The problem with common sense is…it is not so common, and completely lacking in Liberal circles entirely.

When they arrived, the net was emptied out into these cages, where Ahkmed…against his will and screaming out his innocense the entire time…was whisked off to the waterboarding treatment, tortured heinously with it while the interrogators all laughed at him and mocked him mercilessly, until they eventualy grow weary of their sadistic fun and release him back out into the wild, only to be sued later for false imprisonment and torture…based solely on the word of Ahkmed.

Seriously…where the Hell do you think these thugs were taken from? They were taken from THE FIELD OF BATTLE!!! There are not a whole lot of “innocents” wandering around the open battlegrounds of Afghanistan folks. And if you think for one minute, that there is not a whole lot of fact checking on their detainees before they even left the country they were picked up in, and if you actually do believe they are whisked away directly to GitMo, did not pass Go, did not collect two hundred Drakmas…then you really need to put down the Hippie Lettuce, because it has done far more damage to that tiny crinled up organ between your ears than any opponent to pot smoking could have ever imagined.

But then again, I suppose when you only deal in emotions and feelings rather than reality and facts…anything is possible in Happy Libby-Land.

On July 3rd, 2008 at 7:51 pm, fulldroolcup said:

For those who claim “torture” doesn’t work, I ask where do you get the wisdom NOT shared by the hundreds of human generations that have used it?

I’ve often seen liberals quote victims of torture that claim they eventually told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. Stupidly, these were usually just forced confessions.

The problem is that liberals don’t know the difference between getting a confession from someone and obtaining actionable intelligence.

For the record, I agree that torture probably doesn’t generate accurate confessions.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that torture produces actionable intelligence. There is also no doubt in my mind that waterboarding (which is not torture) also produced actionable intelligence prior to these leaks.

Yes, subjects can lie. Liberals need to realize that intelligence professionals can recognize some lies immediately. Other lies can be determined by piecing other intelligence together. They should certainly try to understand how an interrogation system functions before they pass judgment regarding the effectiveness of certain tools. And no more anecdotal evidence please?

When the NY Slimes outed Deuce Martinez, they portrayed what he thought of “harsh” techniques yet he is not at liberty to confirm or deny what they wrote. If you bought that and repeat it as the basis for your arguments, sorry, the Slimes is currently laying off propagandists left and left. Every word in that article was written to further the Slimes’ political agenda and make money in the process.

Consider the story of how KSM was captured, even if their basic facts are accurate (and we have no way of knowing they are), look at how they told it. It was if all the “torture” and interrogating of “detainees” and the billions we have spent on intelligence equipment was a waste of time and money, only resulting in America looking bad in the eyes of the world (snif, snif). Had Bush and his hideous henchmen only read all “detainees” their rights and waited by their Blackberries for somebody to sell out KSM for $25 million, all would be peachy.

But hey, let’s also out our “hero” Deuce. First, let’s write he thinks the torturers are all knuckle draggers and, being an “egghead,” he would have eventually got all the info out of KSM so no one needed to soften him up. The best part is we have no way of knowing exactly what went through KSM’s mind and the government can’t present the facts to prove us wrong. So, we’ll use dubious (at best) sources to make characterizations of the facts, do a “news” report like our facts are in stone, and suckers will pay to read it all. Deuce should have read KSM his rights, grabbed all the secrets he could steal, come running to us so we could undermine Bush-Hitler, or at least agree to an interview. Let’s make Deuce pay for his failure so the next egghead knows better.

If you want to draw a line in your mind about where interrogation becomes torture and then offer it as opinion, fine, feel free. Yet the arguments over what did and did not work are largely based upon conjecture. That is the mental equal of nailing one foot to the floor, running in a circle for a week, and claiming you got somewhere.

Thank you, I just have a problem with this penchant for misconstruing the ” beacon on a hill” thing…. yes, we are the best country and people in the world…. but we should never be seen as weaklings who won’t snap a neck if the cause calls for it. I guess that is my irritation, rational or not.

It is stunningly obtuse ( and I think a purposeful misdirection) to claim that “Chinese water torture” or what the Japanese did has anything to do what WE engage in when we “waterboard”

WE DO NOT LET WATER GET INTO the person’s lungs.

WE DO NOT KILL the person we are interrogating after we waterboard them.

Japanese and Chinese routinely did.

THAT’s why the Japanese were considered war criminals, you effing morons, not for the act of waterboarding but for torturing to the point of drowning, and then going all the way and drowning or otherwise killing the prisoners.

We, OTOH, try to scare the carp out of the person being interrogated by giving him the sensation of, and the fear of, being drowned.

And John McCain’s got nothing to add here: he says “torture” doesn’t work, but in his autobio he says every man has a breaking point, and he broke.

Pain from real physical torture is what broke McCain. FEAR is what we used to break the sheikh.

For those who claim “torture” doesn’t work, I ask where do you get the wisdom NOT shared by the hundreds of human generations that have used it?

I know, it’s the same liberals who think THEY have a lock on all that is good and true and moral.

On July 3rd, 2008 at 6:05 pm, MNUSMCDavid said:

…war is horrible and deadly and cruel and unfair…. you play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, you die.

…I am damn glad I followed those protocols to a minimum and sometimes not at all, for me and my squad. If that makes me horrible… and inhuman, I can live with it. I’m just tired of this sophomoric exercise in this whole thing of waterboarding crap.

I certainly concur with your last sentence. This waterboarding discussion is a joke. If forced to decide, I would absolutely choose waterboarding over incarceration (which liberals don’t seem to lose any sleep over).

I understand war is hell and that perfect protocols are difficult to establish for our warriors. However, ‘commander perspective’ (the big picture) often requires certain trade-offs. Since Vietnam, volumes have been written about the constraints put on the warrior – most agree that not all constraints are bad.

Overall, I believe that the US should treat its prisoners well – and, with very few exceptions, I think it does. However, I think we lose more than we gain when we don’t. There are too many idiot liberals out there ready and willing to exploit every single exception.

I don’t want the US to seem like a weak pushover. I want the US to be a shining beacon for the rest of the world. Waterboarding is NOT torture (I will continue to fervently argue this point), but it can scratch some of the shine.

If that makes me horrible… and inhuman, I can live with it.

To repeat, I don’t think poorly of those that disagree with me. You are not inhuman.

Forgive me I certainly don’t mean what I’m about to say as flippant … but, war is horrible and deadly and cruel and unfair…. you play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, you die. Yes, I am aware of Geneva, Rules of Engagement and other limitations…. but it is still war. I am damn glad I followed those protocols to a minimum and sometimes not at all, for me and my squad. If that makes me horrible… and inhuman, I can live with it. I’m just tired of this sophmoric exercise in this whole thing of waterboarding crap.

It is a vastly different experience to be some afghani farmer or iraqi goatherd picked up because some other guy in his village harbored a grudge.

So is it the Afghani farmer, or the Iraqi goatherd that, when released from Gitmo, went back to Iraq and suicide bombed a bunch of people?

I know you like to imagine that these folks in Gitmo are there for no good reason. Perhaps there are even a small number for which that is the case. But as recent events have clearly shown, many are there for very GOOD reason. . .that they are terrorists.