Well, California did go to Hillary after all.
After 9/11, Americans wanted one thing from Washington: to prevent future terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush, the CIA and other hard-working officials delivered. For their trouble, a handful of those individuals now have reason to fear that they may be ruined.
My guess is that President Obama realizes it was a big mistake for his administration to release four memos written by Bush administration lawyers sanctioning enhanced interrogation techniques. Already, rage on the left has prompted Obama to go squishy on his once-insistent opposition to prosecuting any Bush administration officials. Now he says he might let his attorney general prosecute Bush lawyers…Seven years later, Obama banned those techniques, as he promised. But in releasing the memos last week, Obama unwittingly reinforced Osama bin Laden’s view of America as a country of pantywaists. Now America’s enemies know they have nothing to fear but bad lawyering if U.S. forces catch them.
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Once “enhanced techniques” were used on KSM, interrogations “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ … to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner’ into a building in Los Angeles.”
Do I like waterboarding? No, but it is not life threatening; in extreme cases, I can live with it. And I’ll take waterboarding over a 9/11 in Los Angeles any day.
I was starting to believe that perhaps waterboarding was torture. After all John McCain said it was, because the Japanese were charged with torture in WW II partly because they waterboarded POWs. But then I had to reconcile this with the fact that the military routinely waterboards combat soldiers during their training, and subjects them to the same enhanced techniques we’ve used on our detainees. We do this to teach them how to resist coercive tactics if they are captured by a civilized foe (we don’t have to worry about this with jihadists, because they just do the worst: sawing off their heads). So then can it be said that we torture our own soldiers? Does contemplating this idea even make sense?
Stratfor.com recently released a report, posted on Bill O’Reilly’s site, which openly says, “Yes we’ve tortured detainees,” but maintains that we did it only because it was necessary to gather certain critical information in specific circumstances. It says the problem was that “torture” became routine, and that in addition to the cases where we needed to use it, we also used it when it didn’t need to be used.
Unfortunately the report wasn’t specific about how we “tortured” detainees. I think it said that nearly a couple hundred detainees died while in custody. I think those cases deserve to be investigated, and it probably calls for some prosecutions, because the idea was to get information, not kill in those circumstances (that is if they didn’t commit suicide).
I feel like we’re muddying the waters here. It feels like we need to define what torture is, and what it isn’t, first of all. And unfortunately the definition that the public knows has gotten very out of whack. I think only then can we really pick out who meted out abuse unnecessarily, and in those cases I think prosecutions should follow. I think all that will be accomplished in the current environment unfortunately is a witch hunt.
Waterboarding creates a terrible fear. Repeating it, once, then again, and again, does not lessen the fear; or inure one from the fear. The fear escalates – but only.
But, weighing one person’s fear against thousands dead, a society immobilized by terror and the distant laughter of those who hate us; I’ll man the spicket.
What kind of image do you want to have? One that says image is so more important than the lives of your own so that you’ll risk thier lives for it?
My reckoning won’t abide that.
There was no intent to cause pain or physical injury – so a charge of torturing as a state of mind is very weak and questionable at best.
And now obama and holder seem to want to do something to gift follower sheeple with something to weaken out country even further.
Can either mr obama or mr holder say ex post facto or bill of attainder? Or, do they think they can ignore our constitution?
And what about san fran pom pom nan and her denial that she knew anything about interrogation techniques. True statement, truth as she sees it, trying for plausable denial of fact, or selective amnesia – hmmmm?
Folly. I am guessing (hoping) that there will be some advanced expression of humanity at some point in the distant future (surely our culture is in massive decline)– people who will look at our time and reflect that it was the time of utter and absolute folly. The flat earth society comes to mind. Magical thinking is absolutely epidemic! This invented reality where “just be nice and the rest will happen”; the reinvention of history by the leftists in academia to reflect this fantastical reality, the total absence of common sense – its like watching a new version of Night of the Living Dead with Obambi the Vampire King presiding over it. This whole issue in re: waterboarding is complete and utter b.s., and just another b.o. strategy for distraction. All of this would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic and dangerous.
I’m almost positive that the poor, desperate people who jumped from the Twin Towers on 9/11 would have preferred waterboarding, had they the choice.
Obama had better get off the, “I’m not George Bush” tour and reconsider this boneheaded decision.
In BO’s head he believes that terrorists hate us because we waterboarded them. He’s not alone, as in, the left believes that we went into Iraq before 9/11 and that’s why they attacked us. They are deranged. And we are all in a lot of trouble as a result.
What is the definition of Torture?? Where is the line? Almost all U.S. Special Forces and military pilots are, as I understand it, waterboarded as part of their training. In the past it has been used as part of fraternity hazing rituals and for all I know may still be today.
When I was in school paddling was allowed for students as were certain forms of duress such as isolation, kneeling in a corner sometimes for extended periods (on rice kernals in some parochial schools.) My generation seems to function pretty well in spite of it.
I have seen articles in the Mainstream Media calling the Bush administrations interrogation techniques gruesome. I’m sorry, Impaling is gruesome, crucifixion is gruesome, hanging drawing and quartering is gruesome. Sleep deprivation, a slap on the face or even waterboarding is NOT gruesome.
The congress today may leave us as vulnerable as the Church Commission did in the 1970′s. Church Commission restrictions on intelligence gathering greatly facilitated the 911 attacks. The reason “nobody connected the dots” was that the law made it virtually impossible to do so after the Church Commission was done.
The damage done to the US Intelligence community by the Church Committee, and the subsequent appointment of Stansfield Turner, did untold damage to intelligence officers; not just in their work; some suffered persoanlly.
Watch for the re-play of not only the Church Committee Hearings, but several other tactics as well.
Remember, most Americans on the ground in Vietnam saw the desparate attacks at the time of Tet a defeat for the Viet Cong. But with assistance of the media, the Cong got PR victories out of it. (American gullibility isn’t some new phenomena of 2008.)
One major point to consider: Power is not played on fields and ball courts with referees. It is a blood sport and indifferent to spectators. Take heed and take part.
Hate to chase a comment with a comment, but here goes:
Pakistan, whose government has signed deals with the Taliban (Taliban forces only 60 miles from capitol) has a bomb.
Iran will soon have a bomb.
North Korea has a bomb and delivery means.
And we’re opening the books on the intelligence community; Clipping our defense budget. We have the greatest appeaser since Neville Chamberlain, the loudest denigrator of the United States since Clemenceau. Time to look at the cyclical pattern of history.
Now, if you need some escape from the times to the tiimely;
Rich Lowry’s “Banquo’s Ghost” (a waterboard climax); and William Forstchen’s “One Second After” (dire scenario but thought provoking). Forstchen has co-authored with Newt Gingrich over the years.) Also; Look up “Electromagnetic Pulse” and question if our SDI is working (check your battery supplies).