450 posts IS a worse crime than wanting to kill us .
POSTED BY: AURaptor
UPDATED: Friday, May 22, 2009 14:59
VIEWED: 29463
PAGE 17 of 46
Quote:
Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
AgentR ?
I find it very telling that none of em even addresses my arguments despite the fact that I know something about this kinda thing and happened to provide hard evidence of our own admissions we did in fact torture folks to death.
They just go on arguing with everyone else in the thread and dance around ever having to own up to the facts of the matter - which is rather typical when authoritarian types run up against something that refutes their entire worldview.
It's like it don't even exist, because they cannot fit it into the artificial reality they have constructed for themselves.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
Frem, I think Finn is afraid you're going to dehumanize and demonize him because he's in favor of dehumanizing and demonizing others, which he considers "Gestapo tactics" when someone other than him or the intel goons are doing it...
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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FINN: I have probably asked provocatively and possibly even unfairly. I was taking your statements and extrapolating them to various circustances to see what stuck. It's a time-honored logical technique... What if in THIS case? what about THAT? But if it helps, I'll ask differently... without attempting to extrapolate your wording to other contexts. But IMHO you still haven't answered the essential question, and I'm wondering if you ever will.
So, without any extraolation on my part: What are the circumstances that you can imagine which will crack the most hardened resolve? Are you willing to use them in the context of interrogations? Assuming that such issues as shock and injury can be gotten around, what limitations would YOU put on interrogations, and why?
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They pit us like dogs against each other and rake it in. And I'll bet they laugh when they hear dupes like you defend the system that fucks you over and rewards them so nicely! But the one thing they'll stamp out in horror as if it were the spark of conflagration is any whiff of socialism. That should tell you something.
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And BTW, our torture went beyond interrogation to include EXTRACTING CONFESSIONS, according to some:
Quote:
Landay also quoted a former intelligence official, who said, "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used."
"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
According to security sources, that is why the two detainees were waterboarded an total of 266 times. The techniques sought and authorized by the Bush adminstration were those used by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War to EXTRACT FALSE CONFESSIONS.
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They pit us like dogs against each other and rake it in. And I'll bet they laugh when they hear dupes like you defend the system that fucks you over and rewards them so nicely! But the one thing they'll stamp out in horror as if it were the spark of conflagration is any whiff of socialism. That should tell you something.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Hero:
A little water and discomfort is a mild price to pay for the continued existance of an entire people. If we were them...they would cease to exist in the fire of American fury. But we're not them...so instead the get water and mercy. Such is life.
H
A little water and discomfort.
WHY would they confess anything over "a little water and discomfort"? Fear of death, physical panic and extreme exhaustion are not "discomfort". It may not leave marks, but it's torture, alright, and shouldn't be pretended to be better than other forms of torture.
To me "We torture them but we don't dismember them"... doesn't deserve the term mercy.
And you're equating an entire people with a network of terrorists. Basing your moral highground on a hypothesis of how they would be worse than what you're proposing. That's kind of sad, as value systems go. If all it takes is being just slightly better than a network of terrorists.. well, why on earth did folks ever bother with those human rights they drafted up some 200 years ago? Fools.
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FINN
"So, without any extrapolation on my part: What are the circumstances that you can imagine which will crack the most hardened resolve? Are you willing to use them in the context of interrogations? Assuming that such issues as shock and injury can be gotten around, what limitations would YOU put on interrogations, and why?"
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They pit us like dogs against each other and rake it in. And I'll bet they laugh when they hear dupes like you defend the system that fucks you over and rewards them so nicely! But the one thing they'll stamp out in horror as if it were the spark of conflagration is any whiff of socialism. That should tell you something.
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Finn, if you won't speak for yourself people will naturally wonder why. And they will infer all kinds of thoughts and motivations to you that might not belong.
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They pit us like dogs against each other and rake it in. And I'll bet they laugh when they hear dupes like you defend the system that fucks you over and rewards them so nicely! But the one thing they'll stamp out in horror as if it were the spark of conflagration is any whiff of socialism. That should tell you something.
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Apparently, torture is friggin' hilarious to media conservatives
For most rational human beings, even the notion of torture is bone-chilling. Media conservatives, on the other hand, apparently find it hilarious. Following President Obama's release of four previously classified Justice Department memos that had authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees -- including "stress positions," "cramped confinement," "sleep deprivation," and "the waterboard" -- numerous conservatives in the media have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that those practices constitute torture. Hard to believe? Here are just a few of the many examples:
Conservative leader and radio host Rush Limbaugh asserted, "If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh," said that "if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn't torture," and claimed that "appeasers" have "water[ed] down" definition of torture like "NOW gang" did with definition of domestic violence.
