ANOTHER KIND OF TORTURE IS.....Tying the CIA's hands from protecting our citizens by totally destroying its morale and effectively neutering its procedures to extract info that could prevent future attacks against the US used against our deadliest enemies---you know those who'd kill us all and will, if they can.... Replacing Justice Souter with someone who doesn't understand bedrock legal principles and enumerated federal powers of the Constitution, but rather nominate a replacement, probably a female, who has lots of empathy..... Having Rahm micro-manage Treasury...... Letting self-important federal officials who want to build power bases and have nothing better to do create pandemic panic based on little real evidence....And finally, letting the Obamatron's gun grabbers try to take away our 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.
Meanwhile, we need to thank Sen. Arlen Specter for leaving the GOP.
Photo credit above: WSJ PhotoJournal of the Apollo Wheel at an amusement park in Shenyang, Liaoning province, China, Friday. (Riding this would be real torture to me.)
11 comments:
Awwww...your concern for the CIA is so touching. Would that you had that same concern when Scooter Libby was...well...you know.
Take it from someone who knows, the CIA morale is just as affected (if not more so) by outing its agents. And it's not just the libs there who feel that way!! (that's still my favorite web-ism, blaming the liberals at the CIA...chuckle, chuckle, chuckle..)
Thanks for sending Arlen Specter our way...we're thismuch closer to implementing the EVIL LIBERAL AGENDA...
I would think that a party that attracts less than a quarter of registered voters (and falling) would want to keep anyone who would actually consider themselves a Republican these days, but hey, let me politely suggest that you keep applying ultra-hard core litmus tests to your party memebers. It's fun watching the GOP implode!
Proof. Pudding. Etc. Tell. Time. Will.
liberals presumably would prefer that we sit down with the captives (after bowing to them, of course), and engage in mutually respectful “dialogue” - the left’s favorite and only way of confronting evil - which will yield no life-saving information, but which will enable them to air their grievances. After we promise to make things right, we can let them return to the battlefield and take up arms against us again. This makes for a pathetic, brainless wartime strategy, but hey, national self-preservation and victory against violent jihad are far less important to liberals than providing our guests with civil rights that the Islamists themselves want to deprive us of.
Many liberals and conservatives say we should handle enemy combatants (I keep forgetting we’re not allowed to call them that anymore) with kid gloves because to do otherwise incites the enemy to take punitive measures against their prisoners of ours. This is perhaps the lamest argument against harsh interrogation. First of all, the Islamists need absolutely no incentive from us to mutilate and murder infidels, Jews, and Muslims who don’t fall in line. Second, they do not operate according to such rules of fair play, so we are not rewarded for our good will. Third, jihadist captives are trained to lie anyway about the brutality of their “mistreatment” at our hands, so what we do is irrelevant. And those who insist that America is obligated to hold herself to a higher standard than our enemy are willfully ignoring the fact that we already hold ourselves to the highest possible standard - and unlike our enemy, we punish any interrogators and guards who cross the line.
The problem is that the left thinks everything crosses the line, that causing enemy combatants any degree of discomfort constitutes sadism. Because the left in America has commandeered the topic of torture, such basic interrogation techniques as sleep deprivation and waterboarding have been held up as reprehensible and horrific examples of it. Is waterboarding extraordinarily uncomfortable, even panic-inducing? You bet your ass it is, and that’s the point. Is it torture? Not surprisingly, former community organizer Barack Obama has announced that it is, and as with all his opinions about confronting radical Islam, he is wrong.
Do you want to know what torture really is? Have you ever seen a beheading video, or footage of a stoning? Because that’s torture, and nothing America does is even remotely in the same category. Below are four marginally more palatable examples that you won’t hear about in the current liberal-driven debate because they were committed by jihadists, and liberals and their media collaborators don’t want to cloud the whole torture issue by allowing the ghastly facts about our enemy to be introduced. I tried to refrain from explicit detail:
1) The drug-stoked jihadists who devastated Mumbai last Thanksgiving weekend and left nearly 200 infidels dead in their wake took time out from their rampage to sexually torture a rabbi and his pregnant wife (who, as it was later revealed, were their primary targets) before executing them. The doctors who examined the corpses were so horrified they didn’t want to discuss it.
2) This week the leader of a jihadist gang went on trial in Paris. The gang had kidnapped a Parisian Jew in 2006 and tortured him over a period of 24 days - 24 days - during which over 80% of his body was “butchered,” according to police. He was dumped near a train station, bound and unable to speak, and died on the way to the hospital. The gang leader proudly shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” in the courtroom and taunted the victim’s family.
3) In June of that same year, two young American Privates, Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, were captured and tortured to death by Iraqi insurgents. Their bodies were later dumped and booby-trapped (because of course it’s not enough for the Islamist cowards to butcher helpless captives - they also have to wire the corpses with explosives to cause even more mayhem). The mainstream media reported only that the two had been killed in a “barbaric” way; I won’t even begin to relate here the truth of how horrifically they were mutilated, but if you want a gut-wrenching appreciation not only for what torture really means, but also for the depths of our enemy’s sadism....
