You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.
Whoa!!...Good shot from Krauthammer ....a professional psychiatrist.
Posted on 05/16/2009 8:18:39 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
WASHINGTON -- Earlier this month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives. The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited.
And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin, writing for washingtonpost.com and echoing a common meme among my critics, asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians." (He later helpfully suggested that my moral deficiencies derived from "watching TV and fantasizing about being Jack Bauer.")
On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered, as we now say, this enhanced interrogation explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the ('87) Landau Commission (guidelines), we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."
Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. (The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.)
That moral calculus is important. Even John McCain says that in ticking time bomb scenarios you "do what you have to do." The no-torture principle is not inviolable. One therefore has to think about what kind of transgressive interrogation might be permissible in the less pristine circumstance of the high-value terrorist who knows about less imminent attacks. (By the way, I've never seen five seconds of "24.")
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Terrorists have no rights by being terrorists. They have information that can save lives then torture away.
http://brayincandy.com/id132.html
Pray for America
Ron Paul rally somewhere, is my guess.
*************************EXCERPT****************************
Radical evil sets the threshold of victory so high that we risk contamination by confronting it on its own terms.
Terrorists tempt us to torture them, by striking against innocent noncombatants out of the shadows. The present debate over torture is a black cloud as big as a man’s hand announcing a storm to come. How do we arrogate unto ourselves the right to inflict death and extreme pain upon innocents—leave aside not-so-innocent terrorists—without corrupting ourselves? The insidious character of radical evil seeks to contaminate us through our own response. Ordinary evil kills for profit or rapes for pleasure. Radical evil rapes and kills so that terror and horror will blot out the memory of the good and leave behind only the capacity for more evil.
Are you being sarcastic or are you actually Bill Shatner? He would share your opinion.
"Yes, Chucky, Pelosi is a liar but torture is still wrong."
Could you be more explicit about your "torture is still wrong" declaration? For example, by what standard is "torture" wrong? Who, what, when and where made it wrong? What is "torture"...really, the obfuscationization of American English begs this question. Some might think watching "American Idol" is torture. Others might hold out for pulling out finger and/or toe nails, burning certain body parts, gouging eyes, lacerating with sharp or not so sharp instruments, various external and internal chemical applications, electric shot therapy applied in various ways, whipping, beating...just to name a few.
Now I admit I wouldn't choose to be water-boarded for fun and pleasure, in fact I would probably give up all of the information I had to avoid it...unless I had something greater to fear should I give up the information.
One thing I have learned to my satisfaction, folks who are water-boarded do not die, they are not cripled or scared...in fact they are perfectly fine within minutes of the experience.
Daniel Pearl, is not fine...in case you missed some of the graphic video and pictures, his decapitation was not clean and swift.
Oh and the boys who get to endure water-boarding (excluding our Navy Seals...who get the chance during training), can avoid it by just sharing the information they have with their interviewers. Also, afterall, these pigs live in better conditions at Gitmo than they did at home.
Finally, I would contend that Mrs. Pearl and Mr. Pearl's parents are to this day being "tortured" by what those swine who were water-boarded did Mr. Pearl.
You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.
Whoa!!...Good shot from Krauthammer ....a professional psychiatrist.
Sounds like a good plan to me!
He looks like my image of a psychiatrist in that picture.
Maybe you should disseminate that info to the Jhad websites.
Your friends and relatives are living out a psychosis against which logic has no more palliative power than it does over diarrhea. I have two posts which I presume to lay out here which cumulatively are quite long but I think go a ways to explaining the reality of contemporary American politics and why we conservatives have such a long, steep hill to climb. The first is inspired Dr. Shelby Steele, himself an African-American, who therefore has the bona fides to say it like it is:
I have enormous respect for Shelby Steele ever since I read his insightful piece which explained much about the election of Obama which was otherwise inexplicable to a white male middle-class conservative. He also appeared on C-SPAN and delivered a talk in which he outlined the reasons for Obama's appeal. Reading this piece today, one comes away even more impressed when one considers his personal odyssey in arriving at conservatism.
