of time. Sounds like a first.
So, we take this mastermind and torture him for awhile and assume that he will tell us the truth --- of course he would never, ever concoct some fake locations (maybe a few that they originally discarded, perhaps) --- or hey, maybe as he became progressively *hypoxic* from having water in his lungs he transposed a few numbers in that Manhattan or DC address.
No, instead, you and your neocon heroes would magically obtain the exact right answer and save the world just in time.
Maybe it's time to stop watching 24 and come back to the real world, you know, the one filled with "virtuous" far-right commentators and pundits...
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He Admitted It
Gleefully without torture? Is that how we caught him and how we know that he knows? He came in and admitted it?
And the 72 virgin thing gets real old. That's our government giving out simplistic, ridiculous explanations to appease and inflame morons (not mentioning any names of course). Examinations of things like our foreign policy as factors is strictly prohibited.
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Notorious
I never made a leap to the new example you cited, YOU did. I was only citing ONE example in which we had ONE proud dirty-bomb planter in our custody who knew for a fact when the bomb would explode and admitted it to our interrogators. So if you'd like to discusss that example, fine. But leaping to another hypotetical because you can't deal with the one cited is rather transparent.
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Joan:
Can you imagine any scenario in which you would support torture?
What if we could have tortured one individual and uncovered the 9/11 plot?
Do you believe it is ethically permissible to torture one person to save the lives of over 3000?
I'm interested in what you think about these questions.