New poll finds majority of Americans believe torture justified

have you read the constitution? have you read article 6 of our constitution? Obviously not. The UN convention was modified by us to make the definition of torture conform to the constitutional definition of cruel and unusual. If waterboarding were constitutional, US police departments would be able to use it. They can't. We did not with GITMO prisoners either.

 

Can you read all the interviews from the guys on the ground during combat? How the elitist political flavor have different views? Any reason about you?

 

I am a retired Naval Officer with 25 years of service. While serving with UNTSO, I myself was taken hostage by the PLO in Lebanon on two different occasions. I am supremely grateful that President Reagan had not tortured any palestinians before that happened to me. What about YOU?

 

It was legal with illegal combatants upon whom we can force interrogation, there is no right to remain silent, there is not right to attorney there is no habeous corpus, they are treated differently under the Constitution than a domestic criminal. Although if it was a matter of terrorism and an imminent domestic attack and the President gave his approval with that of the DOJ I would have not problem with it. The DOJ TWICE adjudicated it and FOUR TIMES the CIA went back for clarifications. IT WAS LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL.

Stop being obtuse. You were wrong to claim that we must abide by the UN Convention so stop beating a dead horse and just admit it.

 

It wouldn't have made a twit of difference to the PLO just as it makes no difference to al Qaeda or ISIS. We can only hope that they might announce that as of today they will only use the same methods we did on the same caliber of captive to stop an imminent mass terrorist attack.

 

Well, there are quite a range of experts far more competent than you, but if you really think nations torturing captives is a productive pastime, no amount of expertise will alter your belief.

 

You are using false equivalencies to justify your moral judgement on the EIT's used on 3 individuals by the CIA. Everything done has been legal and none of those persons waterboarded suffered any ill effects - all 30,003 of them. Thousands of lives were saved based on the information resulting from the EIT's. The CIA officers are heros. It is perfectly fine to disagree with all of this but disengenuous to attempt to prosecute them now for legal actions they took in the past and to claim that military leadership does not care about captured US servicemen.

Here is some input from a retired Col. and Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Leo Thorsness (6 year resident of the Hanoi Hilton). He knows exactly what torture is and that the EIT's are not torture.

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/happening-now/index.html#/v/3936834993001

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Yes, and that's why I rely on them.

 

You cannot reason with emotion-driven, hardcore, short-sighted torture lovers who are convinced that nations should torture captives.

-and that "It's okay when we do it," attitude creates terrorists. The zealots are incapable of seeing the propagandistic value of the gift of torture to the enemy, even when so many far more familiar with the repercussions of indulging in the practice explain it to them.

As previously quoted:

... [Torture is] extremely ineffective, and it’s counter-productive to what we’re trying to accomplish.

When we torture somebody, it hardens their resolve … The information that you get is unreliable. … And even if you do get reliable information, you’re able to stop a terrorist attack, al Qaeda’s then going to use the fact that we torture people to recruit new members.

And he repeats:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.


They don’t want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans…. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners “was al-Qaeda’s number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers.​

.

 

Things change.......as does the world.

 

What emotions?

 

no one ever said anything about the right to remain silent or the right to an attorney or the right to habeas corpus. That's just a red herring. What they DO have a right to, under our constitution, is to NOT BE TURTURED. We MUST abide by the amendments we ourselves put ON that UN Convention when we ratified it. Torture is defined by the ratification document. Waterboarding falls within that definition. We do not waterboard criminals here in America regardless of their citizenship. Why? Because it's unconstitutional. The UN Convention, as ratified by the Senate, IS the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND as per the constitution.

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In fact, I was not tortured by the PLO. So... something stayed their hand because I certainly had intelligence that they would have found useful had they been able to pry it from me through torture.

 

First, I have NEVER claimed that MILITARY leadership does not care about captured US servicemen. It is a lie to say otherwise. So...what does that make you for saying it?

I am sure that we disallowed the "only following orders" defense at Nuremberg when germans attempted to use it. Waterboarding is torture. We considered it torture when the Japs used it on us. John McCain was also at the Hanoi Hilton and he disagrees with the colonel, as do I.

 

if things change, we should abrogate the UN Convention. Until we do, according to the constitution, it remains the "SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND". Failing to abide by it is a crime.

 

Read your own post which I responded to.

There you go again - claiming a moral equivalency between CIA EIT's and the holocaust and water torture (and a lot more) used by 5 Japanese soldiers in WW2.

 

learn to read. NOTHING in my post ever said that I claimed that military leadership does not care about captured servicemen. To say otherwise is a lie.

and I am not claiming MORAL equivalency, but actual equivalency. Warterboarding was considered torture then and it is still considered torture today. I never went to SERE school, but knew many Navy pilots who did. When they were waterboarded, they were told that that was the form of torture some enemies might use on them. For us to use it on others does not change what it is.

