GOP to waterboard Cheney

[Bug]

Pelosi should be fired.

But so should Bush and Cheney,and,....................

DC is a cesspool.

"Holier than thou" in national politics is a joke.

[billcoe]

Let's not get bogged down in semantics, the real "take-home message" is clear: Republicans are the only people we can trust on this issue because they are the only people who're morally consistent enough to support torture and the killing of civilians. sickie

 

How soon do they forget the rest of the world. Pol Pot. Mao. Stalin. Hitler. Did we also conveniently and easily forget Democrats Harry Truman and FDR? Lets add a few million more innocents slaughtered here and there in Dresden, Hiroshoma, Nagasaki, the Firebombing of Toykyo, etc etc.

 

ps, JB: Porter make joke Komrad:-) Joke!

 

 

[prole]

You amateur, you forgot Genghis Khan, Ming the Merciless, Darth Vader, Jafar, Vlad the Impaler, Robespierre, Ed Gein, and Jimmy Carter.

[j_b]

Now that you mention these widely known advocates of democracy and human rights who were also in favor of torture, I just may have to reconsider

[Bug]

I've been for torture all along.

Just read my posts.

[j_b]

Yeah, but your civilian body count is way too low (at least as far as we know ), so you are obviously not "morally and logically coherent".

[Pete_H]

I've been for torture all along.

Just read my posts.

 

What a coincidence. Because frequently it's torture just reading your posts.

[JayB]

Jay, you're still talking baloney here. Bush started two wars and handed Obama the third. Most of us who have been against these activities from the start, and any who have been against torture, hope Obama can turn all of this around. Many are concerned that he may dig us in deeper rather than turn things around, but the idea that if we called Bush and Cheney war criminals we have to say the same about Obama is ludicrous.

 

Am I happy that he has said that we may use torture in isolated instances where he will give specific permission? No. But that is a much better state of affairs than Cheney or Rummy or whoever it was saying we're taking the gloves off now and having torture become common practice and show up on the 6:00 news.

 

Am I happy that they are expanding the war along the Afghan Pakistan border and that this is and will continue to cause civilian casualties? No. Do I think Obama started this war? No.

 

Tell me again: who are these people who say torture is bad but it is OK to kill indiscriminately? I see people for humane and legal treatment of prisoners of war demanding fair tribunals and more accountability for how we handle both the imprisonment and the interrogation, but I don't see anybody saying we should instead blow up their families with a "surgical" air strike.

 

Indeed - no one is arguing that we should do one instead of the other, but that was never the point. It's not as though policy makers have been confronting their choice while we've held the detainees in a booth with two doors, and the fate that befell them depended on the spin of a roulette wheel where red equaled a painful interrogation, and black meant being stuffed back into a hut on a bombing range whence they were promptly blown to pieces.

 

The point is, we've resorted to both tactics in response to different opportunities and circumstances. Killing terrorists outright, let alone killing civilians in the process, is clearly a greater affront to all of the moral principles that get compromised during a waterboarding session. If you wish to argue the contrary, I welcome reading that argument.

 

If waterboarding the likes of KSM constitutes a moral stain on our national soul that can never be cleansed, then it stands to reason that executions by explosive, especially those that kill civilians along with the intended target, are far worse offenses in any moral framework that claims even the slightest basis in logic or reason.

 

It's worth asking, then, whether our moral status as a nation really been elevated by relinquishing waterboarding or an equivalent to "special circumstances" that the President has to specifically endorse while there's no indication whatsoever that we'll give up the use of airstrikes to kill the sort of guys that we subjected to waterboarding when we could get our hands on them. Ditto for the litany of other tactics that the Obama administration has retained.

 

Do the policy choices that he's made on matters ranging from trial by military tribunal to rendition really represent significant moral departures from those developed and used by the Bush administration? I'll grant you there are practical and political advantages to modifying your rhetoric and making cosmetic policy changes in response to public sentiments, but I was never under the impression that the most impassioned critics of the Bush administration were relegating morality to the bottom of the list of their stated motives when they were equating the man to Hitler, scoping the real-estate ads to pick out their new digs in Toronto, etc.

 

I'm also not convinced that the flurry of inaction and scarcely audible din of mild disapproval with which the left has greeted Obama's policy choices on military tribunals, renditions, etc would have greeted the very same moves by the McCain administration. What this says about the motives of the once impassioned critics of the Bush administration who were ready to douse anyone nearby with a monsoon worth of high-decibel spittle whenever any of the above came up for discussion, yet are strangely composed at the moment is for each of us to evaluate on our own. I'm reasonably confident that I know your answer already, but if you feel like spelling it out, type away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bug]

I've been for torture all along.

Just read my posts.

 

What a coincidence. Because frequently it's torture just reading your posts.

I would say that you are quick but you only reworded what I said.

Good stab at being witty tho......

[Bug]

I'm reasonably confident that I know your answer already, but if you feel like spelling it out, type away.

 

How did you know I was going to fart in your general direction?

 

PPfffffffffffffft. Pfffft? pFffffttttttt!

[Pete_H]

I've been for torture all along.

Just read my posts.

 

What a coincidence. Because frequently it's torture just reading your posts.

I would say that you are quick but you only reworded what I said.

Good stab at being witty tho......

 

Aha. And there I was thinking I was witty, only to find you were wittier before me. Some things do improve with age.

[JayB]

Witever.

[mattp]

If waterboarding the likes of KSM constitutes a moral stain on our national soul that can never be cleansed, ...

 

C'mon, Jay. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and guys like him - particularly if they actually were shown to have given intelligence that actually made us safer - were the only ones tortured there would be no big issue. You know that.

