Political discourse is screwed because I ardently oppose torture and believe it is against everything this country stands for, and against what those who founded it believed? Where do you get that? How is being against torture "blatant political opportunism?" I responded to your post about Pelosi and Harmon possibly signing off on this crap. When it comes to torture, I'm a strong critic of anyone who supports it, for any reason. Some of you post like you're fans of "24." We're not talking about a rediculous TV show. This is real life torture of real people. They haven't been given their rights under the Geneva Conventions or due process under our own legal system. They are in complete legal limbo. Republicans cry out in support of this mad adventure in Iraq and say it is a war, but think it is OK to treat the combatants as two legged cattle, with similar rights. It is absurd. I'm seriously shocked as hell that some of you support this. Just stunned. The usual suspects here? Sure, they can have their laugh about it, but I expect the more intelligent posters of either side, or in between, to recognize that we don't support torture as a country. Bush does, and for that alone he should be impeached. As for your belief that George W. Bush has saved American lives, I suggest that you ask the families of the well over 3,000 dead and thousands maimed of our armed forces in this voluntary war that Bush embarked on just how they feel about that. Impeach Bush.
*snicker* That's personal? Lighten up dude. Really? Link please to the CIA's plans for "restrained and controlled torture in US prison camps". Legalese aside, torturing is for fearful pathetic losers. The thread jumped the shark some time ago. And now we have a red herring. I'm feeling all aquatic. Basso asked for examples pertaining to innocents being tortured. No "waterboarding qualifier" was requested. Or even remotely necessary. You stated that the Geneva conventions require "doubt". I don't trust the CIA/US Army to be the judge of a man's innocence or guilt, and those stories provide rationale. See Ottamaton's post. Same old Hayes. Still deliberately hiding behind childish wordplay. I don't have any desire to play anymore. Torture is reprehensible, and never acceptable. As I said before.
.....The "Ticking Bomb" Argument For Torture The argument goes like this: A nuclear bomb has been planted in the heart of a major American city, and authorities have in custody a person who knows where it is located. To save possibly millions of lives, would it not be justified to torture this individual to get the information? Is not this lesser evil justified? Of course it is. And this argument is a wonderful means to comfort those who have moral problems with torture. The beauty of this argument is that once you concede there are circumstances were torture might be justified, morally and legally (through what criminal law calls the defense of necessity: that an act is justified to save lives), you are on the other side of the line. You've joined the torture crowd. Those who've invoked the argument range from Alan Dershowitz, to the Israeli Supreme Court, to the Schlesinger Report on Abu Ghraib, to the Robb/Silberman Pre-Iraq War Intelligence Report. Most recently, and eloquently, the argument was set forth in the pages of The Weekly Standard, by Charles Krauthammer. His powerful essay, "The Truth about Torture: It's time to be honest about doing terrible things," received wide circulation on the internet. With all these great minds, and moral authorities, relying on this argument, it is with some trepidation that I point out that it is phony. I do so for a number of very real reasons. Fallacies In The "Ticking Bomb" Argument -- The Clock Does Not Work It is a rhetorical device. It is seductively simplistic, and compellingly logical. It is also pure fantasy. The conditions of ticking bomb scenarios are seldom real. No one has more effectively probed the fallacies of this argument than Georgetown University School of Law professor David Luban. Writing in the Washington Post, in a piece entitled "Torture, American-Style," Luban explains why, while it makes good television melodrama, this scenario does not produce critical thinking. Professor Luban surgically dissects this argument at greater length in the October 2005 Virginia Law Review. His essay "Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb" is very much worth the read. Citing moral philosopher Bernard Williams, Luban writes that "there are certain situations so monstrous that the idea that the processes of moral rationality could yield an answer in them is insane," and "to spend time thinking what one would decide if one were in such a situation is also insane, if not merely frivolous." ... "McCain has said that ultimately the debate is over who we are. We will never figure that out until we stop talking about ticking bombs, and stop playing games with words." ..... http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051216.html
A more accurate phrase would be "near 4,000." As of this minute, we're at 3,888. With any luck, it'll be March before 4,000, but I doubt it.
