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 ...
Water boarding is the most extreme of the enhanced techniques used. It was used very sparingly and yielded high quality information that saved lives. Most Americans know that this type of interrogation isn't torture and polls have born this out. A little phychological discomfort to the head hackers is not the same as pulling out fingernails, electric shock, systematic rape and starvation. These are all methods that are used today by our adversaries in this conflict.
Words mean things it is imperative that words like torture are not dumbed down to include being tired, and and having water splashed in your face. If we are not careful someone could pass off a paid street thug as a concerned “community Organizer” and ride that pony to the halls of power.
Well,...the anti-american leftwing group wants this ...but they want it structured to achieve an outcome to their liking.....
How best to do it...requires much thought!
I wouldn't let Congressional committees do it....
true
I think that she and the democraps started this whole thing as a campaign issue and that it got out of hand.
Now Pelosi is sticking to the lie as a matter of political survival and in an attempt to keep the extreme Left in her corner.
"extraordinary measures." Is that something like "revenue enhancement?" If you believe in TORTURE, why not shout it from the rooftops loud and proud.....that is unless it makes you feel "uncomfortable." To me, the best evidence that government approved TORTURE is wrong is that its proponents can't even bring themselves to use the word.
Do I want to save my life even if torture is used? Possibily, I'm all to human and I want to live.
Now let me ask you a question: would you be willing, to have the federal government (now headed by Obama) intentionally TORTURE a man, woman or child as part of an effort to save you even at the risk that this man, woman, or child may be proved innocent? Governments make mistakes all the time, my friend. Just how willing are far are you willing to extend use of the torture power to save your life? Are you more importantly, are you willing to hand over the power to TORTURE (again say it loud and proud) people without either trial or charges? Do you trust the Messiah O not to misuse it and turn it against the innocent, and if so, why?
exactly, use her the way they used newt, and bush
I'll just use Captain Kirk's answer.
"Do I want to save my life even if torture is used? Possibly, I'm all too human and I want to live."
Some people on the left (heck ask Janet Napolitano) think you're a "terrorist" for participating on this site and their hero is now the president. Why do you trust him (or Biden) with unlimited power to torture people who may later be proved innnocent?
Terrorists have planted a WMD upwind of your family. It goes off in one hour. The situation makes evacuation impossible.
The FBI has one of the bombers but he’s not talking.
What do you do?
“Why do you trust him (or Biden) with unlimited power to torture people who may later be proved innnocent?”
Whether we trust the 0ne or not, whether it is legal or not, he will do what he wants.
Precedence does not matter to this administration. It doesn’t matter if GWB, BC, GHWB, RR, JC, JF, ..., AL, or GW ever ‘tortured’ anybody or made any prisoner uncomfortable. Het will do what he will do. The One is a Chicago thug.
0bama wants to completely transform America. Get it.
Do you honestly think that 0bama would ever limit his actions or policies based on any previous administration?
Thanks for the heads up. Can anyone record the song? I have as much singing ability as Obama has the ability to run our country.
You might also enjoy this Hitler rant about Pelosi - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2251967/posts
If you have a moment, please leave a comment on YouTube and pass the link around. May the mocking continue.
We have a constitution in this country. If you really believe that scenario will happen (it wasn’t the case in any of the waterboarding sitautions) then you need to give Obama the power via constituional amendment to authorize the torture of American citizens. The constitution is very clear on this.
The Constitution (I generally capitalize it) doesn’t cover POW’s.
I answered your question. Please have the courtesy of answering mine. Thank you!
I concur with your answer. You’re welcome.
“Yes, Chucky, Pelosi is a liar but torture is still wrong.” ~ Captain Kirk
You Leftist pious phonies wouldn’t lift a finger to stop REAL torture - the torturing to death of an unborn child. But put a terrorist [or a baby seal, for that matter] in the block and watch them spring into sensitive-soul mode. http://www.jillstanek.com/pba.gif
Partial Birth Waterboarding http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2007/11/09/partial-birth-waterboarding
The truth is out there, but, as evidenced by your posts, you avoid it at ALL costs. Well here it is - in your face:
Bottom line:
“....we are still detaining captives (except when Obama releases dangerous terrorists), the Obama Justice Department has endorsed the Bush legal analysis of torture law in federal court, and Obama has endorsed state secrets, extraordinary rendition, and national-security surveillance (and the Bush stance on surveillance has since been reaffirmed by the federal court created to rule on such issues). Do these people ever get called on their hypocrisy?”
Rendition:
Michael Ledeen http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/ledeen/ledeen200501060830.asp points out that the most questionable interrogation method of all is process called rendition, which is unlikely to be examined by the committee....
A week or so back, I criticized the Washington Post for giving a lot of space to an article that basically “outed” a CIA aircraft, and only in passing raised what I took to be the main issue, namely the transportation of captured terrorist suspects to countries where they could be interrogated more vigorously than in the United States. The Post journalist had briefly quoted Michael Scheuer, the recently retired CIA officer who became a best-selling author writing under “Anonymous,” to the effect that the philosophical subleties of this issue would not have disturbed his former employers. They would simply have saluted and done what they were told by the White House.
I doubt anyone in this administration — which, remember, already retreated from its earlier positions on interrogation methods permitted against captured terrorist suspects — is going to point out that the most controversial and ethically questionable method of all was developed during the Clinton administration in direct response to orders that came directly from the White House. “Rendition” was a Clinton creation, and was approved by Clinton’s lawyers, with no apparent cries of pain either from the Justice Department or from anyone in Congressional “oversight” committees. Gonzales might quietly make that point if anyone yells at him. It won’t register with the Democrats, but it might help the public understand the real world a little better.
[.........snip.........]
