Originally Posted By piperlynne As in troops? I don't believe that you can, under international law execute a prisoner of war.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip I don't believe in torture, but I don't know if I accept the "We're better than that" statements either. War is a nasty business, and on occasion we do stuff just as nasty and immoral as the other side. It goes with the territory. If you want to keep things nice and clean and moral; don’t go to war.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <So, its basically a case of "the end justifies the means"?> No, it's a case of some ends justify some means. In this case, preventing hundreds of deaths justified putting a washcloths over the faces of two confirmed terrorists and pouring water on it. And I believe it's, "Those who would give up essential liberty to gain temporary security deserve neither." I don't believe we have done that. So say we didn't waterboard Abu Zadayah, so we never located Kalid Sheik Mohammad, so we never learned any of the details of the second Liberty Tower plot, so hundreds of people died. Would you be okay with that? Or would you have complained, as many did post 9/11, that our intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots?
Originally Posted By piperlynne Kill them, smack them around a bit, pour water over their mouth and nose so they can't breathe and have a psychological belief that they are drowning (being drowned). Forget due process, forget habeus corpus. Forget it all! Lets all just be vigilantes!!! They did it to us, so lets do it to them. All I see in that attitude is a neverending vicious cycle. I don't want the representatives of my country in whatever capacity to be that base. To be that barbaric in their methods. We're better than that. If we do not hold ourselves to the same standards we wish to be held to, if we accept this treatment for our "enemies" and deem it just, then we cannot be surprised when those "just" actions are used against us by others and by ourselves.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh Sorry. Looks like I mixed singular and plural nouns. Torture would therefore be justified.
Originally Posted By DAR We are better than that. But I also want this country to let the bad guys know that if they come after us or our allies they better knock us down and knock us down hard.
Originally Posted By piperlynne >><So, its basically a case of "the end justifies the means"?> No, it's a case of some ends justify some means. In this case, preventing hundreds of deaths justified putting a washcloths over the faces of two confirmed terrorists and pouring water on it. And I believe it's, "Those who would give up essential liberty to gain temporary security deserve neither." I don't believe we have done that. So say we didn't waterboard Abu Zadayah, so we never located Kalid Sheik Mohammad, so we never learned any of the details of the second Liberty Tower plot, so hundreds of people died. Would you be okay with that? Or would you have complained, as many did post 9/11, that our intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots?<<< If we did nothing, I would not be ok with it. But there are many many many other ways to garner intelligence. And many other interrogation methods. I would rather we pursue HEAVILY those avenues of intelligence.
Originally Posted By DAR <<If we did nothing, I would not be ok with it. But there are many many many other ways to garner intelligence. And many other interrogation methods. I would rather we pursue HEAVILY those avenues of intelligence.>> Except at the time our intelligence agencies were mucked up at the time.
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan >>some ends justify some means<< That's about as good a standard as "pretty damn sure." >> Liberty Tower plot<< There is no "Liberty Tower."
Originally Posted By piperlynne >><<If we did nothing, I would not be ok with it. But there are many many many other ways to garner intelligence. And many other interrogation methods. I would rather we pursue HEAVILY those avenues of intelligence.>> Except at the time our intelligence agencies were mucked up at the time. << So because we're "mucked up" lets just do something we know we shouldn't do?
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <And many other interrogation methods.> We have ways of making you talk! Bring out - the comfy chair! He must be made of stearner stuff! Get me - the fluffy pillow!
Originally Posted By piperlynne >><And many other interrogation methods.> We have ways of making you talk! Bring out - the comfy chair! He must be made of stearner stuff! Get me - the fluffy pillow!<< You know better than that and so do I Doug.
Originally Posted By DAR <<So because we're "mucked up" lets just do something we know we shouldn't do?>> No but at the time we had no idea if or when another attack was coming.
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_04/017853.php" target="_blank">http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...7853.php</a> >>The entire claim has been exposed as dubious over the years, but as long as torture apologists are going to keep bringing it up, it's probably worth taking a moment to periodically set the record straight. Tim Noah had this piece late yesterday: The first reason to be skeptical that this planned attack could have been carried out successfully is that, as I've noted before, attacking buildings by flying planes into them didn't remain a viable al-Qaida strategy even through Sept. 11, 2001. Thanks to cell phones, passengers on United Flight 93 were able to learn that al-Qaida was using planes as missiles and crashed the plane before it could hit its target. There was no way future passengers on any flight would let a terrorist who killed the pilot and took the controls fly wherever he pleased. What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument) is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got -- an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous" -- that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003. How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. Remember, according to Bush, Cheney, and their most ardent supporters, the thwarted "plot" against the Library Tower is the single best piece of evidence that torture -- waterboarding, in specific -- saved American lives.<<
Originally Posted By RoadTrip <<Sorry. I meant Library Tower.>> Library Tower. Isn't that where that Whitman guy shot up a bunch of people in Texas?
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <The entire claim has been exposed as dubious over the years, but as long as torture apologists are going to keep bringing it up, it's probably worth taking a moment to periodically set the record straight.> Of course. It would be like Al Queda to try to blow up a building and, if the attempt failed, try to use a different method later.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh "It would be like Al Queda to try to blow up a building and, if the attempt failed, try to use a different method later." Darn it. That's supposed to say "wouldn't". There's nothing worse than trying to use sarcasm and blowing it.
