I Believe In Torture

[Warph]

Sometimes I get the idea that America's MainStreamMedia is nothing more than an off-shoot of Al Jazeera, a well-oiled propaganda machine for all things Islamic.

For instance, we've been hearing for the longest time that torture is the worst possible way by which to extract information from the enemy.  Who says so?  When something that is so nonsensical is passed off as common knowledge, I, for one, get very suspicious.

I'm willing to believe that every so often there are those who are willing to absorb any amount of punishment and take their secrets to the grave with them.  But, aside from those occasional saints and masochists, I'll wager that most people -- and that definitely includes Osama bin Laden if we were ever to get our hands on him -- would cough up everything they knew.

I think a problem we have when discussing, say, water-boarding is one of semantics.  The question isn't whether water-boarding constitutes torture...  (If it's not, then it's just a big waste of time and a small waste of water).  Rather, the question is: What purpose does it serve?  When Muslims cut off the head of an American such as Daniel Pearl, they do it in order to prove how barbaric they are, and to put the fear of Allah in our hearts.  However, when a terrorist is water-boarded so that we can avoid experiencing another 9/11 or prevent some American soldiers from being ambushed, I'm all for it... 110%!  I do wonder, though, why we don't just cut to the chase and threaten to feed them pork intravenously or bury their miserable remains in pigskins.

When you get right down to it, torture takes many forms.  For one man, it's being dunked repeatedly in water, while for another it's being forced to sit through a Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi speech or a Dixie Chicks concert.

Lately, I've been wondering if the folks who spread the rumor about the failure of torture to garner results are the same ones now insisting that Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon.  My understanding is that our so-called intelligence community came to this absurd conclusion based on having overheard a single telephone call, probably one between Ahmadinejad and the guy who supplies his cheesy looking windbreakers.  I suspect that at least a few of these clowns on the CIA payroll were members of the O.J. jury.

The logical question is: Why Iran, a nation under the thumb of fanatical ayatollahs, fronted by a miserable dwarf who spends half his time denying the Nazi holocaust and the other half promising to initiate one of his own, wouldn't spend a sizable portion of its oil revenue in developing a nuclear bomb?

That brings us to the final question of the day, class:  Why are America's liberals so anxious to believe the best of Islamic fanatics but only the worst of Christian fundamentalists?

.......Warph

[Mom70x7]

Along with that . . .

People 'still willing to torture'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7791278.stm

[sixdogsmom]

Torture is unacceptable in all forms. It is time for us to stand up and declare what has been an accepted truth for as long as I can remember. Torture by the United States for whatever reason is unacceptable. That nasty mess at Abuh Grahib is unacceptable as is the nasty mess at Gitmo. I hope the United States is better than that. WWJD? 

[Catwoman]

In theory, I agree with SDM...it would be nice to think that the high road that the common American citizen takes is the same high road that the rest of the world treads, as well...but the plain fact of the matter is that our military and common citizens have been routinely tortured and executed, using methods far more heinous than any our interrogators have utilized (check the records on our past Asian conflicts and WWII, in particular)...and while I personally do not believe in the use of torture, I also do not believe in letting there be any holes left open for the terrorists.  The information that has been gathered has kept us from enduring another 9-11...and for that, I am grateful to George Bush.  There have been a large number of plots that have been foiled, due in part to the information that was gathered.  So, yes, I do wish there was no need for the use of torture on the part of our interrogators...but if wishes were horses, beggers would ride.  The moment that we have the expectation that the rest of the world will fall into line with our own national "high road morality" (also known as humanitarianism) and let that dictate how we protect this country, that will be the moment that our defenses will be so weakened that we will be ripe for invasion.  I wish that we could apply Jesus' principals to this and what He would have happen...but we're dealing with people who believe that the easiest way to reach their idea of Heaven is to die while killing infidels...that means you and me.   The best we can do is get the situation under control and then come in with humanitarian measures that are driven through our Christian principals...even though we are dealing with jihadists who would never dream of applying the same gracious measures with us.   

[pam]

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
- Friedrich Nietzche

[Warph]

Well stated, CatWoman.... let me go one step further:

This morning, CNN had on its site these headlines:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) --01/04/09:  A suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured 70 -- many of them women -- during a Shia pilgrimage in northwestern Baghdad Sunday, Iraqi officials told CNN. 

Should torture be used to find out who the responsibile parties were that caused this disaster?

GAZA CITY (CNN) -- 01/04/09:  Israeli Forces Push Deeper into Gaza -- Israel continues to pound the Gaza Strip in an effort to stop the militants from shooting missiles and rockets into Israeli cities. In the past week over 400 rockets have been launched into Israeli cities with one aim, to kill Israeli civilians. Israel launched a military effort in response to those rocket attacks.

