TheAgitator.com
Has Marc Thiessen Been Living Another Country for the Last 30 Years?
Saturday, January 9th, 2010Someone should send him a copy of Overkill.
Reminds me of the time Michael Ledeen attempted to illustrate how evil the ruling government in Iran is because, holy crap!, their narco cops wear masks when they conduct drug raids. Imagine!
I’m personally sick of this crime/war distinction. The terrorists are not a country, they are not an army. They are just members of a loosely organized serial killers’ club.
I know if you go outside and throw a stone up in the air, it will come right back down. You don’t need to send me a video of it. I am so certain of it, I know it without the need for any proof.
That’s how some people feel about cops. They are the good guys. They are they to serve and protect. They are our friends. They know it’s true just like they know gravity is true, so there is no need for them to view or read any evidence to the contrary.
So they don’t.
I thought torture was used because there may be a ticking time bomb, or some other pending danger against life and limb, not specifically because it occurred in war.
Then again, are neocon-types really against torturing criminals?
I think they are categorically pro-torture. It’s about feeling good by hurting bad guys. Not even for the purpose of gaining information. Just look at all the support for prison rape(can anyone here honestly say they’ve never heard it said, “that’s what you get, so stay out of jail,” ever?).
Torture is already permitted for some criminals, only it’s not called torture. It’s called the sex offender registry.
Not only supporting prison rape, but especially for children ( see Radley’s tweet). Wait, I thought we had to “protect children.” Oh, they aren’t 15 year olds giving blowjobs, just kids getting raped in prison? Well, that’s what you get for doing crime.
This is brought to you by the same people who have Gulliani and others claiming that there was never a terrorist attack under Bush.
They are dangerous in they honestly believe in this day and age that historical revisionism is not only a matter of saying something enough to make it true, but that it’s also the right thing to do. Unfortunately in many ways they are correct about the first part. The second part however is pure delusion.
Pretty sure that SWAT is the special ed version of the special forces. But the reason is actually quite simple, for all the rhetoric, we are not actually at war with the drug dealers, and the drug dealer’s aims are not to kill as many american citizens as possible.
Shorter Thiessen:
WAR!!!!! Sounds so macho and I love hearing myself say macho things.
“All lies and jest, ’til a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” — Simon & Garfunkel, The Boxer
I sooooo wish you could make comments there. I’d even register to respond to idiocy like
I read this and thought, “No way. Pham is just making stuff up”. The I googled. My sincere apologies for even momentarily thinking such thoughts.
Um, aren’t we fighting a War on Drugs? Maybe now is the time to get conservatives to stop declaring wars on social problems, because otherwise, Thiessen’s crime-is-different-than-war logic is a little, well, tortured.
Also: “enhanced interrogation techniques” is definitely among the best euphemisms I’ve ever heard. Sort of like saying pistols at dawn is an “enhanced arbitration technique.”
Meh. Someone getting hot and bothered about Excitable Andy, what else is new…
Here’s the thing: You can make an argument that torturing terrorists is a ‘grave breach’ of the Geneva Convention. Fair enough. Personally, I prefer sodium pentothal.
However, the Conventions are typically applied only to signatory nations. Terrorists such as al-Qaeda, et.al., do not represent a signatory nation.
Not that it matters, as radical Islamist scum have so many strikes in regards to the Conventions — the treatment of captured or injured soldiers, the wearing (or lack of wearing) of uniforms, indiscriminate targeting of non-military personnel and structures… sorry, when Ahmed gets waterboarded, I close my eyes and all I see are Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl. So it’s hard for me to care.
But, we do have a precedent we can use. When the Germans attempted mischief ‘out of uniform’ during WW2 (a scheme dreamed up by Otto Skorzeny, naturally), the ones we caught were shot. Ditto for six of the eight German saboteurs delivered to the continental U.S. during the same war.
So: load ‘em full of sodium pentothal, wring them out, then stand them up in front of a wall and ask if they’d like a last cigarette. No more playing games with courts — and lives.
