Torture/Waterboarding: Discussion/Debate Thread

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Diemen said:


Terrorist loving conservatives... :tsk:



what's genuinely frightening, though, is that his refusal to torture people is one of the biggest problems the Republican elite -- Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, others -- have with McCain.
 
martha said:


This alone should scare the shit out of anyone who even for a minute thinks torture is acceptable for any reason.
Not when the person on the recieving end is a Muslim or an infidel who are commiting a crime by not kowtowing to God.
 
A_Wanderer said:
Not when the person on the recieving end is a Muslim or an infidel who are commiting a crime by not kowtowing to God.



true enough.

and were the power shifted, and said Muslim terrorist were doing the torturing, he's be using the EXACT same series of rationalizations in his own mind that 286whatever has used.
 
Irvine511 said:




true enough.

and were the power shifted, and said Muslim terrorist were doing the torturing, he's be using the EXACT same series of rationalizations in his own mind that 286whatever has used.
I doubt it, the waterboarding was done in 4 cases on top prisoners like KSM, it was more utilitarian than faith based.

Wait, for that poster you are exactly right.
 
A_Wanderer said:
I doubt it, the waterboarding was done in 4 cases on top prisoners like KSM, it was more utilitarian than faith based.



i'm comparing 286whatever to the theoretical Muslim terrorist.

he invoked God. i think the only invoking of God in these cases were by the tortured man shoulding that name out loud.
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:



you're right. we're no better than them. we obviously have no moral high ground, we have nothing to defend, we aren't any different. we just have to kill them first.


Moral high ground? You think an attitude of "moral high ground" will affect Al-Qaeda at all? You fight fire with fire. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

No, you're right though. If we just act moral, they'll leave us alone.:|

Irvine5whatever said:
you do realize that your boy, John McCain, is AGAINST waterboarding?

Yes, I'm well aware, Irvine5whatever.

Irvine5whatever said:
i'm comparing 286whatever to the theoretical Muslim terrorist.

Thanks for the comparison, Irvine5whatever. I'll remember that.

So, just for the record, let me get this straight:

Comparing a poster in here to a terrorist... ok
Calling President Bush a terrorist... ok
Pointing out a similarity between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler... NOT ok

Gotcha :up:

Anywho, I'm done with the particular topic. There's no point in continuing, especially getting quadruple-teamed and being compared to a terrorist. :up:
 
2861U2 said:


Moral high ground? You think an attitude of "moral high ground" will affect Al-Qaeda at all? You fight fire with fire. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

No, you're right though. If we just act moral, they'll leave us alone.:|




I didn't post that. Learn how to quote someone.

And no one is saying that taking the higher moral ground will affect Al Quada. It's doing the right thing, and it does affect the rest of the world watching us...

Something Jesus taught me. Remember when he placed the ear back on his enemy?
 
Originally posted by phillyfan26
You can't prove the person you've captured is a terrorist.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed? He is hardly some random "man of middle eastern appearance" off the street.
 
A_Wanderer said:
Khalid Sheik Mohammed? He is hardly some random "man of middle eastern appearance" off the street.

Ostrich%20with%20his%20head%20in%20the%20sand.gif
 
2861U2 said:


To be honest, that's a really tough one.

One can still be a Christian and recognize that Samson was hardly a hero--he was a deeply flawed, selfish man. The entire book of Judges if full of people who supposedly served God but were of highly questionable moral character--to put it lightly.

The difficulties of the rough-and-tumble times of the Old Testament aside; the Christian stance is made crystal clear by the man for who Christians are named--Jesus Christ.

I don't recall him making any exceptions in the turn the other cheek rule; I don't recall him expressing his toleration for violence against the bad guys.

If you want to support torture, fine--but have the guts to admitt that this is an area where your faith falls short. You know your faith calls you to love you enemies and do good to those that hurt you, but you don't want to do that--you can't do that. Don't try to bend and twist the Man who was tortured--to death by the way--to fit your point of view.

Apologies to those who are not Christians on the thread--this is not addressed to you.
 
A_Wanderer said:
Khalid Sheik Mohammed? He is hardly some random "man of middle eastern appearance" off the street.

Our law system has trials, and even in those trials, it's only "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," not "guilty with absolute certainty." These people aren't even getting to the trial process.
 
phillyfan26 said:


Our law system has trials, and even in those trials, it's only "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," not "guilty with absolute certainty." These people aren't even getting to the trial process.

For citizens of our country, not terrorists or enemy combatants.
They shouldn't expect to have the same rights as USA citizens, nor do they, only the liberal left is trying to foist it upon them.

This is why you can argue that modern liberalism is a mental disorder.:huh:

db
 
diamond said:


For citizens of our country, not terrorists or enemy combatants.



honey, i know you don't want to know this, but our President Bush has given himself the power to detain American citizens indefinitely, and to waterboard them. it all happens at his discretion.
 
On Sept 11, 2001, 4 American jetliners were hijacked and purposely crashed resulting in the death of all on board.

At the least that is murder plain and simple.

However, one of those jets, United Flight 93, was hijacked for a second time and taken down in a field solely to prevent the further loss of life that would have occurred had the jet been allowed to crash into a building in a major U.S. city. Did those "passengers" allow themselves to 'become the monster"?

Doesn't it matter that even though the result, intentionally crashing the plane and killing innocent airline passengers, was the very same -- the motive was completely different? Doesn't that matter? Isn't OK to sometimes do a bad thing to prevent a much worse thing?

Waterboarding a handful of key suspects is never acceptable, even if the motive is to possibly identify additional terrorists or gain actionable intelligence to prevent another mass murder? It simply can't be justified, right?

