Obama’s First 100 Days

Another boring and predictable Round Table discussion. You can’t investigate torture without asking why they had to waterboard 2 people 260+ times. Some reporting this week (but never on this show) suggests it was to find a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, for, if not falsifying reasons for the Iraq is not a crime, then I don’t know what is a crime!

Legal remedies for probable violations of the law are never political wrangling. Legal remedies bringing the light of day upon shrouded acts allow democracy where continued disinformation prevents democracy and is a form of diabolical tyranny the world has seen too much of. Legal remedies allow righteous citizens to once again hold up their heads. Legal remedies restore America to a rightful place in the family of nations. Legal remedies are the only way folks in other nations can be inspired that economic investment in America is a prudent idea. Legal remedies are the road for America to take as a necessary part of dusting off the transgressions of the past in order to get to any sort of future including a place at the table with honorable people. In short legal remedies going up and down the whole cascade of the acts in question are the only thing that can save the America we find ourselves in; they are our one ticket left to declaring that we are still a democracy who respects the rule of law in the end.

Have you forgotten what Reagan said? Are you going to put him in the “you libs are a joke” category? This is from his signing statement ratifying the UN Convention on Torture from 1984:
“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

I don’t think Ronald Reagan would have changed his mind on this. He would have held firm to doing “whatever it takes to keep us safe”, but only if it is lawful. I think he would have considered it more important for us to maintain our standards than to give in to terrorist ways.
I watched the towers fall. I saw the horror. The terrorists weren’t attacking buildings they were attacking our ideals as Americans. For us to make their ideals (torture) ours is giving in and giving up.
Ronald Reagan was not that kind of American. He was not one of give in and give up. To do so would make a mockery of the sacrifice of WWII.

Missed the part of the program where you and your guests discussed the implications of this explosive news, George:
http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/the-rest-is-silence/

Listening to Cheney and the other neo-cons defend using torture is like giving credence to a rapist claiming that his victims asked for it. Why on earth should people find their comments credible when they are the immoral bastards that authorized the use of torture in the first place?

You too are right JR. The terrorists are more humane than us. They just take care of business no questions asked. Dead right JR.

Right JR, because pouring water on the 9/11 masterminds’s head 266 times is far worse than beheading a fully conscience innocent boy.
Wow, do you really think you sound credible when you post nonsense like that?

On November 29, 2007, John McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, “Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding.”
Dan, do you know what you sound like when you post nonsense?

You need to have a show about how the Taliban is in Pakistan and what if anything we can do to help stabilize that situation. The taliban being 60 miles from nukes! That is scary!

we already know terrorists will kill and maim, cause grief unspeakable for noteriety and public recognition..
the question is how we act, not how they act.. and WHY we act as we do..
i don’t recall asking any terrorists permission to execute them, and wonder why a battlefield courtsmartial, or kangaroo court, isn’t considered an adequate answer to those found opposing our interests. i’d personally consider it considerably less guilt-causing to HANG terrorists rather’n torturing ‘em, under a brisk and efficient military style process.
Incarceration isn’t sufficent, demands legal justification EVENTUALLY if you admit to it, and can’t be handed off to torturers without splitting the guilt and shame..
Whether we call waterboarding torture or not, it’s absolutely certain that the INTENT was in fact to apply pain and suffering sufficient to coerce results unobtainable otherwise.
The ostensible value of such results may have been overrated, underrated, or overlooked entirely.. but the results of the choice to coerce information ‘to the legal limits’ are fairly obvious.
IF we are, in crisis, damned and doomed to the actions of our enemies in response to their threats, we ought at the very least have the shamed conscience required to both admit it, and condemn it..
I’d be ok with a bipartisan truth commission, but the dueling headlines aspect of the partisan split on ‘was it torture and was it worth it’ has peeved me intensely. Ya’ll who don’t think it was torture and ya’ll who think it was worth it, have to prove your point cause you ain’t a majority this time.
So if the road to justification looks steep and muddy, that’s what it costs to lose elections. Get used to it.

ONE QUESTION:
If “enhanced interrogation techniques” are legal – why did the previous administration need and seek legal cover for something they claim is not against the law or violates international laws?

BTW George, I would defend to the death your right to speak anything you want, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. And you know that free speech road runs in both directions. It is not a one way street for libs. Although the media bias would make us think that these days. When they have so much influence over and election and biased poll reporting it is really getting scary how lopsided the “free speech” balance is becoming. You hide behind the bill of rights as if it is only for your side of the aisle. It is time for a wake up call to America to get things evened out a bit don’t you think. Let’s tip the scales back to the left a bit in 2010. How about it?