Radio host G. Gordon Liddy compared the proposed technique of placing a detainee who "appears to have a fear of insects" in "a cramped confinement box with an insect" to his appearance on a game show, stating, "I went through worse on Fear Factor."
Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee mocked the same technique: "Look, I've been in some hotels where there were more bugs than these guys faced." Huckabee went on to state that under the Obama administration, "We're going to talk to them, we're going to have a nice conversation, we're going to invite them down for some tea and crumpets."
Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson replied, "That usually works with your kids, too, right? When they're in trouble for something, they just tell you everything."
To which her co-host Steve Doocy joked, "Mr. Moussaoui, it's time for you over in the time-out chair."
To buttress his support of torture, Fox News' resident conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Glenn Beck aired a clip from Fox's 24.
When they weren't bowled over with laughter, many media conservatives were serving up the dubious claim that harsh interrogation techniques used on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed "stopped an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles." The claim conflicts with the chronology of events put forth on multiple occasions by the Bush administration. Indeed, the Bush administration said that the Library Tower attack was thwarted in February 2002 -- more than a year before Mohammed was captured in March 2003. Facts be damned, Fox News and others pressed forward with the story repeatedly. (But missed the bigger story that time travel had been perfected.) Typifying the use of this story, Sean Hannity claimed this week that enhanced interrogation techniques "saved an American city, Los Angeles."
The hysterical nature of coverage surrounding the torture issue by conservatives didn't reach everyone in the media. This week, Fox News' Shepard Smith stood out among his colleagues at the conservative news network when he said of torture, "We are staring into an abyss and it's staring back at us, and we don't do it. We are America."
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Silence is consent.
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Quote:
Facts be damned, Fox News and others pressed forward with the story repeatedly.
I believe this is the story that some posters here have been trying to foist off as genuine, also. This is apparently the attack that Hero is convinced was going to end us as a nation and a people, for which he's heartily glad that we tortured people - er, I mean we subjected them to a little moisture and discomfort.
Because THEY get off on torture, murder, and sadism, they project those same sicknesses on us, accusing us of wanting America to be attacked, of wanting thousands of Americans killed. When they're rounded up and tortured for being right-wing extremists, I won't cheer and I won't laugh. I also won't be terribly surprised.
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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People are mesmerized by the "ticking time bomb" scenario... a scenario which has never occurred. And how do I know that???? Because the previous administration has NEVER claimed that torture "saved lives". Never. And if it had, they would be trumpeting that info from the rooftops.
OTOH, we have a real expert telling us that torture DOESN'T WORK. Not Scarborough, and Hannity, and Limbaugh and the rest of the clueless ideology-addled bullshit artists, but an ex CIA officer Robert Baer of the middle East, one who has overseen many torture sessions and has himself been tortured (by Iran, fingernail-pulling and all.) What he says, unequivocally, is that the only thing that you get out of torture is whatever the victim thinks you want to hear.
and if HIS bona-fides aren't hard-core enough, the Israeli Mossad has also given up on torture. Why? Because it's too unreliable. Too hard, actually, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Apparently, in REAL-LIFE, the "24" scenario just doesn't exist. That's why when people say they can imagine scenarios about how torture MIGHT work (the same as how Saddam MIGHT have active WMD production, even as his nation was being intrusively probed by the CIA and others) it's all pretty much mental masturbation.
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They pit us like dogs against each other and rake it in. And I'll bet they laugh when they hear dupes like you defend the system that fucks you over and rewards them so nicely! But the one thing they'll stamp out in horror as if it were the spark of conflagration is any whiff of socialism. That should tell you something.
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Quote:Really? You’re really threatening me with accusing me of saying or meaning things I didn’t say and couldn't possibly have meant? After spending the entire thread doing just that to everything I did say? Really. Really?
Originally posted by SignyM:
Finn, if you won't speak for yourself people will naturally wonder why. And they will infer all kinds of thoughts and motivations to you that might not belong.
As it turns out Signym I had a swing dance last night and I’m hosting a swing workshop today as well as a dance tonight. On Sunday I’ll be doing the same thing. I don’t know when I’ll have time to get back to this. Next time, if you actually care that much, try disposing the Gestapo tactic earlier, like before I have to call you on it would be nice.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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