CIA Praises Deal; Harsh Techniques Would Continue

This is disgusting, coming as it does on the heels of the news that Maher Arar was kidnapped and tortured for ten months, and reportedly confessed under duress to crimes of which he was entirely innocent.
Let’s be clear that torture is not a search for truth, because the truth and his personal innocence did not save Mr. Arar.
It is sick revenge and a perversion performed upon helpless subjects by sadistic sociopaths who have no business calling themselves Americans.
Anyone who does not stand against these barbaric practices is just as sick and perverted as the torturers themselves.
Just so we’re clear, I am a United States Army veteran and my patriotism is beyond question. Click the link.

Lets see, making terrorists uncomfortable,thousands dying. Tough choice.

Hayden’s grandmother would confess to a terror plot if “waterboarded”.
This is not about information. It’s about intimidation. It’s a psyop against the “free” people of the world. DRTC = Disorientation, Regression, Transference, Compliance. We are all complicit.
Wake up Americans!

I’ve got to hand it to the Democrats. The strategy of allowing the Republicans to “thrash out” their differences on the treatment and prosecution of detainees has played out exactly as planned…for the Republicans. Don’t let anyone convince you that you can go to the well too often…that is if you are a Republican and your opponent is a fully inept Democratic Party.
Amidst a trend of favorable polling data and a firestorm of speeches by the President to refocus the voting public on their fear of terrorism, the Democrats stood in the background for the past two weeks and watched what the GOP will call the difficult work of creating legislation that preserves our commitment to civil liberties while at the same time providing our determined President with the essential tools needed to pursue those who seek to kill us all.
OK, perhaps I’m being too harsh. There is a possibility that in the past two weeks the Democrats were able to devise their sixth iteration of a campaign slogan and strategy to roll out with less than 50 days to the election. Perhaps they could call it “Fifty States, Fifty Days…But Never Fifty Percent”! It’s catchy, it’s succinct, and it may well be accurate come November 8th.

Repack, I don’t see anyone questioning your patriotism, and I’d like to personally thank you for serving our country in our nation’s armed forces. But the simple fact of the matter, as Brian Ross has stated in other forums, is that the six techniques advocated for by the CIA do work very effectively. Ross has stated that 14 terrorists have been interrogated using these methods, and all 14 have given up useful intelligence that has saved American lives as a result. None of these terrorists have been permanently injured using these techniques. Not one.
The White House and Congress have merely asked that these effective techniques be continued, to save the lives of our friends and neighbors.
Most Americans have a Jacksonian view of dealing with our nation’s enemies. We will afford every right and privilege afforded by the laws of war to an honorable enemy soldier captured on the field of battle. If you fight America honorably, we will treat your honorably, even though you are our enemy. At the same time, if our enemy dismisses the agreed upon common decencies and rights, there are no legal moral or ethical reasons that we should treat them with kidd gloves at the expense of our own lives.
If our enemies are dishonorable, attacking innocent men, woman, and children instead of legitimate targets, then our gloves will come of as well, and we have the right to engage you in total war with all the methods at our disposal to defeat you. And yet, the United States has conducted an exceedingly restrained and honorable war against terrorists and the nations that support terrorism.
Even though we have the unquestioned capability, we have not launched the large-scale carpet bombing campaigns against cities and civilian populations that we did in the Second World War. We use precision-guided weaponry whenever possible, with protection of even enemy-sympathetic citizenry always at the forefront of our mission planning. Our honored military veterans are fully aware of the great pains we take to minimize civilian casualties, even though the pains we take to ensure the safety of innocents often puts our soldiers lives at risk in exchange. We have without a doubt, and without contradiction, the most lethal and compassionate military force that this planet has ever seen.
But even though we are compassionate, we recognize that to survive as this great and compassionate nation, we cannot be weak and cowardly, as many would clearly like us to be.
The techniques we use are unpleasant and coercive, but they are not torture, and it is both dishonest and disheartening to see our own media attempting to blur the line in such a way to make all such life-saving intelligence gathering techniques a crime.
By their own repeated, long-standing and well-documented series of abuses of basic human rights and dignities, the terrorists we have captured have forfeited any right for human treatment, and yet we consistently treat them better than we do domestic criminals in our prisons and jails.
We are clearly on moral ground here, no matter how willing many people in our own nation are willing to give that ground away.

