Here we go once again. The NYT’s publishes another in a long line of liberal screeds against the Bush administration and the "torture" we perpetrated on terrorists. Poor widdle terrorists. Torture like head slapping, simulated drowning, turning the thermostat down, sleep deprivation and the like. Some real tough stuff.
Of course its nothing like our enemy does:
Here the NYT’s pulls out a "expert" for a quote:
The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?
To which I only have a few words. Is he freaking kidding me?
They do much more then slapping someone’s head genius. They put blowtorches to them. Is this guy for real?
Then we have the man, the myth, the legend of liberal kookiness, Andrew Sullivan, who pulls out the Bush is a war criminal tag again:
We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?
But the truth of the matter here is that slapping someone’s head, waterboarding, sleep deprivation is NOT torture. What is being done by our enemy is torture. Cutting someone’s eye out, putting a blowtorch to their skin is torture, ripping out fingernails is torture.
Making someone stay awake is not.
And making someone stay awake has yielded results. Abu Zubaydah, a very high ranking al-Qaeda recruiter and operational planner. Omar al-Faruq, another high ranking al-Qaeda member who helped spread their doctrine into the far east, he was captured as a result of the interrogation of Abu Zabaydah. Ramzi Binalshibh, a planner of 9/11. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, planner of the Cole bombing.
All these resulted from the very same techniques these yahoo’s are screaming about.
Of course how can you argue with people who don’t believe we have real enemies to begin with:
Taverner Thu Oct-04-07 12:36 PM
Original message
Gentle Reminder: There is NO Terrorist Threat Updated at 12:36 PMHonestly – there is none. At least, no more than the ravings of a madman in the hills of Pakistan and some like minded idiots scattered all over. Most Muslims in the world don’t really give a rats ass about America, Bush or Bin Laden. Unless they live in Iraq, where we’ve given them lots of reasons to hate us. Most Muslims are concerned with feeding their family, farming their fields, running their businesses, etc. Most Muslims don’t even give a rats ass about Israel. Outside of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the rallying cry put forth by the madmen never took off. "Wiping Israel off the Map" is still the parlor talk of madmen who face their own constituencies, and are using it to distract the people from issues such as food and work. And so far, it isn’t working.
The reason we are all a flutter with fear is because going by a terrorist attack seems so senseless, and such a horrible way to go. On 9/11, nothing changed except our own minds. And that which changed was a shift into delusion.
The Shepherds of Terror are in The White House
They learned well from herr Goebbles, et al. What better way to control the populace than to play on their fears?
It has been established that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rove have all worked VERY hard to make sure we do have a terrorist threat. They want one – they relish in the deaths of Americans. At night, when they go to sleep, they jolly themselves to sleep with visions of death and destruction.
If there is a threat anywhere, it lies in the White House.
And believe me, this is how a majority of liberals think. Terrorism? Just a talking point meant to scare us from the right.
So if you think like that then its just a hop, skip and a jump to the next logical conclusion, Bush is giving the ok to sleep deprivation because he is nothing but a war criminal. A madman wanting to take over the world…..BAHAHAHAHAHAH! (insert your own evil laugh here). He couldn’t be doing it to ensure that our country is safe and that evil men like those above are either killed or captured. Nope, nothing but a war criminal.
Sigh….
But I gotta tell ya, when it comes down to it. I hope and pray that someone is turning the thermostat down on these evil creatures to induce them to talk. Them talking saves lives. It helps us capture the worst of the worst and prevent another 9/11.
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Since when has the enemies of the United States not tortured every American captured? Democrats have lied to everyone so long they now lie to themselves and believe their own lies. They are a sick pitiful lot.
Way to define deviancy down, Scrapiron. Hey, if al-Qaeda does it, it must be fine!
Yeah, AQ uses sleep deprivation…sure thing.
You guys are a pitiful lot.
