and to save time, let’s allow the State to come into our homes and waterboard at home. We have already lost (temporarily I hope) other civil rights – e.g., 4th Amendment unreasonable searches, habeas corpus.

You can’t just waterboard innocent people. Waterboard their neighbors.

James – GREAT idea… maybe station at bars and doctors offices too

The President has assured us that waterboarding is not torture, and there are legal opinions by the finest minds in his administration (stop laughing) that all sorts of “enhanced interrogation techniques” are okay.
So why not bring back some of the tried-and-true methods of the past?
Thumb screws: Hey, it doesn’t sound so bad, right?– and it has a long and popular history with law enforcement, witch hunters, heresy hunters, etc.
The Rack: Now this particular device got a bad name from overzealous practicioners. But since it can be used in such a way as to not “be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure”, I think our brave forces of law and order need this effective machine installed in every police station basement.
There are lots of other devices, just the threat of which might elicit a confession. For the female evil-doers, breast talons. For the really hard cases, why not give the Iron Maiden a try? Or the Heretic’s Fork? Or the notorious Pear?
We’ve got a Crusade going, maybe it’s time to bring the rest of the Middle Ages back.

Hey SkipChurch,
The fact is, that the Muslims were responsible for the Crusades. Wow, unbelievably, they took Jerusalem by force of war and killed most of the Christians that wouldn’t become Muslims and darn it the Europeans fought back. And lost and went back home leaving THEIR LANDS to the Muslims that stole them by force of war!!!!
That was how many centuries ago?
Er, I mean miniutes ago? Er, I mean CNN, MSNBC, CBS yada yada.
AND . . . AND . . .
How come none of you dear souls have any problem with Muslims torturing, beheading, dismembering and slaughtering innocent people by the thousands and thousands um, ahhhh, just today . . . and in the last few years??????????
Let’s see, dunking a guys head under water to gain information that will PREVENT HIS FRIENDS from torturing, beheading, dismemebring and slaughtering innocent people by the thousands?
Yeah. It’s just terrrrrrible.
If Christians ever start genociding millions and millions and millions of people all over the world to spread Christianity, you will not have to torture me to get me to tell you where the people are that are doing it. I will be stopping them myself.
KKK anyone?

The problem is that waterboarding and other forms of torture don’t work. Much of our supporting evidence for the invasion of Iraq came from torture. That is were all of the Al Quada and Iraq relationship info came from. Torture produced false evidence. Talk to virtually any expert on the history of torture. It doesn’t work! So why are we having this conversation? Torture certainly isn’t moral. And Donny’s argument of their doing it so we should too, doesn’t really resonate with me. So if it isn’t moral, it doesn’t work and it is a violation of international law, why is it that the administration wants to keep it?

” How come none of you dear souls have any problem with Muslims torturing, beheading, dismembering and slaughtering innocent people by the thousands and thousands um, ahhhh, just today . . . and in the last few years?????????? ”
umm, maybe because they’re TERRORISTS, and we’re supposed to be better than them?????? And maybe because torturing doesn’t work like the administration would like us to believe, which is why it’s been ILLEGAL for so long (and yes, waterboarding falls under that category, whether you like it or not). But hey, if you want to sacrafice the moral standing of our country just to squeeze some bad information out of some guy in a ticking-bomb situation that never happens, go ahead, support State Sanctioned Torture.
After all, nothing can be wrong if we’re doing it for the right reasons. Right??

Donny,
You’re going to defend torturing prisoners? You have a Bible verse for that, no doubt.
I didn’t think you could sink much further, but you managed to surprise me.

Donny: Christians have used force to spread the faith. Think Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, 19th century colonization of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

Wizzz, wizzz, wizzzzzzzz, goes Skips spin zone. Libs are cagey and crafty little buggers.
Many of my Bible versus condemn Muslims, Progressives and Liberals, that condone and support murder and torture. Ever seen an abortion? It’s as bad as a Muslim beheading an innocent contract employee in an Islamic country, ot teering a US soldier to pieces after his death. A death enjoyed by the Liberal elite.
Notice carefully class, how I framed the torture thing in morality, deceny and goodness.
Meaning . . .:
I don’t see a need for torture because good people don’t allow bad people to do bad things. If there were no Muslims truly believing that Islam means death to infidels then, there wouldn’t have arisen the whole torture debate in the first place. Of course “we” shouldn’t act like Muslims.
Now, compare that to the American inner city where children and “gangsta’s” wear T-Shirts warning people against “snitching” and “ratting.” People that get shot and stabbed if they do.
Class?
I see no hands raised.
So convoluted a morality. It’s hard to un-wash the brains of the leftist educated.

“After all, nothing can be wrong if we’re doing it for the right reasons. Right??”
Posted by: Saint Andeol | November 2, 2007 12:44 PM
Are you referring to abortion, gay marriage, taxing the family into oblivion, or the Muslim wars being waged to establisj Islamic dominance in so many countries on earth?
I can’t tell which is more important to promote for the Left.

“After all, nothing can be wrong if we’re doing it for the right reasons. Right??”
Posted by: Saint Andeol | November 2, 2007 12:44 PM
Are you referring to abortion, gay marriage, taxing the family into oblivion, or the Muslim wars being waged to establish Islamic dominance in so many countries on earth?
I can’t tell which is more important to promote for the Left.