Should Israel use torture to find out where these rockets sites are located so they can be destroyed?

Let's begin with a few analytic distinctions. For the purpose of torture and prisoner maltreatment, there are three kinds of war prisoners:

First--there is the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle. There is no question that he is entitled to humane treatment.  Indeed, we have no right to disturb a hair on his head.   His detention has but a single purpose: to keep him hors de combat.  The proof of that proposition is that if there were a better way to keep him off the battlefield that did not require his detention, we would let him go.  Indeed, during one year of the Civil War, the two sides did try an alternative.  They mutually "paroled" captured enemy soldiers, i.e., released them to return home on the pledge that they would not take up arms again. (The experiment failed for a foreseeable reason: cheating. Grant found that some paroled Confederates had reenlisted.)

Because the only purpose of detention in these circumstances is to prevent the prisoner from becoming a combatant again, he is entitled to all the protections and dignity of an ordinary domestic prisoner--indeed, more privileges, because, unlike the domestic prisoner, he has committed no crime.  He merely had the misfortune to enlist on the other side of a legitimate war.  He is therefore entitled to many of the privileges enjoyed by an ordinary citizen--the right to send correspondence, to engage in athletic activity and intellectual pursuits, to receive allowances from relatives--except, of course, for the freedom to leave the prison.

Second--there is the captured terrorist.  A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents.  He is entitled to no protections whatsoever.  People seem to think that the postwar Geneva Conventions were written only to protect detainees.  In fact, their deeper purpose was to provide a deterrent to the kind of barbaric treatment of civilians that had become so horribly apparent during the first half of the 20th century, and in particular, during the Second World War. The idea was to deter the abuse of civilians by promising combatants who treated noncombatants well that they themselves would be treated according to a code of dignity if captured--and, crucially, that they would be denied the protections of that code if they broke the laws of war and abused civilians themselves

Breaking the laws of war and abusing civilians are what, to understate the matter vastly, terrorists do for a living.  They are entitled, therefore, to nothing.  Anyone who blows up a car bomb in a market deserves to spend the rest of his life roasting on a spit over an open fire.  But we don't do that because we do not descend to the level of our enemy.  We don't do that because, unlike him, we are civilized.  Even though terrorists are entitled to no humane treatment, we give it to them because it is in our nature as a moral and humane people.  And when on rare occasions we fail to do that, as has occurred in several of the fronts of the war on terror, we are duly disgraced.

The norm, however, is how the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo have been treated.  We give them three meals a day, superior medical care, and provision to pray five times a day.  Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue.  That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.

Third--there is the terrorist with information.  Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply.  Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City.  It will go off in six hours.  A million people will die.  You capture the terrorist.  He knows where it is.  He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty.  But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

Yes, you say, but that's an extreme and very hypothetical case.  Well, not as hypothetical as you think.  Sure, the (nuclear) scale is hypothetical, but in the age of the car-and suicide-bomber, terrorists are often captured who have just set a car bomb to go off or sent a suicide bomber out to a coffee shop, and you only have minutes to find out where the attack is to take place.  This "hypothetical" is common enough that the Israelis have a term for precisely that situation: the ticking time bomb problem.

And even if the example I gave were entirely hypothetical, the conclusion--yes, in this case even torture is permissible--is telling because it establishes the principle: Torture is not always impermissible.  However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information).  And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price.  In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

[Maude]

If my memory is correct, good old boy Bill Clinton had Osama bin Laden when he was in office and turned him loose. He did not see Bin Laden as a problem. As far as torture, if you look back on the war's there has always been torture. Ask Mr. McCain what happened to him when he fought in Viet Nam and was taken prisoner.
Maude

[Warph]

From dickmorris.com :

A PREDICTION: TERRORISM IN 2009
Three weeks ago, I sent out my predictions to paid subscribers of my Play-By-Play for what the politics and economics of 2009 would be like. Now I want to turn the crystal ball to the war on terror and foreign affairs and make my predictions for the New Year.

Obama has given power to men and women who really don't believe terrorism is much of a problem. They implicitly share the European view that an attack here or there is not worth turning what they regard as constitutional guarantees on their heads. The result is that we will be vastly more vulnerable and have a good chance of being hit again soon.