 

and when out servicemen went to SERE school and were waterboarded, they KNEW it was training. They KNEW that the guys pouring water down their noses were on their side and they would NOT kill them. They had NOT dropped bombs on villages where relatives of their captors were killed. They were NOT being held by real life enemies in a real life prison with no real expectation of freedom and a cold beer at the end of the day.

 

You really just have to laugh off some of these excuses they invent. You've buried them every which way but Sunday, and they keep repeating the same nonsense. Did you happen to catch that hilarious excuse? He hates Obama and the Obama Justice Department, but in this case he sides with them, (can you believe that), because no charges were brought up. Lol! So, since no charges were brought up, (by his favorite Justice Department lol again), that automatically means that no torture took place. My goodness, what confidence he has all of a sudden in the so called " Obama anti-American Justice Department all of a sudden. Gotta love it! What a joke.

 

We're not debating whether torture is moral, we're asking whether it's legal, and the answer is NO. It's not legal anywhere, it's completely illegal at the local, state, national and international levels. There is no "exception" in the law, no circumstances under which crimes against humanity magically become any less egregious.

Those scumbags in the Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to insulate themselves from the legal consequences of the torture activity, they even invented a whole new class of combatant that never existed before. In all the years between the creation of the Geneva Accords and 9/11, there was not even a single incident anywhere in the world that required the concept of a "non-uniformed combatant". The only reason BushCo invented that is because they thought it would mitigate the war crimes charge. Same for "enhanced interrogation" - any idiot can see there's only reason for the word "enhanced" to be there, and in this case it's equivalent to the word NOT. Because enhanced interrogation is not interrogation, it's torture. Plain and simple. How the hell are you gonna get information out of someone whose mouth is covered by a wet rag? Hm???

The only reason they had to torture anyone in the first place is because their intelligence failed so miserably. If they'd had anything close to adequate intelligence they wouldn't have had the need to torture anyone.

And asking Brennan's opinion on this is beyond laughable - considering that he is, in fact, the "Architect of Torture".

I'm thinking the CIA should be de-funded. It failed in its intelligence gathering mission, and when politics made that inconvenient it resorted to war crimes in an effort to cover up the failure.

That's pretty low, even for a government agency. Would you trust people like that with unaccountable power? I sure wouldn't, and it strikes me that the whole concept is kinda stupid in the first place. What do you think?

 

KSM knew that he would not be killed as well. In fact he knew exactly how many seconds the water would be poured onto the cloth covering his face and would count them out by tapping his finger. But that does not negate the discomfort and stress put on him. And that the certainty of the procedure continuing along with the other EIT's are what resulted in his compliance after which the EIT's were discontinued. The 30,000 service men knew that as well however most of them were not able to resist. The practice was discontinued because it worked too well - people could not build up a resistance to it which is the reason it is so effective.

 

This is what you said:

I interpreted that to mean generals who had never served in harm's way.

There is no equivalency between what the Japanese did in WW2 and the waterboarding EIT performed on ~ 30,000 service men and 3 terrorists who were responsible for ~ 3000 deaths of innocent US citizens and the beheading of Daniel Pearl (KSM admits personally doing this and is proud of it).

 

The CIA EIT's are legal. There is no question about that. What we hear in this thread is moral outrage over those enhanced interrogation techniques. The DOJ of both the Bush 43 and Obama have confirmed the legality of these procedures.

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Again, the CIA EIT's are legal. There is no question about that. What we hear in this thread is moral outrage over those enhanced interrogation techniques. The DOJ of both the Bush 43 and Obama have confirmed the legality of these procedures.

 

Yes, we get it; the USA is above the law, makes up its own rules and bends existing ones it feels are uncomfortable whenever appropriate. People used to respect America and its condemnation of torture and human rights abuses, but not any longer. With these very public protestations that torture is perfectly acceptable America has sunk to the level of any Third World flea-pit you care to name.
http://www.spiegel.de/international...ca-above-the-geneva-conventions-a-384163.html

 

You might find the following of interest: http://www.spiegel.de/international...ca-above-the-geneva-conventions-a-384163.html

 

Yeah, legal. If you make up the rules as you go along you can claim anything is "legal". The CIA are lying, devious scum. If that's your idea of heroism you need to revisit your dictionary, frankly.

 

While y'all debate whether or not EITs are torture or legal.
Or if the US has an out to the Geneva convention which allows us to torture...
One thing is abundantly clear.

Al Qaeda won. The proof is right here in this ridiculous thread.

max