PBS has a new Ken Burns documentary series on this week, The War. It’s about WWII. A waaaaaaaaay left friend of mine and I were talking about it, and he was just shocked-shocked I say-at the way these old men were talking about how they executed Japanese. My friend tells me there’s a scene I missed where an officer addresses his men, asks everyone who lost a friend that day to raise their hand, then had a prisoner “given” to each man. No prisoners survived. Here’s these 90yr old guys telling about it, like it’s…you know…something that happens in war, and my friend is just shocked. I asked him to imagine if that kinda thing happened today, and guess what my friend did?
He started reciting the stories of US atrocities like Haditha (where he didn’t know that even the last Marine on trial is likely to have his murder charges dropped), the Green Berets in Afghanistan who were investigated for killing an AQ leader during a snatch and grab (investigated THREE times, and each time found no wrong-doing), Abu Ghraib of course (had no knowledge of the reading programs etc going on there now), and best of all…he started referring to the stories told by GIs who’d “been there” and done the atrocities; ie The Phony Soldiers who were never there at all…the anti-war activists who claimed to be soldiers and never were, but made the claim of service to get more attention for their deliberate propaganda. I’m not saying bad things haven’t happened, but it’s a damn far cry from Bataan or Okinawa or Guadalcanal or Tarawa or Iwo or a million other islands.
“War is hell” isn’t a metaphor
It’s reality, and what people choose to ignore is that Plato was right, “Only the dead have seen the end of war”
Jpe posts all over the place — the guy has too much time on his hands. Here’s a tip: GET A JOB LOWLIFE!
“The Great Raid” is being shown on American Movie Classics. If anyone hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
The Japanese were signatories to the Geneva Convention and yet that didn’t stop them, or the Nazis from torturing prisoners and civilians, or mass executions.
This idea that if we don’t waterboard the monsters who would use their infant children to smuggle bomb making material on airliners the terrorists will be nicer to us is absurd.
There are no rules of war or society these terrorist monsters recognize.
I saw “The Kingdom” recently too. The message is: it’s either us or them and we had better win or we are dead.
The argument that Al Qaeda does worse things than we do is not a good defense. OK, so they’re medievally barbaric. But sleep deprivation, heat and cold, and stress positions still leaves us in the same realm as the NKVD (see Solzhenitsyn), while waterboarding was used as torture by the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese of WWII. Of course you can still offer a utilitarian defense of these methods under certain circumstances – but my feeling there is probably best expressed by Mark 8:36: ‘What does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul’?
There’s also an argument that tough interrogation methods aren’t that useful anyway. I assume you know who Sherwood Moran is? How about Hanns Scharff? They were both enormously successful interrogators, but they didn’t go for the methods you mention and apparently considered them counterproductive.
And that argument is flawed, as the examples I gave above demonstrate.
I agree with Curt. It’s like criticizing the police for the use of tasers and defense sprays, because there’s no moral difference between those tools and firearms and PR-24s.
A conservative Democrat client of mine who served in Europe during WWII, one day as we were talking about today’s conflict and my interest in serving, told me about how one young kid in their unit who was on his last breath, after a firefight, was crying about how he was going to die, and his greatest sorrow was that he didn’t even get to kill one Nazi. The commanding officer ordered one of the German prisoners to be brought before the dying soldier, put a gun in the kid’s hand, and allowed him to execute the prisoner.
My client says he’s still haunted by that to this day. But no one said anything or questioned it, at the time. That’s just the way it was. They were in war.
“The argument that Al Qaeda does worse things than we do is not a good defense. OK, so they’re medievally barbaric. But sleep deprivation, heat and cold, and stress positions still leaves us in the same realm as the NKVD (see Solzhenitsyn), while waterboarding was used as torture by the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese of WWII.”
Maybe you’re right. Maybe when a person without a uniform is caught with a machine gun or a bomb and actively trying to kill American soldiers, maybe those non-uniformed people should be sat down, talked to, asked questions without any physical contact or temperature, light, etc modification, and then taken outside and shot.