Then good luck with this.
Only one country has actually used atomic weapons to instantly kill several hundred thousand people, the majority being women and children.
 
maycocksean said:



I don't recall him making any exceptions in the turn the other cheek rule; I don't recall him expressing his toleration for violence against the bad guys.


Apologies to those who are not Christians on the thread--this is not addressed to you.


Our greatest soldier in World War I, Sergeant Alvin York, found justification. Read of his doubts and deeds.
 
INDY500 said:
On Sept 11, 2001, 4 American jetliners were hijacked and purposely crashed resulting in the death of all on board.

At the least that is murder plain and simple.

However, one of those jets, United Flight 93, was hijacked for a second time and taken down in a field solely to prevent the further loss of life that would have occurred had the jet been allowed to crash into a building in a major U.S. city. Did those "passengers" allow themselves to 'become the monster"?



you should go back and do some research to find out what actually happened. the passengers didn't fly the plane into the ground. the attempted an insurrection, and the hijackers themselves flew the plane into the ground. were the passengers able to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers, you can rest assured that they would ahve attempted some sort of landing or averted the crash that killed them all.

unless, of course, you want to propose that the plane was shot out of the sky by the US military.






[q]Waterboarding a handful of key suspects is never acceptable, even if the motive is to possibly identify additional terrorists or gain actionable intelligence to prevent another mass murder? It simply can't be justified, right?[/q]


nope.



Only one country has actually used atomic weapons to instantly kill several hundred thousand people, the majority being women and children.

the argument being that a full-scale invasion of the nation of Japan would have resulted in 800,000 American deaths and well over a million Japanese deaths. could you imagine a street-to-street, house-to-house battle in the streets of Tokyo?

i'm not saying i don't think that these were the only two options -- there was certainly a political motivation behind dropping the bomb, and many will say that Japan would have surrendered if given more time -- but of these two options, surely it actually was kinder to drop the bomb than invade Japan?
 
I can't believe the contortions some people will go through to justify both their religion and torture.

If you think Jesus would be ok with torturing, with giving the enemy a taste of its own medicine, then you've completely missed the point. Either that or your belief in God is a temporary thing that you can turn off when you get upset or when someone does something wrong.
 
Irvine511 said:


unless, of course, you want to propose that the plane was shot out of the sky by the US military.



Would the order to do that, shoot down a commercial airliner (murder those civilians) to stop an attack on the Capitol or White House, been justified?

I think so and that's my point. What's a handful of waterboard cases against blowing an American jet out of the sky on the moral outrage scale? Or launching a missile at a suspected terror house in Iraq knowing innocent people could be killed or injured. Or killing 200,000 Japanese to save many times more lives?
 
INDY500 said:



Would the order to do that, shoot down a commercial airliner (murder those civilians) to stop an attack on the Capitol or White House, been justified?

I think so and that's my point. What's a handful of waterboard cases against blowing an American jet out of the sky on the moral outrage scale? Or launching a missile at a suspected terror house in Iraq knowing innocent people could be killed or injured. Or killing 200,000 Japanese to save many times more lives?



you're doing the STING thing -- thinking all things are the same.

blowing a hijacked airliner out of the sky when it is known that it is heading for a civilian target is quite different from the President deliberately increasing his own power to expand the rules of what is and what isn't an acceptable method of interrogation. this is a policy, it is an actual program of interrogation, and it is applicable in more than just worst-case scenarios.

as John McCain has said, "Life is not "24"." it's not. there isn't going to be an airplane of civilians heading towards a tower and if we only had the power to waterboard someone, then we could somehow avert the airplane. there isn't going to be a ticking bomb in a building and we'll only find out where it is before it goes off if we waterboard someone.

life doesn't work this way. these are not the situations we ever face. and you're still ignoring the fact that torture does not work. people will say anything to get you to stop torturing them. so what happens? you spend countless resources checking out tips that you *wanted* to be true, rather than the ones that were true.

haven't we learned the lesson from Iraq? you get bad intelligence precisely when you try to make your information-gathering fit a prescribed course of action. intelligence is not supposed to support a policy, policy is supposed to be designed around intelligence. when you torture, you get the information you've already decided you want to get because the man will tell you what you want to hear in order to get you to stop.

so what happens? you get the Soviet Union. the good people leave, and the sadists take over, and false confessions are deliberately extracted.
 
Diemen said:
I can't believe the contortions some people will go through to justify both their religion and torture.

If you think Jesus would be ok with torturing, with giving the enemy a taste of its own medicine, then you've completely missed the point. Either that or your belief in God is a temporary thing that you can turn off when you get upset or when someone does something wrong.



and for all their wailing about moral relativism, they're suprisingly relativist about torture.

premarital sex is never okay, but torture is sometimes?

i'd rather my 16 year old be having sex than waterboarding anybody.
 
Diemen said:
I can't believe the contortions some people will go through to justify both their religion and torture.

If you think Jesus would be ok with torturing, with giving the enemy a taste of its own medicine, then you've completely missed the point. Either that or your belief in God is a temporary thing that you can turn off when you get upset or when someone does something wrong.

What happened to the separation of church and state? Why is GWB said to be "imposing his religion on Americans over abortion and Gay marriage" and then taken to task for not "imposing his religion" when it comes to national defense. Regardles of what some of our more fanatic posters may think, Bush does not rule over a theocracy. He may spend hours at night on his knees seeking guidance and asking forgiveness for some of his actions, but his highest duty remains to protect the citizens of the United States.

To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven...A time of war, And a time of peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1,8)
 
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