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Waterboarding IS torture, even John McCain (not to be confused with a pacifist by any means) condemns it as such. Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman were right, we lose our moral standing in the world when we resort to torture. The information we get from torture is rarely reliable as people will say anything to get the torture to stop.
We're often given these Hollywood-esque scenarios where we're asked "if you captured a 'terrorist' and you knew he had information that could save lives, wouldn't you waterboard him?" In reality that's very rarely what happens. First off, we rarely know for sure that someone has useful information, second off what's more likely to occur is that we capture a bunch of people and we think one of them may have information. If we had 100 people and we had intel that 1 of them may have information useful to us, are we to waterboard all 100 of them to find out who has it? The sad part is, many chickenhawks on here and in the GOP would probably answer "yes." This is insane.
The sad irony in all of this is the biggest torture cheerleaders are often the biggest "family values" and moral majority types. They often claim to be "pro-life." This is disgusting. How you can, with a straight face, claim the mantle of "pro-life" while supporting assassination, torture, pre-emptive wars of aggression, and predator drone strikes is beyond me. We go around the world into other people's nations and round up people we THINK MAY be terrorists and torture them. We drop bombs on their buildings and sometimes we kill innocent civilians and this brushed off as "war is hell" and "collateral damage." We trample their holy ground and kill their sons and we wonder why people hate us. We are supposedly a moral and religious nation, yet we feel as though we can kill and torture anyone we want whenever we want.
It's time we start living by the golden rule: treat people how you want to be treated. How would we feel if China claimed that an anti-Chinese "terrorist" was living in Dallas and they decided to bomb downtown Dallas killing untold numbers of American citizens. Really how would we feel if China send ground troops here and started rounding up "suspects" who are American citizens and tortured them. We wouldn't like and I suspect a great many of us would become "terrorists" against China. Yet we seem to arrogantly think we can strut around the globe and kill and torture human beings and then we're baffled that people around the world can't stand us. They don't hate us because we're "free." WAKE UP.
"It's time we start living by the golden rule: treat people how you want to be treated. "
LOL. I hope your not serious. You do realize were dealing with radical religios fanatics who kill their own daughters if they look at somebody who isn't a muslim? I must admit they don't waterboard. They just chop folks heads off. I'm sure they laugh when they hear stuff like this and it's one of the reasons they look at the west as weak. Hell who wouldn't.
I say get out the pliars and batteries and go to work. They don't talk after a while then put em in a landfill. How many of those gitmo boys have been recaptured?? That is what you get playing nice with these lunatic terrorists. They only understand one thing. Waterboarding is a bath to them.
"It's time we start living by the golden rule: treat people how you want to be treated. "
LOL. I hope your not serious. You do realize were dealing with radical religios fanatics who kill their own daughters if they look at somebody who isn't a muslim? I must admit they don't waterboard. They just chop folks heads off. I'm sure they laugh when they hear stuff like this and it's one of the reasons they look at the west as weak. Hell who wouldn't.
I say get out the pliars and batteries and go to work. They don't talk after a while then put em in a landfill. How many of those gitmo boys have been recaptured?? That is what you get playing nice with these lunatic terrorists. They only understand one thing. Waterboarding is a bath to them.
No they laugh at people like you. Osama bin Laden LOVED people like you because it was a boom for his recruiting effort. If we simply left the world the hell alone we'd kill a lot of their recruiting focus. We have to start looking at the reasons that they hate us, I'm sure you believe the fantasy that they hate us because we're "free." That's a lie. The CIA and the 9/11 commission recognize the fact of blowback.
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I say get out the pliars and batteries and go to work. They don't talk after a while then put em in a landfill. How many of those gitmo boys have been recaptured?? That is what you get playing nice with these lunatic terrorists
What you've just suggested is MURDER. You're a sick human being. Yet you call them "lunatic terrorists," well pot meet kettle. But the terrorists would LOVE for people like you to be in charge because it drives recruiting. Terrorist leaders love to be able to say "see, look at how they treat our people! They come to our lands, round up our sons and 'put them in landfills!'" What you're attempting to do is put fire out by drowning it in gasoline. For every terrorist you torture and then kill you create 10 more. We're taking an already unstable region and throwing gas on the fire.