I think the true debate will begin after we are attacked on our own soil again, thanks to the gutless celebrity-in-chief and co.

It just doesn’t make sense to me that you would argue on the side of the terrorists.
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I haven’t heard anyone arguing “on the side of the terrorist”. I’ve only heard Republicans and Democrats alike who love what America stands for and America does NOT torture.

“America does NOT torture”
wish you were right, but America has tortured and the documents prove that.

“Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding.”
First Point: The key word there is “among” what other acts did they commit? Was waterboarding the worst thing they did? The Japanese did far worse things than that! And I really doubt they had doctors and psychiatrists on hand to insure the well-being of those being water boarded. We had professionals from the medical industry on hand to make sure there was no harm done to these animals.
Second Point: You libs seem to run around spouting this nonsense that the “morals of the U.S.” are the most important issue in this matter. Here’s a wake-up call – the MOST important issue here is saving American lives! I would gladly waterboard Kalid Sheik Muhammed 1,000,000,000 times if would prevent a second 9/11. Heck I’d do it that many times just to save one American life.
But while we’re on the topic of morals, why are you libs so concerned about the treatment of the 9/11 mastermind, but have no issue with partial birth abortion, or allowing fetuses that are aborted but born alive to die? Remember, YOUR savior voted for a bill that prevent doctors from helping aborted fetuses that are viable.
As usual, the libs are more worried about international perception and their own feelings than they are about human life.

Doesn’t matter and we haven’t only been waterboarding, we also have been using “other” acts that were abusive. Frankly I don’t care what excuse you attempt, torture of prisoners is NOT moral or acceptable. You neo-cons seem dead set to turn us into the very monsters we’re fighting. I refuse to accept the argument that “you must become barbaric to fight barbarians”, that rubbish and nonsense. That’s the kind of argu7ment you get from a 2nd grader, “well they started it”……..Grow Up.

I’m questioning the validity of the comment, so what poll, where says that 51% support torture, Fox News?

Enough wrote “This is not a political issue – this is the foundation of who we are as a country.”
This is 100% BS!!! Obama cherry-picked the memos and information he released to make the Bush Administration look bad!
If you are so interested in having this debate, then surely you agree with Cheney who is calling for the memos that show the valuable information that was gained from water boarding.
I am also sure you are all for releasing all of the meeting minutes from the briefings where the heads of BOTH parties were told exactly what techniques we are going to do.
All you and Obama are interested in, is criminalizing political viewpoints that you disagree with.

william earle. Sorry but the Japs and Germans were prosecuted for FAR worse things than water boarding.
As Ive said many times, it would be GREAT if the WORST thing to happen to American hostages would be water boarding.
Go watch the Nick Berg video then get back to me on atrocity.

LOL! All two of them? One dated 7/13/04 and the other 1/1/05 and only certain pages within those documents.
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Doesnt matter if there’s just one of them. If that one document shows that American lives were saved by using these techniques, then it should out for the public to see.
Where do you get this bizarre idea that what matters is the number of memos that prove good intelligence was gathered? How many is enough for you? 5? 10?

Enough wrote: “We don’t torture.”
I agree don’t torture. And we didn’t torture. Water boarding was not defined as torture until Obama defined it as such.

Water boarding was not defined as torture until Obama defined it as such.
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Nice try.
The Geneva Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture all it torture.
The interrogators at GTMO trained the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. It’s not just waterboarding.

Sorry, but torture is wrong. The attempt to justify puts the proponents firmly on the side of the Nazis at Nuremburg who would have said amen to the idea that torture works and is therefor justified. If you do not think the architects of the torture program should not be prosecured, no matter what else you may say, you support torture. This includes you, George Will. There may be occasional successes, but this is like anectodal evidence in science, it often does not stand up under examination. But even before we had modern sophisticated approaches to interrogation, our Founding Fathers opposed torture in the Bill of Rights – no one compelled to testify against himself (coerced confessions) no cruel and unusual punishment. You know this, George Will. If you still support torture, you might as well rip up the Constitution. Certainly, a constant concern of the Bush Cheney administration was finding ways around the Constitutional checks and balances, in part because of torture and other short cuts. George Stephanopoulos, replace will with Sam Shepard.

