Lalo Alcaraz for December 10, 2014

The black hood is the Headsman’s/ Executioner’s garb…not a reverse-KKK reference…but yes, the Dems condemned torture, then did not document/expose it, allowed it to continue – expedience over principle.

Why did the Bush administration punish the prison guards at Abu Ghraib?

What the prison guards did was torture, but what the CIA did was just “enhanced interrogation”?

And it was all nice ‘n’ “legal”.

James Risen, in “State of War” lays it out, in 2006, as did many others, even in 2002 regarding “intelligence gathering” before our invasion.

The Bush folks proved Goebbels was right, and still very much alive in swaying public opinion with ignorance and lies. While I regret the nation does share a degree of blame, many of us protested, and presented facts, so the blame DOES belong at the top, not stalling the buck at the lowest levels, while they count their profits from the war, and torture.

What convention have the terrorists signed? “My” government never gassed millions and burned their bodies simply because of their religious beliefs. The current crop of murderers are playing a game plan from ~ the year 650. Current politics are moot. They hate all non-Musims and their fellow Muslims who don’t kiss their boots. We owe them no consideration.

Nice subversion of everything this country stands for. Really, what Constitution do you think you live under.

Partisan Political Pulp for Partisans.

Sorta like Benghazi? Except this time with a whole lot more factual basis and import for the nature of our country’s government moving forward.

You do realize that there are treaties we’ve signed that cover this sort of thing? And that, according to constitutional law, these treaties are considered the law of the land? So actually, in this way we have granted rights to non-US citizens outside the country. The growlings of of Haven’t-Met-a-Human-Right-I-Wouldn’t-Violate Dick Cheney notwithstanding.

Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I would expand this to include people who are willing to sacrifice the moral basis of this country for their own narrow-minded quest for vengeance.

This is the same America that fire bombed the cities of Germany, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Not to mention the nuclear weapons that we dropped on the cities of Japan.

And both of those have stained this country’s moral being.

What is it that we are now that we were not then?

A lot more willing to use remote bombing to kill those we’ve decided are our enemies, along with numerous innocent bystanders, for one. Judging by what you’ve said so far, I’m sure this does not bother you. But it should.

Liberal angst purely for political theater.

Tell that to John McCain, who has been a strong advocate for the release of the torture report. Are you saying that the fact our government had a multi-year, widespread torture program doesn’t matter?

Pelosi and Rockefeller were on the National Security Committee and knew exactly what the CIA was doing, and even encouraged it.

Let’s say they did (and there are indicators that they shamefully at least didn’t object). Does this make the fact any less disgraceful, any less despicable? At this moment, there should be a strongly bipartisan push to bring out the full truth about the CIA’s torture program, but the Republicans (minus a few—most notably McCain) have taken this on as on more thing to obstruct. Because why? Probably because it was an administration from their party that ran this program in the first place. And so, once more, we see Republicans put party over nation. And a few Democrats dragging their feet along with them.

Alcatraz finally comments on Fast and Furious.

Alcatraz [sic] finally comments on Fast and Furious.

Nice Breitbartian filter ya got going on there, manteo.

Your definition of torture and mine are not the same.

Quite obviously. But mine lines up a whole lot more with that of McCain, the UN Convention on Torture (which the US signed and ratified), and folks from across the political spectrum who disagree with you. Frankly, unless you’ve actually undergone any of the methods you list, you have no legs to stand on saying they’re not torture. Here’s an idea, read pro-war Christopher Hitchens’ piece on experiencing waterboarding. Then go try it out yourself and report to us how it went.

Making people think they are about to die (which waterboarding does) is torture. Forcing food up a prisoner’s rectum (particularly when there are a whole number of other ways to force nutrition into them) is rape and torture. Making people clearly under one’s control physically and/or mentally suffer in a whole variety of ways is, in fact, torture. This includes methods the CIA used that led to the death of prisoners. In fact, it seems that many experienced CIA operatives themselves recognized all this as torture and would have nothing to do with it, so that it got left to junior personnel with little to no training, as well as contractors. Or to other regimes that were more willing to torture. So congrats, you’ve thrown your support behind methods exercised by some of the most brutal regimes on the planet. With a screen name like yours, you might do well to revisit the Nuremberg trials. You seem to have forgotten their lessons.

with a doctor supervising to make sure our “victim” isn’t permanently disabled

That doctor has fundamentally violated his or her oath and should at the least be barred for life from practicing medicine. Or maybe you think ethics are simply inconveniences? As the Sydney Morning Herald put it recently,

“We say our way of life is based on the inalienable rights of the individual and that all people are equal before the law.

“When a government tramples on those principles, arguing exceptional circumstances are sufficient to extinguish an individual’s human rights and granting some of its employees the power to act outside the law in a bid to force confessions of doubtful utility, it has become a terrorist regime in its own right.

“The only way to defend a society’s laws and values is to uphold them, not to sacrifice them at the first sign of turbulence.”

Thank god there weren’t liberals like you around during WWII or we never would have won.

You are supposing the indiscriminate firebombing of Dresden (just 12 weeks before Germany’s surrender and as the Allies were making strong, inexorable gains to win the war) and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved military gains that more targeted attacks would not have. And recall that Japan had been making overtures of surrender even before those bombs were dropped. But yet we went ahead with the indiscriminate killings of massive numbers of civilians. Sort of like, say, people flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In full-throatedly defending torture, you run the risk of sacrificing a piece of your humanity. I hope you will see past your reflexive defense of neoconservative policies and step back from that brink.

I would have personally put a bullet in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s head.

Ah, so you’re in this on the revenge tip. You do realize that it was your hero Churchill who said, "Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance,” right?

And you need some WWII history lessons as well.

Well, that’s conveniently nonspecific. Why not enlighten us?

Yeah, his invocation of the 9/11 terrorists as torturers is quite literally rhetoric from Cheney. Dick, is that you? Taken any trips to, oh, Switzerland lately?