Posted on 05/04/2011 8:52:21 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Moral arguments against torture I understand, even respect. But the campaign to declare it inefficient or useless is just beyond ludicrous. If we’re human beings, we understand fully that indeed it does work. What’s bullying, if it’s not torture? Does it work? My guess is yes, since the libs want it prosecuted.
Did it work in the Hanoi Hilton? Well, let’s see . . . the “bounce-back” philosophy that most POWs claimed got them through the long spells of “discomfort” that would make waterboarding feel like scarfing down a happy meal consisted of the simple premise that eventually ANYone can be broken. The challenge, and the cure, was to 1) recognize publicly the guilt of breaking and 2) when you’re called back for a follow-up “quiz,” start from scratch, and make the torturers work harder for the same piece of information or anything in addition to it. If torture elicited only false or no information, there would have been no need to face the personal guilt of breaking, no need for “bounce back.”
What I’d really love to test is the ability of any one of these idiots to resist supplying exactly the information required by the mildest of “tortures.”
Here’s the writer’s web site. Professor at the Chicago seminary of the United Church of Christ.
http://www.ctschicago.edu/index.php/mnuacademicprograms/faculty/85-susan-thistlethwaite
That's their defense against the utility of torture ~ that they, themselves, have no moral grounding.
Thistlethwaite = political hack desguised as a REV. (another one)
******
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s hatred and bigotry
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, the (thankfully) former President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, is promoting a religious litmus test for Presidential candidates and revealing her deep bigotry towards people who don’t share the same faith as she does. Her latest post on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog should put her comfortably in the company of other bigots like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan. Maybe that’s overstating it a bit... Duke and Farakhan have an audience (however small) that takes them seriously while nearly no one knows who Thistlethwaite is or cares what she thinks
She starts off this week’s post with...
“Wives be subject to your husbands, as unto the Lord.” So says the Christian scriptures in Ephesians, 5:22. What I would like to know, first of all, is who is going to have the final authority as Vice-President if Sarah Palin is elected, Palin or her husband? In fact, I think the first order of business with Palin is to ask her to give the same kind of speech that was demanded of John F. Kennedy re his Catholicism. Kennedy said he would obey the Constitution over the Pope. Will Palin obey the Constitution over her husband?
Palin, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate, belongs to an Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Members of the Assemblies of God believe that the Bible in its entirety is verbally inspired by God, is the revelation of God to humanity and is “the infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct.” That means, in a literal reading of scripture, that the authority in the Palin family rests with her husband.
The “evangelical base” who are reported to be so “energized” by Palin’s nomination as vice-president need to ante up here. Do they believe in the literal word of scripture or not? And if they believe in the literal word of scripture, then they need to demand that the we vet not only Sarah Palin, but more importantly, her husband, Todd Palin. Todd, by the way, works for British Petroleum.
And Thistlethwaite, by the way, works for GEORGE SOROS!
I would have liked OBL to have been captured, taken to GITMO and waterboarded for the vast amount of information he would have been good for. BUT, I guess a bullet to the head beats torture!
Torture does work. Victims will tell you anything to get it to stop - and anything includes the truth!
Interrogation is seldom done in a vacuum. There is usually enough corroborating evidence to sort out the intelligence items from the garbage.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it should be used casually, but for terrorists, using a reasonable definition of terrorist (that doesn’t include say, Tea Party members, Boy Scouts and NRA members), I’m okay with it.
Of course, I’d like to know if we tried “chemically enhanced” interrogation and how well lit worked?
You mean like civilian Daniel Pearl, where he was tortured and then beheaded on video camera?
Did our enemies see the USA do that or was it just in anticipation of the water boarding that was to come?
Don't be so naive, the muzzies have been torturing and murdering civilians since the 7th century, and regardless of what we do, the only way to stop them is to kill them... all.
TIME : ex-CIA says waterboarding was key in finding Bin Ladin
Time Magazine ^ | 05/04 2011 | drzz
A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.
Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2005, the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) at secret prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him. “Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi about bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video-destruction investigation last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.time.com ...
We talking about torturing people who like to saw off the heads and mutilate the bodies of their prisoners. I don’t see any risk of an escalation against our troops. Torture and murder are already the enemy’s default responses.
Also I don’t see extending Constitutional protections to foreign terrorists capture in foreign lands.. .
If torture is so ineffective, why has it been so popular over the years?
I would say we killed him and buried him at sea - then smuggle him somewhere where can be “rigorously interrogated” for loooong time. I’d dispose of his mangled corpse somewhere lonely - like the Mariannas Trench.
Being kept in a cold cell or a warm cell, being kept in solitary confinement, being fed only a sufficently nutritious but very bland and unvarying "loaf", being denied personal visits, being denied reading materials and recreation, being denied sunlight, being woken in the middle of the night, etc. are all now described as "torture."
This isn't the rack or the thumbscrews or bamboo slivers under fingernails.
HOw come we can kill ‘em but we can waterboard ‘em? Which is worse?
That picture, and the organizational name within, speak volumes.
I meant...how come we can kill ‘em but CAN’T water board ‘em. I’d rather be water boarded.
Have these genius writers considered the possibility that (if true) KSM revealed info under standard interrogation to avoid further waterboarding?
Waterboarding and Photos - BAD
Double Tap to head and heart - GOOD
The liberal mind at its finest.
LOL!
It’s the exact same logic that determines smoking and drinking during pregnancy is really really bad - but the same woman deserves a police escort into an abortion clinic.
Our military & contractors who’ve been captured by these non-uniformed terrorists could have wished they were just waterboarded. What we do or don’t do to KSM & his ilk isn’t going to improve how our troops & contractors are treated.
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