From the last report I could find, of the 779 detainees that have been held at the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, 5 died there. Not, high for a prison population.
you realize that many, many more detainees exist across the globe rather than just those at Gitmo. in all, there have been more than 100 deaths amongst those detained by the United States and subjected to the Cheney torture program (according to the Pentagon and Human Rights groups).
However, 18 former detainees had taken part in new terrorist offences and 43 others were also suspected of involvements in attacks.
Do we care about those innocent lives lost?
you're setting up a false choice, and you're totally misunderstanding the situation. further, do you think that torturing someone is going to make them more or less likely to return to jihadist activity? do you think that the torture program is going to make more people sympathetic to the jihadist cause?
you're falling back on hackneyed Bush-era false choices. you're trying to say that if i disagree with anything that has been done in defense of the country, then i want innocent people to die. that kind of thinking is dead and buried, and the truth is that the choices aren't as stark as you and Cheney would like to believe.
When you take these "acts of torture" and remove them from the context of...
1) Our lack of, and urgent need for, information about our enemies size, strength, organization, location and weaponry in the immediate post 9/11 years.
2) That this is not a Geneva Convention signing, uniformed, flag carrying enemy but one that intentionally hides among, dresses like and targets civilians.
3) These acts were done with full CIA and Presidential approval along with Congressional oversight.
4) 9/11 occurred in great part because of intelligence and law enforcement agencies inability to "connect the dots."
5) The full details of attacks prevented and innocent lives saved that has yet to be told.
...you distort the truth.
1. you're assuming that good intelligence was only available if the US went beyond legal interrogation techniques that have been used for the past 200 years. what the evidence shows is that torture gives you bad evidence, and that there has never, ever been a ticking time bomb scenario, and that there was no evidence gained through waterboarding that was unattainable through any other means. you can't possibly believe that 83 nuggets of previously unattainable information were coughed up after the 83 instances of waterboarding in a single month.
2. no matter the Geneva Convention, it's still all illegal because the president cannot torture unless he has the approval of Congress. the president has no legal right to do so without Congress' passage of legislation repealing the laws and treaties governing such torture. of course, the M.O. of the Bush administration is that if the president does something, then it is by definition legal.
3. we know that "presidential" approval under Bush is meaningless, and we know that the CIA were operating under the guidelines given to them by the Bush "lawyers," and that they were also used to usurp the powers of Congress to oversee such activities. the Bush White House conceived of the Bush as a permanent commander-in-chief with extraordinary powers to interpret and overturn laws for the sake of the national defense. America is not Bush's Banana Republic, even if he tried to keep it as such.
4. agreed. what does this have to do with waterboarding? might it have more to do with Arab and Farsi linguists who were fired from the Army because they were gay? might it have to do with the Bush Administration's pre-9-11 preoccupation with China and the Cold War? might it have something to do with a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States"? we can point to intelligence failures all day, but to say that there were illegal activities that would have somehow prevented 9-11 is, again, evidence of the false choice you've constructed (and probably necessary for you to continue your defense of the torture program).
5. again, the burden of proof is for you to say that such information would have been unattainable without illegal, Gestapo and Khamer Rouge techniques. i sense that you are comfortable not knowing that your government is committing crimes, ostensibly on your behalf (but, as we've seen, to no measurable avail), and that you have no right to know what your government is doing. but some of us believe that the strength of our government is it's supposed transparency.
But if political witch-hunts are more important than defending the nation against hostile enemies who cares right?
well, gosh, INDY, when you frame it that way, what am i going to say? because either we torture people, or everyone dies.
which might have a modicum of credibility if any of it actually worked and intelligence was gathered that would have been unattainable outside of the clear, legal interrogation methods that have been used for hundreds of years.
maintaining who we are and what we'll do and what we'll won't is more important than causing a few evil people to suffer.
it's about us, it's not about them.
besides, you're tucked away safely in Indiana. if anyone's going to be killed by a terrorist attack, it's me on the DC metro.