No uniform in war = no rights in war
Don’t wanna be the nation that executes terrorists? Ok, I’m sure Afghanistan would be more than happy to take custody of Al Queda. To those who want Gitmo closed, I suggest you advocate this policy so that it can be closed. Since no countries want these guys, I’m sure Afghanistan can be convinced to take back the Al Queda/Taliban that were caught in Afghanistan.
No?
Why not?
Because if they go to Afghanistan, or whatever their home nation then they’re likely to be REALLY tortured and then killed? Ok, then that leaves two options: kill em ourselves or keep Gitmo open.
Fact of the matter is that no one “likes” interrogating people by putting them under increased levels of duress, but it can either be done that way, or they can be shot. No other country is going to take them and then NOT shoot them or NOT torture them far far worse than what levels of duress have been authorized by the US. Anyone think that a Djibouti prison has better temperature control than a CIA interrogation room? Yeah, nothin but three squares, a/c, clean water, warm clothes, etc over in Djibouti.
Btw, I’m one of those who think Gitmo should be shut down. Let the CIA interrogate people where they’re caught, then hand them over to the locals. Caught in Afghanistan-let the Afghans deal with them. Caught in Iraq-let the Iraqis who have lost tens or even hundreds of thousands to Al Queda bombs deal with them. Caught in Saudi…well, gosh, for some reason Saudi prisons aren’t full of Al Queda despite the fact that Saudi has captured more AQ than almost any other country. Hmmm, what happens to em? Oh, and who’s captured the most AQ? Pakistan. Lots of AQ in their prisons, right? Nope. The Pakistani ISI doesn’t have an ACLU whining about the rights of non-uniformed combatants.
Capture em, talk to em, and then either shoot em on the spot or hand them over to the locals who will likely whip out AQ’s own terrorist manual, teach the techniques to the AQ guy, then-if still alive-execute him.
Of course, the less brutal, more civilized way of dealing with captured terrorists would be to incarcerate them (effectively protecting them from the govt where they were captured and/or their home nation)…as is done in Gitmo, but terrorist rights advocates don’t like that, so they complain. Why not? It keeps that Soros and leftist PAC money coming in (to say nothing of Muslim charity support).
“But sleep deprivation, heat and cold, and stress positions still leaves us in the same realm as the NKVD”
:))))) Sleep deprivation :)))))) Stress positions
I mean i never read Solzhenitsyn, but it’s like to say “so you punched a guy in a stomach and that makes you Charlie Manson because he had also done that”
I happen to be a russian and believe me NKVD is infamous not because of sleep deprivations. But because they were an executive arm of communist dictatorship. They were whacking people like insects. I personally saw a document concerning blood levels in their basements (don’t remember the exact content). It was a slaughterhouse. They were as barbaric as Al Quaeda.
Read here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD#Repressions_and_executions
stress positions…what a joke…
So sleep deprivation is torture??? They better Marine boot camp, two days awake after getting off the buses. Wow class action lawsuit, I’s gonna be rich!!!!!
Well dang!
In the eyes of clueless libtards of course we are brutish swine…
Perusing the New York Times and a few other sources in the MSM sphere (can’t take to much of it personally before I feel the urge to hurl) I didn’t see much regarding the following: The Sunni Insurgency Has Become a “Disaster”: An Estranged Former Ally Lashes Out, Accusing Al-Qaida of Torture and Murder in Diyala
The first paragraph: In a rather stunning development, the Iraqi Islamic militant faction known as Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya (a.k.a. “the Iraqi Jihad Union”) has issued a new statement dated October 5 suddenly accusing Al-Qaida’s “Islamic State of Iraq” of deliberately killing its fighters in Diyala province and mutilating their bodies: “To make things worse, they dug up their bodies from the graves, further mutilated them, beheaded them, and showed them off from their vehicles while driving through the towns. [The ISI] even killed our men’s wives and children.”
(hat tip to CouterTerrorism Blog)