Bob Owens -
You make no distinction between a terrorist and a suspect. People are innocent until proven guilty under the due process of law.
With your frame, interrogators can decided someone is guilty, and coerce him to talk.
The result will be false confessions.

All of the legislators who backed this bill or even voted for it, should have first been made to experience this water boarding, and then decide for themselves what that constitutes.

Eric,
As has been stataed, these tactics have been useful in getting info out of the top 14 Al Queda suspects in custody. This info has saved lives.
Of the 6 tactics, water boarding is the only one that comes close to “torture” and it still leaves no physical injury or harm to the suspect. Also it is only used as a last resort.
According to Brian Ross, water boarding cracked Khalid Sheik Mohammed and let to info that disrupted a plot to crash airliners into the library tower in LA.
Also, these tactics are not used indiscriminantly on “innocent until proven guilty” persons. They are used on known high level terrorists that have info that can save lives.
I’m sure you can understand the difference.

Is it clear to everyone yet that McCauin is a hypocrite? He’s always so eager to talk like an independant more concerend with what’s right that with party politics. Then he winds up time again siding with Bush against his own publicly declared principals.

“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Law and Justice. There is no such thing as a terrorist suspect. A person is innocent until proven guilty. A victim of rape is not permanently harmed. The right for a person to have their day in court prior to any form of punishment is about protecting us from our own governments, just because they say so, is not enough, they must prove it in a court of law.

Torture has long been proven to be ineffective and produces nothing more than untruths, severe discomfort and/or death. There has been no due process for those held in limbo in the black hole called Gitmo. Bush is a pathological liar. He says they’re terrorists and has decided to become their judge and executioner. Let’s see the evidence he has before we fall for another of his lies. This is all about saving his own behind from prosecution for war crimes once he is out of power.

We’ve been TOLD that torture gained important information and saved lives. But a fact check of the cases Bush cited proved that the information was already known PRIOR TO capture of most of these suspects, and in at least one case, a false confession was made that the president used in fanning the flames for war in Iraq. All the torture in the world will not gain enough information to protect Americans when our government is busily creating more enemies than we can kill.
The debate against torture is NOT about who is being tortured or why. It is about us, it is about America, it is about who we are and what we stand for. We’ve tortured a number of innocent men, some of them to death. That cannot be undone. If we are now willing to become as sadistic and totalitarian as our enemy, demanding that other nations change themselves to suit us and our national interests, then Bin Laden has already won and no amount of money or firepower will rescue any kind of victory worth having.

Brian …
If you care at all about America,
investigate this legislation and it’s implications fully,
as it goes Far beyond the somewhat trivial use mentioned above.
This legislation should scare the hell out of you, and all Americans.
Use the Vast Power you all (in the Media) have of informing & educating the public,
(to influence outcome contructively), to collectively use Truth as propoganda about this legislation.
Conspire with other News Organizations if necessary to create an immidiate Informed public uproar against this legislation, (in it’s present form).

“Rights” are brought up because we are a nation of “LAWS”. Can it be that people are idiots for believing this? Many have died for this truth. Should we scrap our laws when we think that they don’t work for us? Who wants to live in a totalitarian state?
The people 230 yrs ago believed that everybody should have their day in court. In this country even murderers and rapists have this right. Why? It turns out that some of them were found to be innocent.
Incidently, for all the Faithful, in the Good Book it says: “…the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you”.
A greater danger is that living under one-party rule as we do today is a recipe for disaster because it is easier to get some very bad laws passed, laws that can come back to haunt us.

This sums it up -
Kudos to the one who posted this…
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemed to repeat it…”

I am also a veteran. There seems to be outrage about the way we treat terrorists and terrorist suspects. Where is the outrage when innocent civilians are kidnapped and beheaded by these extremist groups? There seems to be a huge double standard in this country.

I cannot claim to be a veteran or serving in the forces, currently I am only a cadet.
Whilst I do not agree with the torture at all, I can understand why the US government thinks it is required…
I’m not going to get into a discussion about the torture itself, I think that’s being handled well enough. I will say this however:
How do we know those being tortured are guilty? The US government is increasingly moving towards a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. With people being imprisoned without trial or evidence… The line MUST be drawn somewhere or SUSPECTED but not proven terrorists will be tortured soon… and there is BOUND to be at least one mistake.
America is supposedly the land of the free. It isn’t.
The question is, do you want to preserve your country by being viscious and tyranical, or do you want to lead the world into a better age by setting a good example?
Iain – England

torture ‘em all