Political discourse in this country is ****ed up, I agree. It is so ****ed up that Republicans like yourself not only try to pass off the torture of waterboarding as some sort of inconvenience but also simultaneously flatly refuse to say you oppose torture. Way to cover your bases. On the one hand it's not torture and on the other you wouldn't mind if it was. You stand for nothing and you're an embarassment to this country.
Regardless of who authorized torture/waterboarding, it's not something we, as the United States, should be doing and the people who are going to pay the price for it are soldiers in the future.
Hmmm. What else was going on during the '80's while the Saddam regime was killing all those people? Oh yeah. Now I remember-
I don't think you want to play the number of dead Iraqi game. The two Iraq Wars started by the USA and the sanctions have clearly killed more Iraqis than Sadam ever did. And the damn thing is that they would have sold us the oil anyway. I know we have God or our side.
No, I'm blaming the factions of the US government (Rumsfeld a prominent member) that provided diplomatic, intelligence, and material support to Saddam while we knew he was slaughtering his own people and using chemical weapons against Iran. And I'm blaming their tireless, ahistorical, dishonest apologists like you, who make their rolling foriegn policy disasters possible.
********** BTW for those who don't know the ground war in the first Gulf War was not necessary and Bush I was desperate to avoid a Soviet deal that had Sadam withdrawing from Iraq without the ground war. Bush I with no justification killed a couple of hundred of Americans along with thousands of Iraqis because he would not accept the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait without a ground war. ************ ... Dodging Peace On Feb. 20, Schwarzkopf sought a two-day delay because of bad weather. Powell exploded. "I've got a President and a Secretary of Defense on my back," Powell shouted. "They've got a bad Russian peace proposal they're trying to dodge. ... I don't think you understand the pressure I'm under." Schwarzkopf yelled back that Powell appeared to have "political reasons" for favoring a timetable that was "militarily unsound." Powell snapped back, "Don't patronize me with talk about human lives." By the evening of Feb. 21, however, Schwarzkopf thought he and Powell were again reading from the same page, looking for ways to avert the ground war. Powell had faxed Schwarzkopf a copy of the Russian cease-fire plan in which Gorbachev had proposed a six-week period for Iraqi withdrawal. Recognizing that six weeks would give Saddam time to salvage his military hardware, Schwarzkopf and Powell devised a counter-proposal. It would give Iraq only a one-week cease-fire, time to flee from Kuwait but without any heavy weapons. "The National Security Council was about to meet," Schwarzkopf wrote, "and Powell and I hammered out a recommendation. We suggested the United States offer a cease-fire of one week: enough time for Saddam to withdraw his soldiers but not his supplies or the bulk of his equipment. ... “As the Iraqis withdrew, we proposed, our forces would pull right into Kuwait behind them. ... At bottom, neither Powell nor I wanted a ground war. We agreed that if the United States could get a rapid withdrawal we would urge our leaders to take it." An Angry President But when Powell arrived at the White House late that evening, he found Bush angry about the Soviet peace initiative. Still, according to Woodward’s Shadow, Powell reiterated that he and Schwarzkopf “would rather see the Iraqis walk out than be driven out.” Powell said the ground war carried serious risks of significant U.S. casualties and “a high probability of a chemical attack.” But Bush was set: “If they crack under force, it is better than withdrawal,” the president said. In My American Journey, Powell expressed sympathy for Bush’s predicament. "The President's problem was how to say no to Gorbachev without appearing to throw away a chance for peace," Powell wrote. "I could hear the President's growing distress in his voice. 'I don't want to take this deal,' he said. 'But I don't want to stiff Gorbachev, not after he's come this far with us. We've got to find a way out'." Powell sought Bush's attention. "I raised a finger," Powell wrote. "The President turned to me. 