Dubb-Ya and waterboarding
 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/....ap/index.html

He makes me sick... I'd love to get his a** on a interrogation waterboard...:nope:

Oh well, this only means that we will see less "OMG OMG OMG AL QAIDA JUST TORTURED OUR SOLDIERS" threads here, because America just lost it's right to condemn torture by allowing it.

Too true...:nope:

I didn't even know we had any. Where are they?

Now, let's not start nit-picking. ;) Just ignore that line.

Oh, Ok. :)

;):up:

That is a tidy way of putting it.

Well one thing is for sure. George W Bush's place in history is established.

This was a bad decision.

"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency." Theodore Roosevelt, 'The Strenuous Life,' 1900

Allow me to add the obligatory <AOL>Me Too!</AOL> to that statement.
Bush can't have things both ways. If it's wrong for other, third-world countries to resort to torture of another country's soldiers, then it's wrong for everyone. Can't use a case of "Oh, we know how much to torture and we know when to stop." crap. If its wrong for one, it's wrong for everyone. Sorry, Bush, you can't be selective in who can and cannot torture people.:shifty:

Pilots normally have to attend SERE school and they do that kind of stuff there.

A sad and shameful event. In Nurenberg they tried Nazis for less

Yeah, but would you get any intelligible or coherent information.:hmm:

http://www.esoterically.net/weblog/w.../lame-duck.gif
Are we there yet?

:lol: I wish we were D! However, somewhere I read a quote from Dubb-Ya that he's going to sprint all the way to the finish line... :damn:

Where he'll hand the Presidential baton to yet another elected idiot...:damn:

I guess it's duck season!

Im gonna go out on a limb and play a bit of devil's advocate, but we've got a lot of people saying it makes us as bad as them, ra ra.

I wont necessarily argue that, but i'll come a little bit from huntington's angle. For those who don't know, hes the author of a paper predicting a clash of civilisations between the western world, the eastern world, and the islamic world.

At the moment were at war with extremists who steadfastly believe that if you're not muslim you must be killed. to their eyes, this war has been ongoing since the 7th century CE, not since sept. 11 like many in the west think. unfortunately, they aren't overly fussy when it comes to killing civilians etc either - they take the view that if you're not muslim you're the enemy. This is contrary to the western view that civilian casualties must be kept to a minimum.

What im getting at is that we're trying to defeat using morals an enemy that simply doesnt share the same values and in doing so making things so much tougher (or are we causing less harm than we could be if we stooped to their level? Another issue..). we're fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Is it even possible to win a fight that is so polarised? ww2 isnt a great example, we wouldnt have won without the soviets and they weren't too far removed from the deprivations of the nazis.

So, in this terribly lopsided fight, is it really that unreasonable to take measures such as non-disfugiring torture, ie waterboarding? Purely hypothetically, what if we knew a nuke was going to go off in NY and we needed the location, and torture was the only way to get it? Where can and do you draw the line?

Like i said at the start, im only playing devils advocate, and itd be nice if people played nicely:)

There is no justification for torture. The West lectures the world about our superior values, we should not discard them at the first sign of trouble.

In a war against militant Islam we cannot hope to win by force, by reacting with violence and torture against these people not only do we motivate them but our mistakes legitimise their message which aids their recruiting. Its a vicious cycle.

There are only two ways for the West to win this conflict.

a) Genocide, obviously not an option.

or

b) Removing the motivations and making the militants irrelevant.

The later option is the only viable course of action.

So that said, I think torture is not only wrong but in a battle of ideas our perceived barbarity would in the long run hurt our cause far more than help it.

An interesting read below regarding a different approach to this issue.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-28737,00.html

I wonder if that school was one of the duties bush "missed" during his "tour" in the Texas/Alabama ANG?

After WWII the United States tried Japanese military and civilians for waterboarding and gave them many years at hard labour. But that was different you see.

That was "bad" torture

We only do "good" torture

Gooses and Ganders, Pots and Kettles

I doubt they go as far as waterboarding.
It is not uncommon for people to suffer broken or dislocated limbs from the practice through struggling against the restraints.


Some short reading