Senator McCain made Abu Ghraib a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign saying the “United States does not torture” before the economy collapsed. Now he is backpedaling saying let’s move on and not investigate the memos?
Had former VP Cheney not gone on FoxNews and said “the Obama administration is making our country less safe” by releasing these memos……maybe certain Democrats would not be so ticked off (re: Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont whom Cheney dropped the f-bomb on the Senate floor toward!!)

It is truly a sad commentary on the USA when it is safer to be a terrorist than to be a fetus.
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Interesting. Bet you support abortion if someone is giving birth to a terrorist.

I understand that the prisoners at Gitmo get to eat lemon chicken and rice, and that it costs somewhere around 36 dollars a day to feed these animals (because that’s what they are). It costs the average American soldier stationed there 17 dollars a day.
The standards there just don’t meet the Geneva convention standards, but exceeds it. So for Spain and those liberal losers (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch), you have no idea what human rights are, much less know the difference between right and wrong. Some of these animals have innocent blood on their hands, and people like you perpetrate it.
The prisoners there spit on the soldiers and even assaulted an army nurse there by bashing in half her face while she was helping a prisoner. I would not mind those terrorists tortured to keep my family safe at night. It was used when we needed to use it. What do you think Al Quieda will do to you if the captured an American soldier ??
As for water boarding, is that really torture. Would you really think it’s torture on a hot day in Texas if they did that to you ?

When are you going to talk about the beheadings by the terrorists? That only made front page for a few days. Curious.

Torture is illegal in our country. Bush and Cheney broke the law and should be prosecuted. If people who object to torture are called liberals, then what are people called who approve of torture?
I suggest they be called Nazi’s. Isn’t that fair enough when we are playing these word games?

P.S., Dan, a good lawyer never asks a question unless they know the answer…

After WW2, the United States, acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts- martial, and as a participant in the international community, condemned and prosecuted the use of waterboarding by the Japanese against Unites States troops. In US military commissions, and as a participant in the International Tribunal for the Far East (based upon Nuremburg procedures), a number of Japanese troops and officials were convicted of torture for the use of waterbording. In 1968, a US soldier from the 1st Cavalry Division was documented as having waterboarded a Vietnamese soldier under interrogation. The event was photographed and appeared on the front page of the Washington Post on Jan. 21, 1968. The article stated that waterboarding “induces a fleeting sense of suffocation and drowning which is calculated to make a suspect talk…The water technique is said to be in fairly common use among Allied troops in Vietnam.” The Soldier (name unavailable) was court-martialed on Feb. 28, 1968. The outcome of the court-martial was a conviction….Unless waterboarding was deemed legal somewhere or sometime by us, it is still illegal….

For those who are pro-torture, I hope that you consider that this will not stop with terrorists. If we set a precedent both in the court of public opinion and legal courts, that these tactics are not torture, as long as are certified by government-hired physicians and psychologists to cause no long-term harm, and further that if it is allowed that this produces “credible, actionable” information — then what protection will we have as U.S. citizens. The Bill of Rights prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. If these tactics are now legally and popularly considered to not be cruel or unusual, and that information produced that way is credible – police and prosecutors will eventually start using it. Imagine a desperate Mike Nifong, trying to save his career, hiring Blackwater guards to have a few sessions with the Duke lacrosse players. After waterboarding them 183 times, if they provide information on each other as guilty parties, that information would be allowed as credible in the courts. Or, imagine if your kid went on spring break to Mexico and, after going along with the crowd, bought some drugs. Both the U.S. and Mexico are fighting a “war on drugs” — would you like the Mexican police and courts to be able to use tactics like this on your child? …Nothing happens in a vacuum. This WILL spread into the civilian legal system if it is allowed.

If you look at the poll results 48% were induced to say that torture “should be considered” in some cases. 2% were undecided.
Nevertheless it is disappointing that 48% are willing to consider torture in some cases.

So what new? The liberals want revenge against G. Bush. didn’t we know this? Should we allow this to happen? Of course not. Obama ia a weak president, but he knows how to stick his finger into the air and learn which way the public wind is blowing. And it is not blowing towards witch hunts.