Shelby Steele identified the psychology which led to Obama's election. Essentially, Obama personified expiation for centuries of slavery and segregation. He struck an implicit deal with white America. He would not rub white America's nose in its original sin of slavery and segregation and white America would accept the proffered expiation simply by voting for him. The deal carried through the election because Obama persisted in being what conservatives complain of: an empty suit. So long as Obama kept his part of the deal and did nothing flamboyant (think of Reverend Al Sharpton), white America kept its part of the deal and Obama was elected. White America's part of the deal was the reciprocal of Obama's forbearance from behaving "black" by acting the empty suit. White America would never suggest that the emperor had no clothes and, of course, would vote its myopia.
The second post was published as a vanity before the election. It represents my attempt to articulate what we are up against and especially the mindlessness of the Democrat party today:
THE OBAMA PATHOLOGY
The idea of the Authoritarian Personality originated in The Frankfurt School as a means of undermining the position of the father within the family circle and thereby undermine the family itself and ultimately the nation as a bulwark against communism. It was heavily larded with pseudo-Freudian analysis and was expanded to subvert all institutionalized authority. Every season we see an article, usually by some college professor with too much time in his hands or sometimes by psychiatrists acting either singly or in gaggles, opining that the current president, if he be Republican, is somehow psychologically deficient. No Republican president or Republican candidate in my lifetime has escaped this ritual psychoanalysis.
A recent excrescence of this genre is the book by Naomi Wolf in which she ludicrously argues that America, led by George Bush, is on the verge of descending into fascism. I have posted my objection to this sort of pseudoscience and I have tried to debunk this cheap propaganda so I am reluctant to engage hypocritically in the same game now. Well, I am going to do it anyway. I aim to indict about half of our whole society. The half, and likely more than half, that will vote for Barak Obama. My psychological conclusions do not pretend to the trappings of the "science" of the psyche and adorned with the word games of Freudian analysis, rather they are rooted in common sense.
The conclusion of anyone with common sense who has seen the films of innocent children singing their Obama songs or who has watched the quasi-military chanting and saluting of the Obama Youth in military garb must conclude that there is something very, very wrong with these people. I remember when I first saw the YouTube Children singing their Obama song I became conscious after a while that my mouth was gaping open, so appalled was I. My reaction to seeing the paramilitary gang marching into the karate hall was a mixture of embarrassment that these kids would make such fools of themselves and anger that adults would so brazenly manipulate children. Then I felt a creeping sense of unease that there was something potentially very sinister going on. Dear merciful God, this is Orwellian!
Beyond a very healthy repugnance to the spectacle of brainwashed children put on display, beyond the inescapable Maoist symbolism of it all, a commonsense person asks, what kind of man would permit this to go on in his name? What kind of parent would not seek to protect his child from such a man? What kind of pathology would lead parents who presumably love their children to consign those children to the demons of mind control? How could Americans fall for such a transparent cult of personality?
Unfortunately, we need not be uncertain about what kind of man would permit this grotesquerie to be advanced in his name. History provides us with plenty of examples: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-Il come to mind and now we add Barak Obama to the list. Why has he not spoken out and repudiated this? Would not a decent man do so if only for the children?
If Obama will not speak out now as a candidate when a little modesty, even false modesty, would advance his chances, what will he do when he gains office with no resistance anywhere on the horizon; no opposition in either the House or the Senate, no voice in traditional media to be raised against him, no institutional resistance on a national level of any kind organized to discourage him? Because he condones this obscenity one must ask, Is Obama really a narcissist as has been claimed? If so, how far will he go when he has the levers of power in his hands when there is no effective resistance to his ego?
How dangerous is Barak Obama?
Is he too dangerous to be put in a place where he could literally get us all killed? Or Is he the indispensable man in some sense? I do not think so. There is nothing in his career that suggests that he is the man for this season. In a time of war he has no military experience. In a time of looming financial disaster, he has no economic credentials. If he is potentially dangerous and if he is not indispensable, why would so many people want to put him in a position where he could do us harm, even get us all killed?