Donny, I don’t understand your last post. Are you saying that because there is violence in the inner city US and there is abortion that those are worse than torture so we should just ignore the torture and focus on the problems in the US?
Also I would have to say, no liberal elite enjoys or celebrates the death of a US soldier. And to claim that they do is a red herring. Let’s stick to the point.
Is torture justifiable by any measure? Does it work? Is it moral? Is it the right thing to do in this situation? If yes, then we can support it. If not then we should condemn it.
Then later we can talk about abortion and violence in inner city US. I am happy to talk about both. But you are deliberately trying to mess the water in order to defend your position.

Um, how can you equate gay marriage with abortion and terrorism, then defend torture? That seems to be morally inconsistent with someone who’s obviously reading their moral compass from the Bible, seeing as how you think gay marriage is somehow wrong or dangerous.
oh, and not everyone falls into your two neat little categories of Right and Left, so try not to assume something just because I happen to disagree with you.

Gosh, the inquisition used such techniques and worse to make sure those darn heretics confessed. In the first chapter of Rene Girard’s “The Scapegoat”, there is a story about the middle ages. old weird woman in the woods – everybody is certain she has poisoned the well – she’s a Jew in addition to being weird. So she is questioned in a manner certain to get to the truth, she admits to poisoning the well and is properly punished by burning at the stake and the plague is over. Now, the question is – did she poison the well?
We can look backwards and see that she was tortured until she would say anything and that perhaps the plague had nothing to do with the well. But the writer of the story – lives in a world where the collective imagination is certain she poisoned the well.
Let us think about those weird people in the woods of our imaginations. Those terrorists, Islamo-fascists, communists, heretics, conservatives, liberals, Evangelicals and Catholics are not what our imaginations would like for them to be. We want to find the cause of the plague – whatever it is – and rid ourselves of it. Plagues are contagious, uncontrolled – a bit like our need for scandal.
Rage, anger and scandal all go together and we feel righteous in such anger. Truth is – only some poor weird little woman in the woods will die for that sin and we’ll feel better.
Don’t know if this makes sense to anybody but me, but I’ll try to be clearer next time.

“Donny, I don’t understand your last post.”
Or the previous 12,000.

People are highly irrational about the effectiveness of torture. Too much 24, IMHO.
I had a person ask me on the Bnet discussion boards (as a hypothetical), if a terrorist had information on my kidnapped daughter, would I want him waterboarded?
I said no — because I don’t think it’s right, but more practically because I think better information could be obtained from a regular interrogation and that, regardless, if he was a potential information source, we could not take the risk that torture would kill him.
The response I got back was “How dare you let your daughter die.” Go figure …

Larry, I guess only babykillers respect the constitution anymore. I bet Thomas Jefferson used to eat the young.

(Larry ruefully laughs at Doug’s riposte …)

WHO WOULD JESUS TORTURE?
How does our country win the hearts & minds by behaving just like terrorists? How do we keep the moral high ground? If you were tortured would you just say whaterver the hell your captors wanted to hear?
Our we any safer after the “shock and awe” of the initial Iraq invasion? Are terrorists and radicals (like some Saudi Arabians) going to feel even more justified in doing similar things to our troops on the other side of the world?
I think so many of these scenarios are only mental abstractions for those outside of combat, including armchair warriors and the entire Executive Branch of the Government (+ Bush cronies in the Pentagon).
John McCain signed a false confession in Vietnam after being tortured. He is also the only one against torture on the Republican side.
It’s amazing that Republicans like Guliani openly debate the merits of this stuff on TV.
If you’ve ever traveled out of the States you’d see that citizens of other countries see us like Nazi Germany.
Now the drums of war are beating for Iran and the rational is like pre-Iraqi rational to the extreme.

Brian, here’s part of my interview with the fake Dick Cheney, which though the interview is made up, might actually reflect the real Veep’s thinking:
“The handwriting is on the wall, as they say, and it doesn’t require the wisdom of Solomon or a degree from Harvard—-neither of which is possessed by yours truly, though Bush Baby has a degree from Harvard-— to see that the war is well and truly lost. Somebody has to take the blame for it, and it most certainly will not be the President, or me, or anyone associated with us. So here is what I have in mind, Skip. It’s a two-pronged approach. You might say, a bifurcated strategy. It’s a plan that has two parts because a plan with two parts is twice as likely to succeed.
“Part one is this. We assert that victory is imminent. But then of course we lose. Because victory isn’t even defined, not to mention imminent. But that all works out, because we put it out there that because of disloyal people, and the press, and protesters, leftists, Democrats, Cindy Sheehan and her ilk, and so forth, that victory was taken from us. These traitors undercut the war effort, and we lost. In other words, the very people that were the whistle blowers take the fall for the loss of the war. Beautiful, no?
“Now for part two. First, a little background. We got rid of Saddam. He was a Sunni. We canned all the Sunni bigwigs, fired the whole Iraqi army, and put in a Shiite government. Purple finger democracy, remember? We set it up so the Shiite majority got in and the Sunnis got out. This empowered Iran of course, because Iran had been supporting the Shiites when Saddam was in power and they were oppressed, and many of the Iraqi Shiite leaders had been exiled in Iran. So there were naturally close ties there, and when the Shiites took over, this played into Iran’s hands. Okay, we were stupid. A civil war brewed up. Granted. I don’t know what we were thinking, not to have seen that coming, but that’s water under the bridge now. The main thing is—transfer blame. So part two is, blame Iran for destabilizing Iraq. They are sending in arms, they are crazy bad guys, they hate America and freedom, they deny the Holocaust, and all that. So we blame them.”