I guess “velocity is a virtue” when you’re trying to ram a radical agenda down the throats of a economically shell-shocked populace before they wake-up to what you’re doing to the country. And what Obama is doing is dismantling everything that made America great… in the name of his wacked-out Marxist-professor mentors.
Seriously, only a fool would cheer programs with no historical precedent of success, i.e. astronomical pork-barrel spending while borrowing ALL of the money from communist China, a Jimmy Carter-esque pacifist foreign policy steeped in appeasement, embracing scum like Hugo Chavez while insulting traditional allies… and Obama and Co. display a pattern of dishonesty that is troubling, to say the least.
Check back with us in a year- when people start to come out of the ether after a couple international embarrassments and 10% inflation from the reckless print-money spending spree that The One if foisting on us.
In three years, people will wince at the very mention of the name “Obama”- and the GOP could win 40 states running Gilbert Gottfried.

My how things have changed. 8 years ago, it was so important that we expose what went on in the Oval office, when it was a private and personal matter that would not really have an impact on our world standing. Now, we all need to sweep what goes on in the Oval office under the rug, cuz it will impact our overall security.
What happen to all “the truth will set us free” right wingers that were preaching 8 years. Oh yeah, if we’re talking about right winger being the ones to moving forward (let’s not focus on the past folks) what about all that, Obama pals around with known terrorists, Palin’s Bill Ayers comments. Her saying and doing anything to get elected.
I want to know all the details and reasons why events happens over the past 8 years, so we don’t repeat it moving forward. Taking a blind eye on it, under the guise of “our country’s security” will only weaken this country even more.
The beauty of this country is we can vote someone in office who will expose our past indiscretions. John McCain would have never allowed this type of exposure to happen… thank goodness he lost.
I don’t want to wait 20 years to find out the whole truth and nothing but the truth on this mess.

When using ABC/Washington poll numbers the show does not come across as an presenting an equinox of poll data. There is probably a large section of the country that does not believe in those poll numbers. To have a meaningful discussion going there needs to be independents and conservatives and liberals. Too much of the same Washington views lends itself to boredom.

What libs fail to understand is that this is a WAR on terror! We were at war with this animals! They are still at war with us, but Obama tells us we are just carrying out an “overseas contingency operation” or some other lib-speak nonsense. This is nothing more than a return-to-pre-911-bury-my-head-in-the-sand wimpiness!
Libs argue that we can’t use water boarding b/c that would “lower” us to the terrorist standards or torture. By that logic, Americans would not be allowed to use guns or bombs during a war, while the enemy blows our guys to smithereens!

This just goes to show you, You can NEVER EVER trust a lib with the defense and security of this country or its people
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Remind me what party had the majority in the House, Senate and had a sitting President on 9/11 ?
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You got to be kidding right….hmmmmm? Carter dismantles the CIA, destroys the military, turns his back on allies, rewards enemies and what did we get from that? A stronger, more aggressive USSR and the emergence and prominence of militant Islam, taking advantage of a weak America, the loss of a pro western government in Iran, and Americans held hostage on foreign soil. We could not even mount a successful hostage rescue attempt mainly because of faulty equipment. We were in a ‘malaise’…. Carter’s words not mine!
Next comes Clinton. Although not as bad as Carter but close! Reducing the budgets of both the CIA and the military severely, severely reducing the emphasis on human intelligence in the CIA. Treating terroists attacks as traffic citations or worse ignoring them, placing roadblocks on the sharing of intelliegence between the federal agencies, refusing to take Bin Laden when Bin Laden was captured in North Afirca, failing to back the military and retreating on the ‘Blackhawk down’ incident. All to name a few, and I could go on and on…
We get attack, less than 8 months in the Bush Administration, and what has been the response…… Not a single terrorist attack against American civilians since then! For all his faults Bush kept us safe! You haters may not like that, but he did!!
Now we have an administration, that make’s Carter’s look strong in comparison!
Libs just have a different few on how to keep America and its people safe. First you have to operate from the premise that America is basically an evil country….you know blame America first. Then, if we only speak nicely to our enemies they will like us and not attack us, because after all we are the bad guys! And after all, the CIA and the military are the forces of evil. Then if we do get attack, well … we deserve it.
Again, you can NEVER, EVER trust a lib with the defense and security of this country or its people.

Is there a teleprompter repair person in the house? This durn teleprompter we bought for $50 million, keeps malfunctioning. And, when that happens the greatest speaker on earth is unable to even mumble. Maybe we broke it because we’ve been using it so durn much. Every where we go somewhere, we have to drag the thing along; no matter how small the event or how
brief the remarks, the world’s greatest speaker, gotta have it. Please, is there anybody out there who can take care of this?