At #14
The fact that al-Quaeda and its affiliates don’t adhere to laws or even basic tenets of decency is not an excuse for the government to respond in kind. Not only is it counterproductive but such logic followed to its natural conclusion becomes a justification for the government to behave horribly based solely on the fact that individuals have or are accused of behaving horribly. That is not how the Constitution works nor is it consistent with the enlightenment principles on which this country was founded. We’ve already seen the evolution of people advocating torture only in mythical “ticking time bomb scenarios” to advocating it even when terrorists are apprehended via normal law enforcement procedures and there is no indication of an ongoing threat related to that individual.
It may sound cliche but I think the way the debate has moved only illustrates that once boundaries on things like torture are crossed it is extremely difficult to rebuild that wall or to predict where it all ends.
If selling crack is just a crime, does that mean that the right wing has finally conceded the War on Drugs?
On the contrary, InMD, the behavior of al-Qaeda is /specific/ justification to shoot them. In particular, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
It is to act as a deterrent against non-uniformed combatants, who pose the very problems we have faced in later years.
As I noted in my prior post, I do not approve of torture; I don’t believe it works very well, and I doubt more than a handful of insurgents/terrorists/whatever know enough to justify the thumbscrews.
You refer to ‘caught by normal law enforcement’, and I will concede there is a conflict there. Note, however, that the German spies I mentioned before were captured by the FBI, but tried under a military tribunal. Why should the ‘crotch bomber’ or KSM get anything better?
There’s no ‘behaving horribly’ in this. The purpose of warfare is to kill people and break things. Since terrorist organizations tend to have very few things to break (not being actual nations), it only leaves ‘kill them’.
Toastrider,
Your problem is that you seem to think the government is only torturing terrorists and not innocents. Our government routinely fucks things up. We fucked up 9/11. The intel was there, it was just ignored, not passed on, etc. We fucked up Katrina. We fucked up with the latest economic crisis (the incestuous relationship between DC and Wall Street). Its a litany of mistakes, screw ups, fuck ups, and so forth.
But terrorists that’s serious business…oh wait, 9/11. So yeah, lets inject people against their wills. If they aren’t terrorists then we just wont release them less the animosity we’ve engendered in them leads them to becoming terrorists. Or even better shoot them like you want to do. I wish I could be as perfect as a government bureaucrat!
And you miss the point here. We do send in special forces into the crack dens. We call them SWAT. So the distinction that has been drawn is an irrelevant one.
So again, why don’t we torture the crack dealers? Or inject them with sodium pentathol? They destroy hundreds of lives too. And we call it the “War” on Drugs.
You seem to operate under the misapprehension I am discussing the war on drugs. That’s another matter, and a domestic one. This is the one about foreign terrorists.
Here’s a secret, Steve:
I don’t give a flying crap about the terrorists because they are not U.S. citizens. Period.
They are not my brother, my neighbor, or my coworker. In fact, they have gone out of their way to make sure I do not mistake them as such.
They have murdered, terrorized, bombed, and dragged nations backwards along the road to civilization. They wrap themselves in religion, in a way that NONE of you cowards would tolerate if it was from someone espousing a ‘Christian’ faith, and all you can think to do is insist that ‘but some might be innocent’.
Welcome to warfare, Steve. People /die/ in wars. Why did we put down the Geneva Conventions? To try and limit things as best we could. There is a reason why Common Article 3 exists — to prevent a metaphorical ‘termite infestation’ that we have now. One that will claim more lives in the end than a conventional conflict.
“Ah!” you say, “but what about the few domestic ones? What about Jose Padilla?” Funny; Padilla /is/ a U.S. citizen, and I do not approve of his extremely questionable holding under military tribunal. However, he was transferred to a civilian court in Miami, and after they hashed out what charges went versus what didn’t, he got convicted. Domestic-born ‘tangoes’, as loathesome as I find them, are entitled to the rights and privileges of U.S. law.
So yes, it is ‘one law for citizens, and another for foreign terrorist scumbags’. Is this harsh? Heartless? Probably.
Then again, we didn’t saw off Nick Berg’s head, or fly airplanes into the Twin Towers, or hang blackened corpses off a bridge.
So nay to torture, yea to Common Article 3, and the strawman is asking if he can get up now.
Here lets change it up a bit:
“I don’t give a flying crap about the Americans because they are not muslims. Period.”
Whoops, looks alot like you. You quote a treaty, the quote the koran and haditha.
By the way, I heard someone found your humanity, if you want it back.