Jon Stewart compares Obama drones to Bush's torture

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/20...g-convoy-in-yemen/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/05/23/2052351/johnson-drones-abdulrahman/


I really get depressed when people don't keep up with these things, but they'll keep up with a traffic jam just because a Republican did it.

Killing 16 Year old US citizen without virtue of trial--not important
Keeping people waiting on a bridget--two months of coverage

((shakes head))

Rather flippant of you considering how many children are killed in these strikes.

Alaska. Sarah Palin. I see. How about Chicago? Would that feel like war to you?

I really wonder about partisans when they can worm and squirm around the deadly nature of this administration and cough up nothing but excuses and mentions of Bush as though this isn't Obama's second term or anything.

 

Comparisons he didn't make.

One could argue pouring water on someone's face isn't torture because it doesn't cause "severe pain".
One can't argue that dead isn't dead.

Pouring water on someone's face gets water in their nose.
Drone missile strikes on someone's house, kills them, their wife, and kids.

Pouring water on someone's face is intended to extract vital information on those who wage war against the US.
Drone strikes are intended to kill.

Pouring water on someone's face seems to be limited to a few foreign combatants.
Drone strikes seem to have no such limits.

He didn't, because it would have made it an absurd comparison

 

Waterboarding is more then "pouring water on someones face". It was considered torture in this very country before Bush and his lovely team of lawyers and their "torture memo".

How can you post such utter trash? If "pouring water on someones face" extracted info why do people not scream out there darkest secrets while washing their faces.

Such utter partisan trash.

 

How you can possibly compare simulated drowning to a drone death strike is beyond me.

 

The claim was it wasnt torture which it is. And Bush used drones as well..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan

Oh and no i dont believe the torture stopped in Gitmo because Obama said it ~

 

All Obama has to do to complete this analogy is find an Asian lawyer who wrote an internal memo arguing that the drone strikes on American citizens were legal, then parade him around the talk shows. If you consider Obama's relationship with the media, it's entirely possible that this could still happen.

 

His administration had stated lies. He has never corrected and allowed American to believe they are true. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

http://rt.com/usa/report-obama-administration-drone-229/

 

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/obama_administration_lied_about_drone_targets/

 

Torture under international law requires "Severe pain". Waterboarding didnt cause severe pain on the 3 or 4 individuals it was used on. And the point is that there is NO argument that a drone strike is anything other than killing somebody.

 

The question is whether or not terrorists fall under the definition as "enemy combatants" in the Geneva Convention. If you think they are, then drone strikes are simply a military tool for a military operation while in a battlefield environment. If a US citizen is involved in a terrorist organization outside of the jurisdiction of the United States, then that citizenship should not protect him from military action.

However, if you believe that terrorists do not fall under the definition of enemy combatants and a U.S. citizen was involved in said activity, then drone strikes should not be condoned.

BTW, trying to compare torture to drone strikes is like trying to compare 18th century warfare to today. And all Jon Stewart is doing is simply making a statement so that people will watch his show.

 

Once again, Jon hits the nail on the head.

This is (to me) one of the biggest embarrassments of this admin. The justification for it is weak and shaky at best, and should be saved for actual declared conflicts.

 

Speaking of Hannity. Hasn't it been like five years since he said he was willing to be water boarded to prove its not a big deal, but always brushes off people who bring it up?

 

Waterboarding is a form of torture, more specifically a type of water torture, in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage, and death.[1] Adverse physical consequences can manifest themselves months after the event, while psychological effects can last for years.[2] The term water board torture appears in press reports as early as 1976.[3] The captive's face is usually covered with cloth or some other thin material, and the subject is immobilized on his/her back. Interrogators pour water onto the face over the breathing passages, causing an almost immediate gag reflex and creating the sensation for the captive that he is drowning.[4][5][6] Victims of waterboarding are at extreme risk of sudden death due to the aspiration of vomitus. Vomitus travels up the esophagus, which can then be inhaled (mostly into the right lung due to its more direct pathway).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
In its war on terror, the Bush administration through Jay S. Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, issued in August 2002 and March 2003 what became known in 2004, after being leaked, as the Torture Memos.[12] These legal opinions (including the 2002 Bybee memo) argued for a narrow definition of torture under U.S. law.


"In January 2009, with a change in administrations, U.S. President Barack Obama banned the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in interrogations of detainees. "

Historically in the West, the technique is known to have been used in the Spanish Inquisition. The suffocation of bound prisoners with water has been favored because, unlike most other torture techniques, it produces no marks on the body.[24] CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the technique have lasted an average of 14 seconds before capitulating.[6] According to at least one former CIA official, information retrieved from the waterboarding may not be reliable because a person under such duress may admit to anything, as harsh interrogation techniques lead to false confessions. "The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.[6] It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer.[6] There was considerable dissension within the Bush administration over the use of these techniques; both military investigators and the FBI opposed them.

Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, has treated "a number of people" who had been subjected to forms of near-asphyxiation, including waterboarding. In an interview for The New Yorker, he argued that "it was indeed torture.

In an open letter in 2007 to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Human Rights Watch asserted that waterboarding can cause the sort of "severe pain" prohibited by 18 USC 2340 (the implementation in the United States of the United Nations Convention Against Torture), that the psychological effects can last long after waterboarding ends (another of the criteria under 18 USC 2340), and that uninterrupted waterboarding can ultimately cause death.[1]

Chase J. Nielsen, one of the U.S. airmen who flew in the Doolittle raid following the attack on Pearl Harbor, was subjected to waterboarding by his Japanese captors.[116] At their trial for war crimes following the war, he testified "Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I'd get my breath, then they'd start over again... I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death."[36] The United States hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war.[9]

Waterboarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in the Vietnam War.[121] On 21 January 1968, The Washington Post published a controversial front-page photograph of two U.S soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier participating in the waterboarding of a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang.[122] The article described the practice as "fairly common".[122] The photograph led to the soldier being court-martialled by a U.S. military court within one month of its publication, and he was discharged from the army.[121][123] Another waterboarding photograph of the same scene, referred to as "water torture" in the caption, is also exhibited in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.[124]


OR you can play legal word games like the Bush Admin did something akin to coming directly out of 1984.

I have shown this country saw it as torture in the past until Bush was President.. What changed? The wording... That is all.

 

Actually, he is actively moving left center as opposed to far crazy person left. This is because he has studied the ratings of oreilly and that show format. The nation no longer wants to see crazy right or crazy left. Everyone likes their news entertainment goldilocks nowadays and stewart is probably smart enough to know he can no longer ignore certain things in the Obama administration without looking like a crazed crackpot leftist. Actually although he is a lefty Ive always found his clever brand of humor entertaining. Good to see he put Pelosi on the spot, that was great wasnt it?

 

Flying a drone over a country and killing someone in it is an act of war. Stop trying to make it sound better then it is ~

 

love Jon Stewart, he tells it like it is in a way that both parties appreciate, can learn from and enjoy

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we even shoot American terrorists in this county with a gun if that is what the authorities have on hand, when they do not surrender (and yes that is even before they are proved guilty) - do republicans disagree with this?

.

 

In the act of apphrension is not the same as bombing a wedding.

 

Attention ~

Contributors should maintain focus on the thread topic. Don't make it personal.

 

I'm sick of the whole notion that the USA can't fight back. If torturing one jerk saves the lives of thousands of Americans, then I'm fine with it. If taking out a terrorist saves the lives of thousands of Americans, I'm fine with it. Whether it was Bush's outsourced torture or Obama's drone strikes, they had their reasons... and they were pretty good.

 

I wonder how you would feel if that was a family member of yours being killed or tortured with no evidence against them outside of the Presidents wishes..

 

Torture is illegal and employed by the incompetent.

Not reasons, excuses.

 

the problem isn't the drones, it's that they are being used to murder Americans.

 

Let me make that question even more fitting. If instead of a "known terrorist", some unarmed man who the lying president claimed was a "known terrorist", but can't tell you who even after he kills him (for what reason) and this same guy LIED about who he targets and why, multiple times, but he says this, would you mind if he demolished the entire shopping-mall with your family in it?

"Known terrorist" is just one of our new fascist clichés. You can't "know" anything, especially with no trial. Plus, they can be fed whatever bs about whatever intel from foreign intelligence, like they did to round up many of the innocent hostages to stick into the Gitmo gulag.

The biggest "known terrorist" in the world is Barack O'bomber.

 

This topic is about the only thing I won't criticize Obama on, except he is less upfront as to why we have drone strikes and keeps a place called guantanamo bay. He won't admit we are war -- but acts like it.

When an American Citizen joins an organization that wants to destroy America and admits they are a traitors to America and moves overseas to impliment actions against America-----well I don't think our response now is much if any different if 70 some years ago --- a German-American traveled to Germany and started working with Hitler against allied forces.. When we bombed German cities---how many American citizens who chose to live in Germany as Germans were killed? And would there be this outcry if there were such Americans killed with the civilians?

When IRS starts bombing Tea Party houses.....I will worry. But Obama is working against a real enemy in this case.