4) A former torturer for the Taliban describes here how inventive he used to be in terms of enforcing the most fundamentalist strain of Islam on the planet. His methods against insufficiently pious Muslims included crucifixion and rubbing salt in the wounds of victims who were so badly beaten and bloodied that it was impossible to tell whether they were wearing clothes.
(If these contemporary examples aren’t enough to convince blustery, high-minded liberals that true torture is unimaginably worse than our own interrogation techniques, then they could enlighten themselves with such eye-opening historical examples as: Armando Valladares’ memoir of 22 years in Castro’s prisons, Against All Hope; Haing Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields of Cambodia under the monstrous Khmer Rouge; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic of Communist brutality, The Gulag Archipelago.)
None of the victims in the above list was suspected of war crimes and “harshly interrogated” for information that might prevent another 9/11; on the contrary, all were targeted, cruelly brutalized, and killed by evil men for no other reason than that they were Jews or Americans or supposed “apostates.”
Let’s get real. As much as it pleases the New York Times and leftists here to brand America as “Torture Nation,” we must recognize that there is a vast gulf between the ways we and the enemy treat prisoners. It is the Islamists who torture, not us. Roughing up suspects who have been trained to resist our medically-supervised interrogation techniques, and who are among the most hateful bastards on the planet, in order to extract information that may prevent more terrorist horrors, is not the same as torture. Anyone who says that we’re the bad guys, brutalizing helpless innocents who just happened to be caught in the net of Bush’s chimerical war on terror, is completely divorced from reality
Speaking of divorced from reality, the Obama administration is determined to pretend that we’re not at war with radical Islam; it recklessly intends to release Guantanamo suspects on our own soil; it is suicidally exposing America’s intelligence secrets to the world; and it is vindictively seeking to retroactively punish the previous administration for its anti-terrorism efforts. The enemy, meanwhile, is laughing at all our moral and legalistic hand-wringing, and at our paralyzing internecine debate about interrogation. They consider it contemptible weakness - which indeed it is. It’s no wonder that insanely apocalyptic Iranian President Ahmadinejad recently declared to America, “We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength.”
For once, Ahmadinejad is right. Instead of bending over backwards to treat these scourges of civilization better than we treat our own prison population, we need to grow a pair and start presenting an uncompromising and unapologetic strength. The first step is to seize back control of the discussion about torture in this country from those who have no grasp of the reality of torture, who blindly serve the propaganda purposes of our enemy, and who froth at the mouth all day long about the satanic Bush cabal but never have a critical word to say about real evil. It’s time America shows the world that we recognize we already have the moral high ground, that we derive strength and national unity from that certainty, and that from now on the spotlight on torture will be trained on those who are truly guilty of it.
I feel sicker.
A Christian, a Marine, a WWII Interrogator. Today's tough talking pro-torture GOPers will no doubt dismiss him as a "libtard", complain that he was "disconnected from reality", and truly "anti-American". The fact that we're still using his techiniques and talking about him 60 years later would seem to prove otherwise. Read the whole website.
http://home.comcast.net/~drmoran/home.htm
"Guadalcanal was where Sherwood F. began his assignment of interrogation, informed by his pioneering and now legendary style. Today it seems a combination of pragmatic psychology and moral — Christian — values, joined together in, and practiced by, this one individual. Sherwood F. never experienced any ambivalence in what he did; there was little disconnect between social work in Japan and “social work” in Guadalcanal, except that the goal was to get useful information. He immediately went down to the level of the prisoner. He began by asking what village he was from. He would say, I know the river, and that bridge in your neighborhood; and so on. Each prisoner had a tale he wanted to tell. To be heard, and have our personal story understood: these are elementary needs, a fact Sherwood F. knew deeply. He got these young men’s tales. Other interrogators modeled their efforts after him, and certainly the BiJ (born in Japan) ones, like missionary child Otis Cary, already had in common with him the basic understanding, acceptance, and love of the Japanese people. They were universally deemed a charming nation — friendly, polite, generous, hardworking, admirable in all other respects — when they were not killing others."
Here's the Atlantic Monthly article referencing Maj. Moran's workin in getting Japanese soldiers to talk:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/budiansky
"Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard "hard-boiled" military attitude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others' experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogation—in other words, emphasizing that "we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors"—invariably backfired. It made the prisoner "so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence" that it "played right into [the] hands" of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance."
Re Specter...
The Devil he blew upon his nails, and the little devils ran,
And he said: "Go husk this whimpering thief that comes in the guise of a man:
"Winnow him out 'twixt star and star, and sieve his proper worth:
"There's sore decline in Adam's line if this be spawn of Earth."
Empusa's crew, so naked-new they may not face the fire,
But weep that they bin too small to sin to the height of their desire,
Over the coal they chased the Soul, and racked it all abroad,
As children rifle a caddis-case or the raven's foolish hoard.
And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play,
And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away.
"We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind,
"And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find.
"We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone,
"And, Sire, if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own.""Tomlinson" ~Rudyard Kipling.
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Thank you, Paul.
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