 

I agree with a lot of your statements about how Obama has not and likely will not depart from the overall war plan in Iraq and Afghanistan - both wars that he INHERITED FROM BUSH, by the way. But do you suggest that Obama would have invaded Iraq in the first place? There's nothing purely partisan about thinking we might want to wait and see just what he does before we pronounce the Obama administration a complete disaster. At least he's said that torture is not going to be our FIRST choice of interrogation methods and that war and the abrogation of treaties is not going to be our FIRST choice of diplomatic method.

[mattp]

Pelosi should be fired.

 

So how would she do - head to head with Cheney? Which one would "break" first? I have to agree she is rather a disagreeable sort of person, but what do you want to bet she's got more stones then Dick?

[Bug]

That woman would eat Dick.

[j_b]

Killing terrorists outright, let alone killing civilians in the process, is clearly a greater affront to all of the moral principles that get compromised during a waterboarding session. If you wish to argue the contrary, I welcome reading that argument.

 

Nobody but people like you think that wiping out 100's of civilians with drones and/or torturing enemies is justifiable, so putting them in opposition as if torture was more benign is obviously only a cheap rhetorical trick on your part.

 

Reducing all the torture that was ordered by the Bush administration to the waterboarding of proven guilty murderers in order to extract vital information is nothing but a simplistic slight of hand that doesn’t pass the most elementary examination. The rampant use of torture under Bush is nothing but terror that has 1) the purpose of sending a clear message to those who oppose the policies of the torturer and 2) has a profound effect on the political culture of the people that practice it.

 

Making torture disappear out of public sight isn’t sufficient from an ethical point of view but it is vastly different than making it part of the culture of the nation. Warmongering propaganda already convinced the uncritical among us that dropping bombs and firing indiscriminately at anything that moves was justified, we certainly don’t want to add torture to the list of what is acceptable under the pretense that torturing bad guys is no worse than killing them outright.

 

[j_b]

The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia By Noam Chomsky

[JayB]

If waterboarding the likes of KSM constitutes a moral stain on our national soul that can never be cleansed, ...

 

C'mon, Jay. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and guys like him - particularly if they actually were shown to have given intelligence that actually made us safer - were the only ones tortured there would be no big issue. You know that.

 

I agree with a lot of your statements about how Obama has not and likely will not depart from the overall war plan in Iraq and Afghanistan - both wars that he INHERITED FROM BUSH, by the way. But do you suggest that Obama would have invaded Iraq in the first place? There's nothing purely partisan about thinking we might want to wait and see just what he does before we pronounce the Obama administration a complete disaster. At least he's said that torture is not going to be our FIRST choice of interrogation methods and that war and the abrogation of treaties is not going to be our FIRST choice of diplomatic method.

 

It seems clear that Obama wouldn't have invaded Iraq, but he would have had to respond in some fashion, and that would likely have included a significant millitary dimension, and he would have had to construct a framework for detecting, targeting and apprehending/killing terrorists that forced him to confront the same nettlesome questions that he's currently dealing with.

 

Given that he's shown a knack for combining diplomacy that caters to public sentiments while retaining an effective set of tools and tactics - there's every reason to believe that he would have done a better job of all of the above than the Bush administration. IMO the Bush administration should have had the sense to figure out that they would have to make considerably more concessions along these lines than any Democratic administration if they were going to wade into moral/legal/diplomatic grey zones like the prolonged detention of known or suspected terrorists, etc. The fact that they not only didn't do so, but more or less went the other way was a diplomatic blunder of the highest order.

 

I haven't been critical of the Obama administration because I think they've made all of the right moves on these fronts thus far and, although this is less important by far, they're more or less identical to what I suspect a McCain administration would have done. One of my central arguments here is that I think that identical moves by the McCain administration would have received a very different response from the same folks who are largely giving Obama a pass here, but I've already beaten that point to death so there's no need to dwell on it any further.

 

 

[STP]

A strong argument can be put forth when you can quantify the moral weight of each action by the number of civilian deaths resultant and/or by the finality of the reaction to the perceived/real nature of the potential or consequent threat. However, an argument could be put forth that torture is in some ways a fate worse than death and that the social effects of torture could be more far reaching as a corrupting influence.

 

It’s bad enough when there’s collateral damage but what war hasn’t seen civilian deaths? And in conventional warfare, the civilian population is targeted when they serve to contribute to the war effort. At some point of warfare, the distinction that acted as a saving grace eventually dissolves.

 

It seems when you are dealing with the nature of this conflict using terms such as fourth generation warfare and unlawful enemy combatant, it’s a different animal altogether.

 

Sometimes the effect of both surgical strikes and enhanced interrogation is to serve as an object lesson not to the subject but to others, the lesson being that punishment can be swift (at least with assassinations) and sure.

[mattp]

One of my central arguments here is that I think that identical moves by the McCain administration would have received a very different response from the same folks who are largely giving Obama a pass here, but I've already beaten that point to death so there's no need to dwell on it any further.

 

No, you didn't beat that point to death. You took it one step further and the point you beat to death was that partisan politics was the motivator for this free pass and that it "could not be supported on ethical grounds."

[Fairweather]

[kevbone]

Pelosi should be fired.

But so should Bush and Cheney,and,....................

DC is a cesspool.

"Holier than thou" in national politics is a joke.

 

 

[akhalteke]

Pelosi needs to be waterboarded as well.

 

I agree. But why stop there. All of the people who think waterboarding is ok need to submit to a round of it......

 

Check.

[akhalteke]

That woman would eat Dick.

 

My kinda lady

[STP]

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