Read more about rendition here:
Friday, January 07, 2005
The Grand Inquisitor 2
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/01/grand-inquisitor-2-we-are-finally.html
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NRO Sunday, 05/10/2009
Scroll down to: 05/09 09:50 AM[]
Obama’s Commission Farce [Andy McCarthy]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/.
As Ed notes, this week’s Obama administration Embarrassing Friday Night News Dump included alerting the Washington Post that the administration will be reinstating military commission trials for captured terrorists. Typical of the Obamedia, the Post uncritically accepts the administration’s fig-leaf that Obama’s new and improved commissions will correct flaws that made Bush commissions (approved by Congress in 2006) unfair, and therefore so the claim goes the reinstatement should not be considered a gargantuan flippero from the Obama campaign position that the commissions were a kangaroo-court of a travesty. So Post reporter Peter Finn tells us:
The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said. The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
This is utter nonsense. Under the existing commission rules, miltary judges have always had the authority to suppress evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, and have done so. Moreover, under Bush, the appointing authority (the Defense Department component that oversees the commissions) dismissed the charges against one of the most significant al Qaeda detainees, Mohammed al-Qahtani, on the (absurd) ground that his interrogation was tantamount to torture. (I discussed it in a New York Times debate, here.) The admissibility of hearsay evidence has always been a red-herring hearsay is a staple of the international tribunals so admired by many in the Obama administration and the academic Left (a redundancy, I know), and the ability to get hearsay introduced in court is a large part of the reason for doing commission trials in the first place. (Otherwise American soldiers would have to be pulled away from combat operations to testify, and much evidence could never be used because it is given to us by foreign intelligence services on the condition that it not be disclosed.) And the bit about granting detainees “greater freedom to choose their attorneys” made me laugh so much my sides still ache American lawyers lined up from here to Gitmo to take up the cause of America’s enemies, including many from firms connected to Obama administration lawyers (including Attorney General Holder, whose firm has represented according to its website some 18 enemy combatants). Finn mentions none of this.
Finn goes on to say: “The military commissions have allowed the trial of terrorism suspects in a setting that favors the government and protects classified information, but they were sharply criticized during the administration of President George W. Bush. ‘By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,’ then-candidate Barack Obama said in June 2008.’” Obama was not the only one. That same month, Holder claimed the commissions amounted to “the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.”
Well guess what? The Obama commissions will be, in every material way, exactly the same as the Bush Commissions: they will allow the trial of terrorism suspects in a setting that favors the government and protects classified information, and they will be criticized perhaps not quite as sharply, but sharply by the same hard Lefties that Obama and Holder were courting during the campaign.
The media will never tell you that the Bush commission trials (as I’ve previously recounted, here) provided elaborate protections for war crimes defendants, such as:
the presumption of innocence;
the imposition of the burden of proof on the prosecution;
the right to counselboth to a military lawyer provided at the expense of the American taxpayer and to a private attorney if the combatant chooses to retain one;
the right to be presented with the charges in advance of trial;
access to evidence the prosecution intends to introduce and to any exculpatory evidence known to the prosecution;
access to interpreters as necessary to assist in understanding the proceedings;
the right to a trial presumptively open to the public (except for portions sealed for national defense or witness security purposes);
the free choice to testify or decline to do so;
the right against any negative inference from a refusal to testify;
access to reasonably available evidence and witnesses;
access to investigative resources as “necessary for a full and fair trial”; and
the right to present evidence and to cross-examine witnesses.
Those are just some of the trial rights. There are, furthermore, elaborate sentencing procedures and a multi-tiered military appellate process at which a convicted combatant could get a guilty verdict or sentence reversed without ever having to appeal in the civilian courts. As Powerline’s Scott Johnson has pointed out, these protections for our current enemies markedly outstrip the paltry safeguards given the Nazis at Nuremburgnotwithstanding that Nuremburg, an international tribunal that afforded no right to American civilian court review, is celebrated by the Left (and was fondly recalled by candidate Obama) as a triumph of the “rule of law.”
The Obama campaign slandered the commissions, just like it slandered Gitmo, military detention, coercive interrogations, the state secrets doctrine, extraordinary rendition, and aggressive national-security surveillance. Gitmo is still open (and Obama and Holder now admit it’s a first-rate facility), we are still detaining captives (except when Obama releases dangerous terrorists), the Obama Justice Department has endorsed the Bush legal analysis of torture law in federal court, and Obama has endorsed state secrets, extraordinary rendition, and national-security surveillance (and the Bush stance on surveillance has since been reaffirmed by the federal court created to rule on such issues).
Do these people ever get called on their hypocrisy? 05/09 09:50 AM[]
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Dr. Pat Santy
Industry: Science
Occupation: M.D. (Psychiatry / Aerospace Medicine)
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Unpleasant Truths About Torture
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/11/unpleasant-truths-about-torture.html
Wrong. Waterboarding was used on an American citizen, Padilla. As to "honest" protest who determines that? Obama? Napolitano? Why do you trust them to make this decision? What makes you think they won't regard you as a "dishonest protestor."
Christopher Hitchens was right when he used the word torture after he underwent a relatively mild form of waterboarding.
Let's get clear what we are talking about. The CIA's version requires a doctor to monitor the oxygen level in the blood to make sure they're brought to the very edge of death before flipping them upright and allowing them to breath. Rinse and repeat 183 times. If that isn't torture, what is? Somehow....I suspect you would agree with me if that happened to you.
Ronald Reagan prosecuted a Texas sheriff for doing the same.
Name-calling eh? I'll wager right now that I'm well to the right of you on taxes, spending, and economic regulation. I know that I'm more conservative on the issue of whether or not to trust the federal government (now headed by Obama) not abuse its power.
Excellent piece by Krauthammer. It’s a shame that more libs aren’t reasonable people more of the time than less but I guess then they wouldn’t be libs.
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