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Obama's Epic Failures
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mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 11:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

........and yet members of your profession opined in 2002 that the techniques used did not fit the definition of torture, and in 2012 that there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute the individuals who used those techniques.

You are correct these are not common situations..........those techniques have, and should only been used in exceptional circumstances. 9/11 was exceptional. Nowhere did I suggest that "torture" should be used as punishment or as an "eye for an eye"........you are putting words in my mouth. However, I fully support the use of harsh interrogation to break down enemies who have information that can save lives. Does anyone doubt that the barbarians who murdered those children would hesitate to detonate a nuclear device in a US city? Incidentally, to compare the actions of our intelligence services with those of some Japanese in WWII is, at best, disingenuous. Those individuals committed an array of atrocities which truly were torture. Waterboarding was one of many actions for which they were convicted and was much harsher.

It will be unproductive to continue the discussion. I do not believe it is torture to waterboard a prisoner, in a controlled environment, or to deprive him of sleep, or to keep him in a confined space...........you do. I do not believe that Congress was blissfully unaware of the interrogations.......you appear to. Fine, we'll agree to disagree. Let's hope that the desire to behave like gentlemen against an utterly ruthless and unprincipled enemy does not come back to bite us hard.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

LHDR wrote:
What about this person?
Mark Fallon ...


1. Using the word "torture" so often without defining it reveals one of two things: either he's talking exclusively about honest-to-God, undebatable, injurious torture, or he's biased.

2. The DOJ, from 2001 right up through Dec of 2014, says the EITs we used are legal, do not meet the definitions of torture, and are not prosecutable.

3. Fallon's boss, Rodriguez; and the psychologist who spent his career designing ways to teach our own armed forces to resists REAL torture before being drafted to interrogate KSM; and the doctors and lawyers who witnessed the interrogations; and the vast majority of the actual interrogators ... all convincingly deny that Fallon's comments apply to modern EIT and/or GITMO, except #8 below.

4. So do all the relevant directors and deputies of all the relevant intel agencies.

5. If that psychologist is being honest, and he sounds very persuasive, physical pain is not part of modern EIT. He agrees that physical pain produces little of value. Productive EIT is psychological, he talks at length about the general methods they used, and when it works the subject WANTS TO and does sing like a bird.

6. The intel trail from EIT to the SEAL raid on the bin Laden compound has been laid out step by step, individual by individual, name/rank/serial # by name/rank/serial #, in many news broadcasts on the TV screen. It's either a total, complex, stupid, easily exposed hoax or it's real. Ditto many other EIT intel results that we can talk about.

7. Those "humane, legal methods that uphold American ideals" have repeatedly been judged legal, but "humane" and "ideals" range all over the realm from ONLY Mom's homemade chocolate chip mint cookies and organic milk to being skinned alive because the next wave of 747s has already been hijacked and we can't bake the cookies fast enough.

8. Fallon seems to be correct that waterboarding didn't work on KSM. Why? He had been trained in OUR waterboarding techniques years before. He was able to calmly let the water trickle (it’s just ounces ... uncomfortable and purely psychological) into his nose, pass through to his mouth, and down his chin. He would use his fingers to openly and calmly count down the rigidly enforced seconds until each session ended (20 seconds, IIRC).

9. Re "the Senate Intelligence Committee—which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program—has concluded ...". Fallon is dead wrong there. There IS no “Committee” report … just the CIA-hating Democrats' totally one-sided vendetta screed denied by every Republican member and the vast majority of insiders and journalists who have been to GITMO. Feinstein and Obama have clearly each and both done far more harm than good to the free world by releasing this cold potato again.

10. GITMO prisoners are and were pampered beyond comprehension, despite having voluntarily (by their overt actions) abandoned all claims to Geneva Convention considerations and having ZERO rights to our own Constitutional protections.

That’s just for starters; I haven’t time to type several more off-the-cuff pages like this, and sure as heck haven’t time or motivation to research it in depth. Again, just as with Brown, Garner, Benghazi, and every other media crapstorm we face, we must seek out and consider the preponderance of the evidence if our opinion on it is to have any value. I've have infinitely more important (to me) stuff on my plate lately to devote more than a few dozen hours to this issue, but my opinion is that we did pretty damned well at walking the tightrope between too much and not enough, considering what’s at stake even now, let alone in the threatening fog of September, 2001.

As for your false implication that I stated anything remotely resembling “Not using torture after 9/11 is not even debatable” … I don’t even understand the comment, and certainly never thought or wrote it, so I’m off to fight bigger alligators.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mrgybe wrote:
We need to fight them, mano a mano, like free men.

As an impressionable kid growing up on John Wayne cowboy movies, I actually believed that BS, whether it concerned a fistfight over a wave or national defense. As a rational adult I say, "BS; if I ever get forced into a physical fight, both hairs on my head become more important than his entire body. He started it, and I'm going to do everything necessary to make sure the only injuries sustained are his, to the point he is physically incapable of jumping up and resuming his attack." That's legal, and it's sure as hell moral.

"Mano a mano", my ass. How about:
Step 1: Touch me and you're going to jail.
Step 2: Bill, call 911 while I take care of business.
Step 2.1: Grab the biggest stick I can lift and render the attacker incapable of doing it again.

