Posted on 04/27/2009 1:23:47 PM PDT by Scanian
The issue of the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques involve several inter-related questions.
There is, first of all, the matter of morality. Critics of enhanced interrogation techniques have taken to saying that Americans don’t torture, period – meaning in this instance that we do not engage in coercive interrogation techniques ranging from sleep deprivation to prolonged loud noise and/or bright lights to waterboarding. Anyone who holds the opposite view is a moral cretin and guilty of “arrant inhumanity.” Or so the argument goes.
But this posture begins to come apart under examination. For one thing, the issue of “torture” itself needs to be put in a moral context and on a moral continuum. Waterboarding is a very nasty technique for sure – but it is considerably different (particularly in the manner administered by the CIA) than, say, mutilation with electric drills, rape, splitting knees, or forcing a terrorist to watch his children suffer and die in order to try to elicit information from him. Waterboarding is a technique that has been routinely used in the training of some U.S. military personnel – and which the journalist Christopher Hitchens endured. I certainly wouldn’t want to undergo waterboarding – but while a very harsh technique, it is one that was applied in part because it would do far less damage to a person than other techniques. It is also surely relevant that waterboarding was not used randomly and promiscuously, but rather on three known terrorists. And of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program, according to Michael Hayden, President Bush’s last CIA director, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey –and of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in the memos on enhanced interrogation.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
“Enhanced interrogation” has been used for centuries. While it hasn’t been used by us as punishment, it has been used for collecting battlefield intelligence.
Anyone listening to the MSM, the Dems, and rabidly leftist web sites would have the impression that tens of thousands of “innocent” people were “tortured”.
Exactly what did they think being robbed at the barrel of a gun feels like? It's torture. And, worse, there's a real threat of death.
Democrats have no moral high ground to stand on in this debate. They are all punks and pukes ~ and particularly vile and brutal punks and pukes at that.
We don’t torture people.
Loud music and water in your face is not torture. You’ll walk away whole. You’ll be fine in time for dinner.
Compare the careful, measured, carefully calibrated interrogation these guys received after killing several thousand Americans versus the treatment suspects regularly get in any police basement in the world outside the United States. There is no comparison.
The question has be purposely misstated. No torture was involved. No one was maimed. No one was beaten. No telephone books were involved. No blackjacks. No one suffered so much as a black eye.
Now compare this to the treatment of Americans taken prisoner in similar fashion. How are they treated? They are regularly and publicly tortured to death. Anyone who wants to make an issue of torture has all the opportunity to do so if they want to, because every American taken prisoner gets tortured to death. Mostly they don’t even print it in the papers because they don’t want to upset anyone, and they don’t want to prejudice the readership against the enemy.
Recently involved in a discussion concerning ‘moral isolation’ as a tactic used against the USA by AQ in the global war on terror.
Once we conceed that the harsh interogations used against terrorist (or scum of the earth) is ‘torture’, we’ve lost the argument and no amount of self flagellation will return it.
(Notice OBL brought up the US use of Atomic weapons. Seems they understand ‘warfare’ better than we think they do.)
I don’t even need the article, just the headline.
It would be AMORAL and INHUMANE NOT to use enhanced interrogation techniques. The human lives saved by this are immeasurable and we have proof they work.
BFL
Ask Daniel Pearl for his opiunion..
Ph, Wait- the Religion of Peace BEHEADED him!!!!!
Just odd.
Like considering assault a more serious crime than murder.
Went thru this in SERE and didn’t like it. However, we are doing this to assholes, not nice enemy combatants IN UNIFORM that signed the Geneva Convention. We haven’t cut off a head nor any other body part. I am sick of Lawyers, including JAG and can’t believe that the American public doesn’t go nuts over the effort to screw our kids and the Intelligence community. Wait till you see the show trial of the Somali pirate. The defense will want the Seal team to testify which will endanger them or make the government drop charges. Kill the pricks, no prisoners no trials.
If one drops waterboarding from the equation the other methods used were things like keeping the captives in windowless rooms and turnning the lights off and on at different times and feeding them on schedules that got them totally disoriented. They didn’t know if they had been asleep for one hour or 8 hours. Eventually the mind plays some wild tricks and the disorientation leads to dramatically diminished ability to withhold important information. Is this torture? If the subject is not aware of why exactly he is disoriented and his mind is playing tricks, how is this torture?
Ann Coulter today on Hannity’s radio program clarified the issue on ‘water boarding’ and the Jpanese use of same. Well, not exactly the same since the Japanese filled a person full of water and jumped on their stomach, as well as submerging a person completely and drowning them once they got or didn’t get what they wanted. DemocRATS/LIEberals are demagoguing the issue with lies and deceit, as usual.
I agree, and for that reason think we should pull out of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. There’s no reason why we need to be party to these treaties. All it does is make Americans legally liable for doing their jobs.
I read another poster who was under the impression that international treaty is in parity with the Constitution or trumps it.
Which of course is ridiculous and I don't agree with.
My hubby, SirKit, says the first thing he'd ask someone who is so adamantly against torture would be if they are pro-abortion. If they are, then he'd ask them how they can justify the murder of an innocent baby, but be against making someone uncomfortable in order to extract information from them.
Well, the Constitution does say that treaties are legally binding, so you’re painting a false dichotomy between treaties and the Constitution. That’s why we need to actually withdraw from these treaties. I agree with the libs on one thing on this issue: the rule of law matters. So we need to change the law and keep pretending we care whether a few terrorists get dunked in the water.
Oops, I meant NOT keep pretending we care....!
In fact, if you read the inter-American weapons treaty that Obama wants the Senate to ratify, it spells out explicitly that it is limited by the Constitution of ratifying states. Moreover the US Constitution prohibits international treaty from abrogating US Constitutional law. The Senate can abrogate or vacate an international treaty with the same 2/3rds vote that is required to ratify.
Dude! I saw your invisible “/s” tag on your earlier post. LOL
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