My commonsense explanation is that there must be a pathology, a mass psychosis, that brings people to the point where not only are they eager to make him the most powerful man in the world but they are invoking his name and calling upon him to be their savior. This they do rather than falling on their knees out of fear of The Real God.
This is the Obama pathology.
To a middle-class conservative who instinctively rejects conspiracy theories and normally wants to think the best of people because that's what he learned in Sunday school, this deification of an empty suit is as bewildering as it is frightening. What in the world are these people thinking? Do they not weigh the risks of consigning their fate to an unqualified man, worse, a person tainted his whole life with stunningly dangerous confederates including felons and Communists and terrorists? What is the upside? What is it about this man whose career is utterly uninterrupted by any accomplishment which would motivate these people to risk their children and my children to whatever he might do to them? How do they know? How can they be sure? Don't they have any doubts?
My problem is that I am seeking after that which I cannot find. I want to find an explanation in logic for a phenomenon of emotion. It is easy for middle-class conservatives to overlook the power of emotion even though history provides plenty of examples even within our own culture in America. Can logic explain why so many drank Jim Jonse's Kool aid? Why Charles Manson commanded such blood loyalty? How many cheered OJ Simpson's acquittal? Why did princes Diana's passing traumatize a nation? These are not questions which are answered with everyday commonsense. One almost has to go to the Bible to see the answer in Old Testament allegory which lets us know that evil is and there will always be worshipers of the golden calf.
I fear that in November we conservatives might find ourselves involuntarily embarked upon a journey that is foreign to our epistemology. We may be going into dark places and we might well be pushed into a netherworld where our common sense values are of no use because it is a place where down is up and black is white, a place where gravity does not pull but pushes, a place where we will need a pocket translator in order to converse in English with our government, our children's teachers, and our keepers even though they superficially use the same words we do. We sense we are about to be overwhelmed by forces guided by the ghost of Saul Alinsky.
I fear the downside of the Obama Pathology after his election may extend to dimensions we cannot begin to fasten to our everyday understanding or to our common sense. We have no way of knowing what will come because we don't know anything really about Barak Obama. We do not know if he is purely evil, we do not know if he is a committed communist, we do not know if he is a racist, we do not know if he wishes to see the submergence of the United States into a greater world order, we do not know if he is a megalomaniac, we do not even know, God help us, if he hates America. We do not know, in short, if we are backs - to- the- wall confronted with the Liberals' quadrennial nightmare: A real Authoritarian Personality.
We do know that Barak Obama has already encouraged a cult of personality whose implications are truly frightening and fundamentally un-American.
This also puts anyone who confers with Pelosi about important matters on notice that if the subject matter becomes the focus of controversy, Pelosi will not stand by whatever the agreement or understanding was if she’s on the hot seat. If she needs to publicly brand the other party as a liar, so be it.
Good post, thanks for finding that.
Well Captain, when the Klingons capture you again, we will take it as a given that you don’t want any extraordinary measures taken to rescue you. So noted on Star Date 20090516.
“Krauthammer is a psychiatrist.” ~ fullchroma
Board certified.
No I believe a different scenario. I believe that Pelosi is playing politics. She is using the moral issue of torture to attack the former administration for political advantage.
The people have short memories. Pelosi knows this and the Left Wing press is her willing accomplice most of the time.
In spades. If our elected leaders who sit on committees are lied to by the agencies they oversee, we have a Constitutional meltdown. Either they lied or Pelosi lied. Either way, this has to be decided by means of a deadly serious investigation.
She is trying to play politics as usual, but she is in way over her botoxed head on this one. This one is NOT politics as usual. In essence, she is saying that in a matter of grave national security, the CIA lied to her. If true, people MUST go to jail. If false, she MUST step down.
The problem with that is the CIA is part of the EXECUTIVE branch, and if she is allowed to openly trash the CIA, she is basically trashing Obama, and he and the CIA both know it. Obama or his supporters know that in real life, the CIA is far more important to him that Pelosi.
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