On the global stage, the tactics must differ, but the strategy should be similar: if it's going to be them or us, the choice must be them. Obama doesn't understand that he vowed with his right hand in the air to uphold that strategy.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mrgybe wrote:
to compare the actions of our intelligence services with those of some Japanese in WWII is, at best, disingenuous. Those individuals committed an array of atrocities which truly were torture. Waterboarding was one of many actions for which they were convicted and was much harsher..


Japanese waterboarding was designed and conducted to drown its subjects just slowly enough for them to tap out and sing before dying. EIT waterboarding is uncomfortable. I hope to hell no one who can't see the difference is never in a position of influence over my safety and freedom.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 1:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Nowhere did I suggest that "torture" should be used as punishment or as an "eye for an eye"........you are putting words in my mouth."



You don't like misrepresentations of what you've said, but you're quite eager to assign ridiculous opinions to the left like you did in the last page of this thread. What's with that?
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 2:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mr. Fick-shun wrote:

Japanese waterboarding was designed and conducted to drown its subjects just slowly enough for them to tap out and sing before dying. EIT waterboarding is uncomfortable. I hope to hell no one who can't see the difference is never in a position of influence over my safety and freedom.

Horse manure.

Can you substantiate your claim, or is this more fiction from Fick-shun?

.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Right wingers spare no effort to put words in the mouths of any that disagree with them, liberal or not, and use specious reasoning constantly. It is either an absolute lack of honesty, or a failure of our (and Great Britain's) education system.

There are many things wrong in this world, including the Taliban. Those who fail to study history don't remember that the Taliban was the result of a proxy war waged between the United States and the Soviet Union in the territory commonly called Afghanistan. We took advantage of, and increased, tribal divisions--and trained some of the people who became Al Queda. Someone who was paying attention might notice that US intervention in tribal battles has not worked out as well as predicted over the last fifty years--while hawks were urging more of the same, and the CIA was doing dirty tricks.

The idea that water boarding would have prevented yesterday's shootings is the working of a deranged mind. There is no connection between the two. Pakistan is a difficult problem for the United States; they have the bomb, at least some of their security forces are sympathetic with the Taliban, and they have waged a rather brutal war in their country to put down what they call an insurrection. None of that, nor the millions we spend on drones and intelligence, prevented yesterday's tragedy. But somehow we are to magically believe that continued waterboarding would have. Utter nonsense from someone who lacks in rigor in this thinking.

But the more important point of the conversation, such as it was, was to point out your utter hypocrisy on matters of ethics and religion. Clearly you will ignore the guidance of your designated religious leader when it comes to matters where your desire for revenge is sufficient. We won't be looking for the beacon of moral guidance shining from Virginia--land of military contracts and retired military.

Solutions may well lie in doing those things, such as educating women and providing better health care, that decrease rather than increase tribal conflicts.
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LHDR



Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 528

PostPosted: Thu Dec 18, 2014 4:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
6. The intel trail from EIT to the SEAL raid on the bin Laden compound has been laid out step by step, individual by individual, name/rank/serial # by name/rank/serial #, in many news broadcasts on the TV screen. It's either a total, complex, stupid, easily exposed hoax or it's real. Ditto many other EIT intel results that we can talk about.
So McCain's statement is false? "[McCain] expressed dismay at a comment by the head of the C.I.A., John Brennan, who he said “made the incredible statement that the results of these enhanced intelligence techniques – interrogation techniques, EIT’s, that the results were ‘unknowable.’ [...] but as Mr. McCain said, “I think one of the reasons why he made this statement that way is they basically don’t have concrete results that they can point to. Now they say a number of things, but on close examination these results were not gained from EIT’s.”

isobars wrote:
As for your false implication that I stated anything remotely resembling “Not using torture after 9/11 is not even debatable” … I don’t even understand the comment, and certainly never thought or wrote it, so I’m off to fight bigger alligators.
Well, it was based on this.
isobars wrote:
AGW is debatable. BFF is debatable. The partisan nature of this left wing BS and the absurdity of milk and cookies when another attack was imminent are not."
I guess I misinterpret your rhetoric.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Dec 18, 2014 12:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

LHDR wrote:
So McCain's statement is false?

isobars wrote:
… I don’t even understand the comment, and certainly never thought or wrote it, so I’m off to fight bigger alligators.
Well, it was based on this.
isobars wrote:
AGW is debatable. BFF is debatable.
I guess I misinterpret your rhetoric.

First, thanks for the compliment (look up the definition of "rhetoric").

Second, how does “Not using torture after 9/11 is not even debatable” -- whatever all those "nots" mean -- equate to "The partisan nature of this left wing BS and the absurdity of milk and cookies when another attack was imminent are not [debatable]."? In case it helps I'll break down my sentence into two sentences without changing the meaning 1%:
Established fact: This report is purely partisan left wing BS.
Self-evident fact: Milk and cookies questioning when another attack was imminent is absurd.

In case it's not clear, the gap between polite milk & cookie questioning and torture is about 4.7 light years, 42 law books, 423 court decisions, and 50 IQ points wide.

Third, go ask the hundreds of chiefs, deputies, operatives, physicians, and lawyers involved in EIT and compare their claims to McCain's ... never mind. Just read my post more closely; it's all there, and people get pissed when I repeat myself for clarity. If it's still not clear, ask again.
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boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Thu Dec 18, 2014 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know it's a week early but Santa Claus came early this year, in the form of an older jewish Lady from Brooklyn...thanks Janet.
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