http://www.aliennationreport.com/DAN.asx

watch this video and then try to tell me stress positions are torture.

But the thing is, if someone kidnapped your child and inflicted it on them, I bet you’d call it torture. When it happens to American soldiers, no one has or had any problem calling it torture. For goodness sakes, the stated purpose of SERE is to teach our assets how to resist interrogations that employ torture.

…..don’t wuss out and try to minimize or euphemize it because you can’t actually make a serious case for what you’re defending.

Actually I can, and I did. If you want to dumb down the meaning of the word “torture” to make yourself feel morally superior then knock yourself out. IMHO I believe most americans don’t view stress positions, sleep deprivation, caterpillars, or turning off the a/c as torture. I never said it was pleasant or fun, all I said is it’s not “torture”.

My biggest beef is I think the constitution is very, very clear when it comes to who has the authority in deciding how detainees are held and who decides what rights those detainees have. This is a political issue that should be decided by voters not courts. If the nation as a whole agrees with you, then fine, but I’m betting they agree more with my position. Right now it’s Obamas turn to decide what’s right and the voters will have a say in 4 years or so whether they agree. Turning this into a witch hunt when the president and members of both parties in congress knew and approved what was going on is lunacy and can only end badly.

Another thing about SERE training is that the people going through it are assets with a lot of time and money put into their training.

It is great there are people defending torture and torturers. If I ever have to torture anyone let it be in this country where I will be defended by many upstanding citizens. Let me not go to trial at another Nuremberg.

Utter nonsense. SERE training includes things like safe words, is utterly voluntary, has a set start and stop date for the program, is known by trainees from the start to be essentially unreal and artificial, and is focused around training people in techniques on how to resist interrogations, not simply endure torture endlessly.

The whole point of stress positions is to cause incredible pain without leaving legally inconvenient physical marks. But intense pain is intense pain, and inflicting that sort of pain for days on end is torture. Anything else is pathetic dissembling. And all the more vile when it’s aimed at helping the President save face rather than saving lives.

If you want to defend the use of flat out torture, man up and do it. But don’t wuss out and try to minimize or euphemize it because you can’t actually make a serious case for what you’re defending.

This POS government is beyond fixing. It needs to be the motivation for some hot fiddle playing.

/off to get the comfy chair

I’m going to go even further and say that is why this sort of talk should end now.

The day a change in power in Washington results in the previous administration being jailed is the day representative government in America dies.

Do you really think that any administration is going to give up their office if it means that they go straight to jail? Really? This is a real simple calculus. No matter how bad the elected officials were in the last administration, they are still the last administration. If they can’t be reasonably safe that they will be free from political persecution (and yes, the torture argument is still a political argument) after they leave office, they will never allow anyone to remove them from office.

If we prosecute former administration officials once they leave office, then we leave the ones in office nothing to lose. A man with nothing to lose has no limits on what he is willing to do.

and you complain about political hyperbole?

re: LGF

That’s because LGF is populated by a bunch of wannabe fascists, authoritarians, religious whackjobs, and morons. Why you were wasting time there is truly a mystery. Tell me, do you frequent DU and Dailykos as well? To balance your daily dose of wingnuttery?

I’ll partially agree with you. I shouldn’t have listed the red cross in there, I got caught up in the middle of a diatribe. The red cross has said the treatment some detainees faced “might” constitute torture. I also left out the military judge who has said the treatment of one detainee also constituted torture. There is a big difference between the possibility that 3 detainees were subjected to what could be argued is torture (I would obviously disagree) and that as a matter of principle the US tortures detainees, which isn’t close to being reality. That’s the problem with political hyperbole, instead of dealing with this rationally, people were out looking to score political points and the entire nation gets dragged down in the process. Instead of asking how Abu Ghraib became so mismanaged that guard troops were playing games with detainees people start screaming “CHENEY IS EVIL AND WANTS TO EAT THE MUSLIMS!!!”.

You are living in a fantasy land with your trite descriptions of what actually occurred. There’s the difference between what Bush Admin said we did, and what the Bush Admin actually did. Originally told KSM broke after 1 session of waterboarding (which has been for a long time been described as torture by the United States with prosecutions to go along with it) when the reality is it was done to him over a 180 times.

“The Inquisition
What a show
The Inquisition
Here we go!”

It was meant to be callous. The hyperbole over the “enhanced interrogation techniques” got out of hand as soon as the pics of those idiot national guardsmen putting people in naked piles at abu-ghraib came out. (The opening photo’s of the slate article link you posted) When we’ve twisted the meaning of torture all the way down to include putting caterpillars on people and slapping then it’s well past time someone pointed out the idiocy. This issue was completely overblown in order to embarrass a president the press and the dems hated and I don’t believe for a second that if the president were a democrat we’d have all this hand wringing over the treatment of these detainees. Radley and Sen. Feinstein are the only two people I’m willing to give a pass since I think they’re both true believers but the rest of the political class in this country chose hyperbole that intentionally damaged the worldview of our country in order to score political points. We’ve done nothing any worse than any other nation on the planet does, the only difference is we talk about it in the open. I am embarrassed about Gitmo, I’m embarrassed we treat foreign detainees captured in the field with weapons in their hands better than we treat the guys in my local county jail.

I appreciated the slate link but I believe I’ve mentioned before that I belonged to the Army Intelligence branch. Part of my training at huachuca and my first division level job included dealing with interrogators so I’ve known for a long time what the army considered their obligations under the geneva conventions to be and what the loopholes were. I had an interrogator tell me that while he wasn’t allowed to strike a detainee there is nothing that says the detainee can’t hit himself, and that after 3 days he could make a detainee prefer beating himself rather than to be left alone with an interrogator. We’re always going to disagree whether waterboarding is considered torture but since the military forces some of their forces to undergo training that includes being waterboarded, I’m going to say it shouldn’t be classified as torture.

Lastly, again I want to point out that these techniques were passed along to congress, some of whom apparently wondered why these techniques weren’t even more harsh. For them to now say this was torture goes beyond being two-faced and IMHO borders on treasonous. Not one report from the Red Cross, not one congressional oversight report, not one internal military report has said we’re not living up to our obligations under the geneva conventions. Politics lost us face in the world, not making people cold, not slapping them in the face, not making them stand in odd positions and that’s why I’m more than just a little angry about this.

I know a lot of people on the right think this site is one step away from pinko commie land but, I want to mention that I appreciate the fact I’m able to vehemently disagree with the host and not get banned. I know I have a tendency to be snide so I try to be polite but it may not come across as well as I’d like. I made the mistake of politely disagreeing with a rightwing site (LGF) and got banned.

The incident (the LA tower bombing) people have tried to point to as being broken up by torture was actually broken up PRIOR to the capture of the person they tortured to supposedly get the information.