Constitution??...what constitution???...we don't need no steenking constitution.
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 ...
In other words, you won’t extend the courtesy of answering my question. Thanks for your honest evasion!
“If that isn’t torture, what is? “
Sawing someone’s head off.
Got some support for that statement?
Well in my younger years I was a decent singer....but the good vocal cords have deserted the ship ...so to speak.
We don’t pull off fingernails. We don’t attach electric probes to testicles. We don’t cut off fingers. We don’t cut off heads. None of us would be for those measures.
But a little discomfort that gives the feeling of drowning and does not kill or maim the perp, is sometimes necessary to save lives.
Enterprise out!
Agreed. Nathanbedford hits 'em out of the park with boring regularity. He's one of my favorites on this board; him and Lurker.
Societies tend to be as moral as they can afford to be. Why is torture always wrong? It’s been around as a central tenet for thousands of years. Why is it only wrong now?
I also concur with your Constitutional analysis as far as US citizens go.
But if that clock’s ticking down I hope our guys are never in the position of having to scramble for a sympathetic judge.
Constitution??...what constitution???...we don't need no steenking constitution.
“.. 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.” ~ Captain Kirk
Oh, you’ve already proven that you’re an extremist (extreme right and extreme left are merely flip sides of the same extremist coin.)
America was founded to be a nation of laws not of men.
As Krauthammer said, “Our jurisprudence has the “reasonable man” standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances. On the morality of waterboarding and other “torture,” Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable-person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the existing circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted. ...”
And Thomas Sowell wrote:
“....Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word “torture,” there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it— which is what our terrorist enemies do— and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.
The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.
If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.” - Thomas Sowell May 13, 2009 Debate Over ‘Torture’ Lacks Seriousness
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/13/talking_points_96453.html
On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee’s ranking Democrat, on EITs including water boarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.
So, who was the director of the CIA, from 9/11 to 2004?
George J. Tenet was the Director of CIA, from 1997–2004 .
Tenet was appointed by President Clinton and approved by Congress. Tenet then became the CIA director in August of 1997.
So, Pelosi is now saying that George Tenet lied to her or ordered his congressional briefers to lie to Nancy.
I met a gentleman years ago, who told me that he had been shut up inside an underground room (a former military ammunition bunker), and tear gassed. He also mentioned that, on a different occasion, he had been zapped with a stun gun. In neither instance was he resisting anyone, nor had he violated any law (civilian or military).
The D@mocrats would obviously call both instances "torture." The gentleman in question, who was a law enforcement cadet at the time of the incidents, called it "training"...
You still can't torture another human being. You can point to every other torturer in the history of the world, and everyone who looked the other way or approved of it, and it won't make the slightest difference. You still die, and die alone, and face your maker. And nothing you plead about any of them will help you in the slightest.
By any definition I am not a terrorist and have every right that is given an American citizen. Terrorists bomb innocents.
Pray for America
Here here. Very well said.
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