'Got something, Colin?'," Bush asked. But Powell did not outline Schwarzkopf’s one-week cease-fire plan. Instead, Powell offered a different idea intended to make the ground offensive inevitable. "We don't stiff Gorbachev," Powell explained. "Let's put a deadline on Gorby's proposal. We say, great idea, as long as they're completely on their way out by, say, noon Saturday," Feb. 23, less than two days away. Powell understood that the two-day deadline would not give the Iraqis enough time to act, especially with their command-and-control systems severely damaged by the air war. The plan was a public-relations strategy to guarantee that the White House got its ground war. "If, as I suspect, they don't move, then the flogging begins," Powell told a gratified president. The next day, at 10:30 a.m., a Friday, Bush announced his ultimatum. There would be a Saturday noon deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal, as Powell had recommended. Schwarzkopf and his field commanders in Saudi Arabia watched Bush on television and immediately grasped its meaning. "We all knew by then which it would be," Schwarzkopf wrote. "We were marching toward a Sunday morning attack." When the Iraqis predictably missed the deadline, American and allied forces launched the ground offensive at 0400 on Feb. 24, Persian Gulf time. Though Iraqi forces were soon in full retreat, the allies pursued and slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the 100-hour war. U.S. casualties were light, 147 killed in combat and another 236 killed in accidents or from other causes. "Small losses as military statistics go," wrote Powell, "but a tragedy for each family." On Feb. 28, the day the war ended, Bush celebrated the victory. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all," the president exulted. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/122600b.html
you do realize that most of the deaths on that chart occurred w/ the full support of the reagan adminstration, right?
I'm not surprised. I bet most war supporters have as well. After 500 American deaths or so it must really be hard to keep up with numbers, particularly when so much energy has to be invested in supporting the administration above all else.
There isn't much here worth wasting time on. It's sad that you have to resort to ad homs. Save us both the time and just don't engage. I disagree. The Conventions set out to extend protections to certain people. If it was supposed to extend to every conceivable person then there would not have been any reason to enumerate groupings. Al Quaeda doesn't fit under the POW designation, nor under the groupings delineated in the subsequent Convention. You're envisioning the Conventions to be something they aren't. Great analysis - 'that's just insane!' Wow, now there's some critical thinking. The scenario, first off, could happen - and not in a 'invisible man from Mars eating your brain' kinda way. Second, considering the boundaries of your decisionmaking IS an act of critical thinking. Similarly, dismissing something out of hand is the opposite of critical thinking.
Uh, yeah he had justification not to leave Saddam fully militarized. Besides, you seem to be forgetting that Saddam had between August and January to withdraw from Kuwait.
What's sad is your blatant obfuscation of simple principles. What's sad is your complete lack of candor. You'd be a great addition to the Bush administration given those talents... And it's not an ad hominem to remark that your argumentative style (and substance) never changes. Funny considering it was you who felt the need to make a competely irrelevant rejoinder regarding the geneva conventions and then proceeded to pretend the argument was somehow only pertaining to waterboarding, or AQ operatives, or whatever is conveniant for your (still confusing and irrational) "point". Furthermore, after all that, your next response is to flee under a nausea-inducing wave of self-pity whilst still pretending you had something meritous to say. Why don't you save us the time instead.
Yes, it is an ad hom to claim my point is 'childish wordplay.' It's also nonsensical since there wasn't any wordplay happening - I asked you a question. sigh. Keep proving my point.
What you think they should say, or what you think they should have wanted is not really relevant. They put it down in pretty clear language: [rquoter] Fourth Convention Article 4 Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals. Article 13 The provisions of Part II cover the whole of the populations of the countries in conflict, without any adverse distinction based, in particular, on race, nationality, religion or political opinion, and are intended to alleviate the sufferings caused by war. [/rquoter] Seriously, read the four conventions. To say that they didn't intend it to apply to everybody is just wrong. It is in pretty clear language.
