Terror Suspect Cooperates

Tim McVeigh was tried how exactly? Serious question nobody has answered for me. It fits your criteria.

 

Can we get a link to back-up your random freedom statistics?

 

Thank you for your service!

 

If Jack Bauer is teaching you anything, you need to re-evaluate your learning methods.

 

Considering I fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines in 2003, getting blown up inside a humvee which took me 6 years to somewhat recover, and seeing a fellow marine who was sitting right where the blast took place get blown in half, id'e say i really have nothing against the troops... and frankly, i find waterboarding a little too nice...

 

Add up the people of Iraq who finally voted after how many years and the people of Afghanistan who finally voted after how many years and the people of Southern Philippines which was controlled by the abu sayaf and see how much you get...

 

Quick question to the anti-torture/enhanced interogation crowd?

How do you deal under the new rules set by the current admin in regards to a highly trained terrorist who has been exposed to the non torture techniques we are currently employing?

Let's say the next graduating class of Al Queeda soldiers are aware of their Miranda rights, know when to demand a lawyer and are fully aware that there is no possibility of any physical harm such as waterboarding.

How would you deal with such a clever terrorist?

You ask him questions, he wants something like a nice meal before he answers them.

At what point to you draw the line and smack his face on the table and break a chair crushing his back, before you lose your sanity?

 

Where in the Constitution is anything about taking up arms with a foreign government distinguishing what rights you're entitled to? That's seems like an argument made to fit the criteria you want rather than any rational basis. American citizens who take up arms with another side would be guilty of treason, which would be punishable under our system of laws, no?

 

Damn Bob, you are one impressive debater.....Your right, I should bow down to your skills and throw in the towel.

 

Haha, I was thinking it would be obvious sarcasm, but I guess not. No, Jack Bauer doesn't teach me anything. Still, he's totally awesome.

The world is not flowers and rainbows, however. If the United States wants to walk the moral high ground, they should do that. I'm all for "killing 'em with kindness," and I think that vast majority of the time it can be effective persuasion.

That being said, torture has been around for a long, long, long, long, long time and like spam on the Internet, it wouldn't exist if it didn't work, data be damned. It won't work all the time, but neither will kindness -- sometimes nothing will work. That's why I'm for taking the moral high ground because if nothing works, we're better off having not done something inhumane.

 

have you ever been on a battlefield? because i have, and i tell you this friend, we did things worse than "waterboarding" towards the saddam fedayeen, the information we got from what we did saved alot of the boys from the 3/4 Marines who were about to fall right into a trap..

 

This isn't necessarily the case - torture has been around but in large part for vengeance, not for information gathering. It certainly makes people feel better about themselves and satisfies a need for revenge, and so it serves that purpose and that explains why the world has always done it.

I agree here - my concern is more the long-term damage it does. As McCain said, our use of torture was Al Qaeda's #1 recruiting tool in Iraq. Whatever theoretical benefit it may have had was outweighed by the damage it did extending that war and costing us any moral authority we had.

 

Cast shame? It's because of your father and that generation that we are not all speaking German now.

 

By the way - while it may have been a sarcastic comment, sadly, it played a very real role in developing our torture policy.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/149009

The Fiction Behind Torture Policy

The lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Jack Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.



The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer's stunning "The Dark Side," and Philippe Sands's "Torture Team," it quickly becomes plain that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television's "24," Jack Bauer.

This fictional counterterrorism agent—a man never at a loss for something to do with an electrode—has his fingerprints all over U.S. interrogation policy. As Sands and Mayer tell it, the lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.

According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on "24" organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show"reflects real life."


John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and of logic—cites Bauer in his book "War by Other Means." "What if, as the Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?" Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Scalia said. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

There are many reasons that matriculation from the Jack Bauer School of Law would have encouraged even cautious legal thinkers to bend and eventually break our longstanding rules against torture. U.S. interrogators rarely if ever encounter a "ticking time bomb," someone with detailed information about an imminent terror plot. But according to the advocacy group the Parents Television Council (which has declared war on "24"), Bauer encounters a ticking time bomb an average of 12 times every season. Given that each season represents a 24-hour period, Bauer encounters someone who needs torturing 12 times per day. Experienced interrogators know that information extracted through torture is rarely reliable. But Jack Bauer's torture not only elicits the truth, it does so before the commercial. He is a human polygraph who has a way with flesh-eating chemicals.

It's no wonder high-ranking lawyers in the Bush administration erected an entire torture policy around the fictional edifice of Jack Bauer. He's a hero. Men want to be him, and women want to be there to hand him the electrical cord. Yoo wanted to change American torture law to accommodate him, and Justice Scalia wants to immunize him from prosecution. The problem is not just that they all saw themselves in Jack Bauer. The problem was their failure to see what Bauer really represents within the legal universe of "24."

For one thing, Jack Bauer operates outside the law, and he knows it. Nobody in the fictional world of "24" changes the rules to permit him to torture. For the most part, he does so fully aware that he is breaking the law. Bush administration officials turned that formula on its head. In an almost Nixonian twist, the new interrogation doctrine became: "If Jack Bauer does it, it can't be illegal."

Bauer is also willing to accept the consequences of his decisions to break the law. In fact, that is the real source of his heroism—to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment. The "heroism" of the Bush administration's torture apologists is slightly less inspiring. None of them is willing to stand up and admit, as Bauer does, that yes, they did "whatever it takes." They instead point fingers and cry "witch hunt."

If you're a fan of "24," you'll enjoy "The Dark Side." There you will meet Mamdouh Habib, an Australian, captured in Pakistan, abused by American interrogators with an electric cattle prod and threatened with rape by dogs. He confessed to all sorts of things that weren't true. He was released after three years without charges. Jack Bauer would have known inside of 10 minutes he was not a ticking time bomb. Our real-life heroes tortured him for years before realizing he was innocent.


That is, of course, the punch line. These lawyers who were dead set on unleashing an army of Jack Bauers against our enemies built a whole torture policy around a fictional character. Bauer himself could have told them that one Jack Bauer—a man who deliberately lives outside the boundaries of law—would have been more than enough.

 

you DO understand our actions were against saddam fedayeens right? these are the people who would kill live rottweilers with their bare hands and eat it's liver and heart raw... You do realize because of how we "interogated" these fedayeens, hundreds of American lives were saved from an ambush right...? Your casting shame on that?

 

i didnt serve honorably because we saved hundreds of american lives on the battlefield...?