I'm not naive enough to think if we brought our boys home that everyone in the middle east would love us, though I'm sure that's what you'll end up misrepresenting me with, but it would give them less of a reason to hate us. And quite frankly many of their grievances are justified. We do go to their lands, try and tell them what to do, trample their holy grounds, bomb their cities, kill their people, and torture their people.
Don't lie and call me an isolationist either. I want to engage the world in trade and friendship. An isolationist wants nothing to do with the world and calls for things like tariffs (which ironically people like Mitt Romney and other statists who accuse Ron Paul of isolationism call for with nations like China) or no fly zones and the like. I want true free trade with the world and I good diplomatic relations. We do more to isolate ourselves from the world by trying to act as supreme overlord and policeman. You're foreign policy is much more isolationist than mine. You're foreign policy depraved and the very reason why we're constantly at war and going broke.
But it's no matter, you're foreign policy is coming to an end very quickly. As we sink deeper and deeper into debt the less and less we will be able to afford our empire. We're either going to smarten up and cut back on our empire to save our republic, or we'll just simply go bankrupt and be forced to end our empire.
We live in a society that doesn't respect life whatsoever. We live in a culture that celebrates death and destruction. A society so twisted, so desensitized to torture and death leads to things like:
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Police charge two caregivers at a Jonesboro facility with waterboarding an 89-year-old woman. Clayton County police said Jermeller Steed and Cicely Reed held down Anna Foley after an argument that started over ice cream.
They’re said to have allegedly held down Foley in a locked shower room, flooding her face with the hand-hold shower nozzle in 2008.
This was Americas final loss of the moral high ground. When it came to light that this oil merchant with the artifical life extending heart stated that torture was okay - that was the begining of the end...Dick Cheney was dellusional - after 9 11 - Cheney should have forgotten about the so-called terrorist stuff and invade the source of the evil...Saudi Arabia - they were the ones who financed the attack...BUT - the Saudis oil merchant were buisness partners of Bush and Cheney - to invade and punish the real "evil doers" - would be like invading and punishing yourself - hence dellusionism and self justification in regards to going after terrorists that were common goat herders...a scape goating in the classic sense - Cheney would have to admit that his profits were in part used to kill his own people...but look at George Bushes...grand dad...Prescot...he made money selling bullets to the Germans who killed Americans with those bullets...and with that profit installed not one but two presedential sons...go figure - what an ugly system.
Only in the US do we feel that our lives are speical, in third world countries you do what you have to do to survive. I have traveled a lot of the South Americain, and in Africa third world countries and life is cheap. Don't believe it in Argentina a friend of mine married to a local was shot by 13 year old boys for a cheap watch. Torture is a way to find your valuables and is used in Argentina by bandits, and they start with your children first just to make sure you give them everything before they kill you.
I didn't mean for this to get into a debate on is it or is not torture. I was just asking the question for those who don't have a problem with it, if they will still feel the same if another country did it to one of our citizens and/or soldiers. Would you be ok with it since it's just enhanced interrogation or would you want the US to retaliate and/or issue sanctions?
During the last debate, the question of waterboarding came up. Cain said he believed it is simply enhanced interrogation. I forget who else agreed with that. I'm sure many of you feel the same. My question to you and a question I really want someone to ask Cain is if Iran waterboarded those hikers a few months back, would he have had a problem with it? Perhaps Iran will invoke an instantaneous negative reaction so what if it was a CIA spy in China that was waterboarded? I would be interested to hear whether people are hypocrites or will stick that it's perfectly fine.
Waterboarding is rather effective when it comes to absolutely scaring the **** out of someone, and good intelligence can be gained from doing it... HOWEVER, it has been shown that people will make anything up to make pain or fear go away, so anything said would have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Treating prisoners well, though, can lead to WAY better intelligence because they don't feel the need to say whatever they can to make it stop.
It remains to be seen how those prisoners in Iran were actually treated, seeing as they haven't really said much about it since they were released (and of course Iran paraded them around like they were treated very well- could be true, could be false.) Interestingly enough, in the intelligence game people generally don't kill off spies per se, they kill off the people working for the spies- the officers. Usually the officers get pinged (declared persona non grata, they are no longer welcome in the country that pinged them) once their cover is blown and they leave.
I won't say that I am for or against waterboarding. I'm not sure how much it actually happens in the US. People seem to think that all prisoners are waterboarded here
Did you know that there were Japanese Soldiers executed for the "War crime" of waterboarding?
EXECUTED by the American military courts.
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