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This is not the first time we have fought people that did not play by the rules, or did you for get Korea and especially Vietnam? Yes, some men do step over the dark line and become like the enemy, but most do not. If we are to remain a nation that is supposed to stand for justic then torture is not an option. Least we forget, once the government has the approval to toture prisoners it will not be long before they apply that tactic to us. As the saying goes; the end does not justify the means. FYI, there are ways to fight without stooping to the level of our enemy, because once we do, not matter the reasons we will have become Them.
Casper
Look...I'm probably as sickened by this entire subject as you are...maybe more. (I'm a Viet-Nam era Navy vet). And of COURSE I realize there's a huge range of 'coercion' from keeping people awake for 3 days, forcing them to listen to Country Music, and 'yelling' at them.....and in extracting fingernails, using the 'Bernz-O-Matic' plumber torch, and hooking them up to car batteries. Waterboarding? That comes somewhere in between. But in the final analysis, ALL of it is 'coercive', NONE of it is 'nice', and no one TRULY against violence would condone ANY of it. But, as I said, we can't choose how our enemies react, and we can't insist on rigid, 'zero-tolerance' adherence to the rules of 'Love thy Neighbor' when the other guy doesn't.
And lest YOU forget, (and I take no pleasure in saying this)...we didn't EXACTLY fight TOTALLY fair in Viet Nam...OR Korea...OR World War II, either..we did 'nasty' things..(or we got our 'nasty' friends to do it FOR us), and most of the time we just hushed it up, and refused to discuss it. We didn't LIKE doing this....we hated to admit it...but often, we broke our OWN rules. We did so, because, at that point in time, "we" decided that rigid adherence to the 'rules' would mean we'd lose the battle; therefore we 'bent' them just a bit.
I'll again remind you of the 'hypothetical' scenario often used..what if YOU had a bad guy in custody, at your mercy. What if you KNEW that HE KNEW where the next 9-11 was to happen..(or what if he had your spouse..or your child...hidden away somewhere, waiting to be killed). You'd tried 'asking nice'...you'd tried giving him the 'guilt trip'...you'd tried appealing to his 'sense of fair play'....you'd even tried 'milk and cookies'..but nothing worked...the guy wouldn't crack. You then remembered that a baseball bat was kept nearby. What would you do, at that point? Hopefully, you'll never have to be in that position....but some people have been, and I can't judge them.
I'm with you...I dread the day when such brutality ever becomes 'the norm', and hopefully it never will. Nevertheless, I still maintain that if you're going to engage in a 'tussle' in which the enemy throws 'dog poop', then it's pretty much inevitable that you're not going to come out smelling like a rose. Either you're going to respond in kind...(at least a LITTLE bit), or you're going to lose.
He probably wants some reconstructive surgery sooner rather than later. If I were in his shoes I would tell all too.
TC doesn't yet know that the entire family of the Underwear Guy has been flown to the US. He doesn't know that al Qaeda no longer has that family to use as a tool to control his mouth. What he doesn't know is that we spent a pile of money to get that family out of the Middle East to get him to open up. He doesn't realize that the kid is not the kind of man KSM is. It is too bad that all TC wants to do is play politics and forget everything else.
Look...I'm probably as sickened by this entire subject as you are...maybe more. (I'm a Viet-Nam era Navy vet). And of COURSE I realize there's a huge range of 'coercion' from keeping people awake for 3 days, forcing them to listen to Country Music, and 'yelling' at them.....and in extracting fingernails, using the 'Bernz-O-Matic' plumber torch, and hooking them up to car batteries. Waterboarding? That comes somewhere in between. But in the final analysis, ALL of it is 'coercive', NONE of it is 'nice', and no one TRULY against violence would condone ANY of it. But, as I said, we can't choose how our enemies react, and we can't insist on rigid, 'zero-tolerance' adherence to the rules of 'Love thy Neighbor' when the other guy doesn't.
And lest YOU forget, (and I take no pleasure in saying this)...we didn't EXACTLY fight TOTALLY fair in Viet Nam...OR Korea...OR World War II, either..we did 'nasty' things..(or we got our 'nasty' friends to do it FOR us), and most of the time we just hushed it up, and refused to discuss it. We didn't LIKE doing this....we hated to admit it...but often, we broke our OWN rules. We did so, because, at that point in time, "we" decided that rigid adherence to the 'rules' would mean we'd lose the battle; therefore we 'bent' them just a bit.
I'll again remind you of the 'hypothetical' scenario often used..what if YOU had a bad guy in custody, at your mercy. What if you KNEW that HE KNEW where the next 9-11 was to happen..(or what if he had your spouse..or your child...hidden away somewhere, waiting to be killed). You'd tried 'asking nice'...you'd tried giving him the 'guilt trip'...you'd tried appealing to his 'sense of fair play'....you'd even tried 'milk and cookies'..but nothing worked...the guy wouldn't crack. You then remembered that a baseball bat was kept nearby. What would you do, at that point? Hopefully, you'll never have to be in that position....but some people have been, and I can't judge them.
I'm with you...I dread the day when such brutality ever becomes 'the norm', and hopefully it never will. Nevertheless, I still maintain that if you're going to engage in a 'tussle' in which the enemy throws 'dog poop', then it's pretty much inevitable that you're not going to come out smelling like a rose. Either you're going to respond in kind...(at least a LITTLE bit), or you're going to lose.
I see that you are willing to agree with Casper that we have lost to the terrorists since they have no respect for us and we just can't bring ourselves to want to win bad enough to get it done.
The real story is that we flew his immediate family out of Nigeria and then they told him, in person, to go ahead. Had they been left there they were the tool that al Qaeda could use to keep him from talking.
How can this be? Well now he told his interrogators why he was thankful to them. Listen to the reason.
While you are at it let me suggest that a new term, radical pacifism, shows up. Pay attention to what that means and how it can be used to defeat us in the war on terror.
Read on, below the fold. After the shiny new expression "radical pacifism" (lol!).
Are you referring to the words of Daily Kos or those of J. J.? I just can't find what you might be talking about other than those comments by those two people.
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