Here's why:

1. Obama will dissolve the Homeland Security Council, a White House group of cabinet officers and staff, set up after 9-11 to focus on domestic anti-terror precautions and protections. He will fold the Council's operation back into the National Security Council (NSC), the umbrella group charged with conducting foreign policy. The NSC is focused abroad, on foreign affairs. As Ohio's director of its Emergency Management Agency, Nancy Dragani, observed "The NSC is focused outside [the US]. They're not going to be consumed with worrying about what's happening in Ohio." We can expect homeland security to be put on a back burner as foreign crises and diplomacy keeps center stage at NSC deliberations.

2. The attacks in Mumbai, India suggest that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are moving away from the big target approach they have followed before and since 9-11. Because of aggressive U.S. homeland security protections, these attacks have become less feasible over the past eight years. But the terrorists seem to be getting the message that they can wreck havoc by sending commando squads armed with machine g uns and grenade launchers into heavily populated cities to kill as many civilians as possible. This style of terror attack seemed to lack the glamour and potential for publicity of a 9-11 style hit. But the global reaction to Mumbai indicates that al Qaeda can put the world on edge with such tactics. In 2007, terrorists planned an assault on Ft. Dix, New Jersey a plot that called only for the use of small arms. While the attack was discovered - and the attackers found guilty recently - we cannot always hope for such good luck. The likelihood is that 2009 will bring such attacks to the West and possibly to the United States.

3. As President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Office of Legal Counsel director Dawn Johnsen curtail wiretaps operated without FISA warrants, the National Security Agency (NSA) will increasingly be unable to trawl through billions of phone calls to look for anomalous patterns. No longer will words like "Brooklyn Bridge" jump out at them and be highlighted by their computers for closer attention. As a result, we will be less able to anticipate terrorist attacks and will be increasingly constrained to spot them early on.

4. The likely closing of the Guantanamo prison will lead to the release of 250 hardened terrorists who will be repatriated, at our expense, back to Afghanistan or their country of origin. There, most of them will join the more than fifty of their colleagues who went right from the Guantanamo holding cells to the mountains of Afghanistan to resume their armed struggle against us.

5. Obama, Holder, and Johnsen all are on record as opposing "rough" interrogation techniques and favor using the Army Field manual to govern the questioning of terror suspects. The manual not only prohibits torture but also bans making the target feel "uncomfortable" or bringing psychological pressure on him to answer questions. As a result, our interrogation of terrorists will be defanged and will likely be increasingly ineffective.

6. As a Senator, Obama sponsored legislation to require notification of a group suspected of terrorist activities within seven days of opening an investigation. Since he will presumably hold to the same view as president, terrorist groups under investigation will have plenty of warning to cover their tracks, erase evidence, and warn co-conspirators.

7. As Senator, Obama voted to toughen the standard investigators had to use to seize business records of suspected terror-sponsoring organizations. Currently, the standard is whether the search would be "relevant" to a terror investigation. Obama wanted to require the government to "provide specific evidence to support the suspicion that an individual has links to terrorism" before records could be seized. How the government is to obtain this information without access to the records is a tough question to answer. The inevitable result will be fewer investigations.

8. Obama also advocated stricter criteria for granting FISA warrants for tapping telephones. Currently, the feds have to tell the FISA court why they think a given telephone may be used to promote terrorism. Obama proposed that federal investigators be required to "identify with particularity the person under scrutiny." Again, the feds may only have a phone number and not be able to name the suspected terrorist. In such cases, under Obama: no warrant.

9. During the campaign, Obama advocated lifting the "gag order" on groups under investigation for terrorism. Under current law, these groups may only discuss the investigation with their attorney in the process of challenging the subpoena. The attorney is bound to keep it in confidence. But Obama advocated lifting the ban and letting the terrorist suspects speak to anyone in public or private about the investigation. Will this change let them warn other terrori sts with whom they may have been in touch? Yes, it certainly will.


God help us.... Time to get out the Water Boards  ...... Warph

[kshillbillys]

If my memory is correct, good old boy Bill Clinton had Osama bin Laden when he was in office and turned him loose. He did not see Bin Laden as a problem. As far as torture, if you look back on the war's there has always been torture. Ask Mr. McCain what happened to him when he fought in Viet Nam and was taken prisoner.
Maude

VERY GOOD POINT Maude!!! The Dems can't seem to remember Slick Willy ever doing such a thing...everything is Bush's fault...!

What about Journalist Daniel Pearl who was beheaded? What about Nicholas Berg who was beheaded LIVE on the internet as they broadcast it around the world? What about all of the contractors and oil field workers and ambassadors and plain ol' good people that were over there and MURDERED! I don't want to hear NOTHING about torture going on behind prison walls when there are INNOCENT people just trying to do their jobs and getting MURDERED for it! AN EYE FOR AN EYE!