lol
morals and liberals don't mix, besides its war, get over it.
Its called black ops, you know with black sites for prison and secrets, oh my.
morals and liberals don't mix, besides its war, get over it.
Its called black ops, you know with black sites for prison and secrets, oh my.
It is a typical liberal tactic. The moral argument is hilarious too. Liberals and morals seem to be like oil and water.
The Norseman
Meandering fecklessly
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I'm not sure I understand you here. If I'm reading your posts correctly, it seems you agree that torture is immoral except in certain circumstances when it is moral. Is that your moral stance on the issue?
Rapport-building is just soft torture, you know, holding people against their will, holding them without charges, indefinitely. Oh my.
Liberals are simply without morals, in this they want to claim morals. Seems they are on the wrong side of goodness each and every time.
My stance on waterboarding is it is a good tool in the tool box, it is supposed to be kept secret (good luck with our current crop of liberals in intelligence) it is supposed to be used on rare occasions, it is HARMLESS to the torturee.
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Oh I think I will, someone has to be the adult here. It's war, get over it.
Isn't that what the Jihadis say?
Yes, are you going to be able to see the difference? I'm sure liberals think of the CIA as no different than the head hunters, its because they are immature and have never been able to identify evil.
sunmaster14
Penultimate Amazing
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Begging the quesiton, right? I mean that's the topic under discussion, although I guess at some level, they're not required to interrogate terrorists at all, or even capture them. Come to think of it, that's Obama's modus operandi.
Yes, if something warrants prosecution, then it warrants prosecution. If something is illegal, then it is illegal. I wouldn't combine those two propositions, though, since they wouldn't be tautologies anymore.
sunmaster14
Penultimate Amazing
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These are category errors. My Mr. Spock quote trumps yours: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
Oh, I see a distinct difference. One is an institutionalized killing machine and the others mostly speak Arabic.
Cleon
King of the Pod People
Yes, you're very adult. Tell us to "get over it" one more time, maybe that will make torture less evil. "Morals." Right.
Torturers, and those who support them, bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.
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TofuFighter
Illuminator
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Liberals are simply without morals, in this they want to claim morals. Seems they are on the wrong side of goodness each and every time.
My stance on waterboarding is it is a good tool in the tool box, it is supposed to be kept secret (good luck with our current crop of liberals in intelligence) it is supposed to be used on rare occasions, it is HARMLESS to the torturee.
I kind of hope someone spends(sp?) their time countering your ... uh... arguments so that i can watch, but i rather doubt that it will happen, wisdom prevailing and all that. Waterboarding is harmless, liberals are immature, have no morals, cannot identify evil, and 'get over it' is the adult way of ending arguments.
Not sure if serious or...
Cleon
King of the Pod People
No. Whether torture works has no more bearing on the question than whether slavery could be good for the economy. They're both fundamentally evil practices, regardless of whether they "work."
If you're getting your morals from a character that is supposed to be without emotion, then perhaps you can see the problem here. And I remind you of Kirk's rejoinder that "sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."
sunmaster14
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I disagree, but I could have missed something. Care to point me to it?
It would be an amazing coincidence if our sense of moral repugnance towards the use of pain to effect compliance lined up perfectly with efficacy. Many of the people here believe that just because something fits their definition of torture (and not only is it a subjective thing, but there is a broad spectrum of physical pain which fits under the rubric of torture, ranging from the mild to the extreme), that all of a sudden it magically is less effective than "rapport-building" methods of persuasion.
What have we seen? All we have our anecdotes relayed by people with agendas. I'm arguing based on extrapolation from everyday experience.
Not irrelevant at all. A 50% chance of saving 1,000 innocent lives, or a 10% chance of saving 5,000, may be as good as a 100% of saving 500 innocent lives, depending upon your point of view. Some might even argue that it is better. There is no reason that <100% probabilities can't enter into a moral calculation.
He has claimed repeatedly and consistently that there is always a more effective and moral method of extracting the same information. It is something of an article of faith with him. If I embed an assumption into a hypothetical that the suspect refuses to talk, and there is no time for rapport-building or whatnot, he simply wishes that assumption away.
What stake do they have? One of the reasons that some of these guys don't talk is because they're more scared of what al Qaeda will do to them if they do. Maybe they believe in the cause, but sometimes it might not even be clear to them how much their information will detract from the cause. Sometimes it is the piece that helps put the puzzle together for the CIA, but the suspect doesn't realize that. As for the training they receive, I believe that first and foremost they receive counter-interrogation training that makes them resistant to "rapport-building" techniques or trickery. They're probably told just to keep their mouth shut no matter what. It's easy to train people to do that. Not so easy to train them to resist torture. As for the training our guys receive, I suspect that's more about helping them to survive in captivity psychologically intact rather than avoid divulging sensitive information. If I were making plans for the army, I would operate on the assumption that any POWs were forced to divulge everything they knew.
sunmaster14
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It is what the interrogators did with the information they received which was ineffective. That is a separate issue from getting the information in the first place. Also, I think interrogators should not ask leading questions. There are ways of asking questions in which the suspect has an incentive to tell the truth. I've described an example in detail already.
Border Reiver
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No, the "liberal" stance is that torture is immoral and ought not to be carried out.
If your position is that torture is fine when used on your own enemies, but not on you or your allies, then you are what we call in the military a hypocrite. The rule of law applies to all, or it ends up applying to no one.
I've already given three reasons based on the rather rational view that doing so is contrary to both international and US domestic law, and makes carrying out operations more dangerous for the US and her allies.
My stance on waterboarding is it is a good tool in the tool box, it is supposed to be kept secret (good luck with our current crop of liberals in intelligence) it is supposed to be used on rare occasions, it is HARMLESS to the torturee.
If it is so harmless, why did the US prosecute members of the Imperial Japanese military who carried out waterboarding on US servicemen in WWII? Surely, the liberals who fought and won WWII should have realized that such a process did no lasting harm.
pagetheoracle
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Good cop / bad cop was used a lot, I presume because after the verbal (and possibly physical) abuse, the fellon relaxed enough to say something incriminating to a friendly face
sunmaster14
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It's interesting to see such an explicit appeal to emotion on this board. I would think most people would want to argue like Spock rather than like Kirk. Even Upchurch wants to be Kirk, as he has brought up the Kobayashi Maru test, and Kirk's implausible and dishonest approach, as a way out of the logical traps I set for him.
sunmaster14
Penultimate Amazing
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While I do not wish to argue that the CIA form of waterboarding was not torture, it is not appropriate to compare it to what the Japanese did to American POWs in WWII. The Japanese form was much more brutal, in addition to having a high probability of killing the victim. Also, it could be the case that we were being hypocritical in our prosecutions of war crimes, prosecuting our defeated enemies for actions that we ourselves felt were legitimate. In fact, I'm pretty sure we did. I don't remember Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay being prosecuted for war crimes, even though he admitted he surely would have deserved it.