Tom Toles for August 27, 2009

Obvious, but some people are a little slow to catch on.

Torture is immoral whether or not it works. The fact that it doesn’t work just gives those who would obscure the act’s basic immorality one less obfuscatory justification.

And I guess that little person in the back, pointing and laughing, is the ACLU.

I agree. It did blacken the reputation also someone being tortured will say anything to make it stop. You cannot trust what anyone being tortured says. How many were tortured who knew nothing. Some also died. All information they gained was gotten BEFORE enhanced interrogation was used. Also I thought America was supposed to be above all that and a more civilized caring country. Where were all the SUPPOSED christians?

I cannot believe we have to go through the charade of investigating ‘if torture works or not’. It doesn’t- interrogation experts agree. You literally get more flies with honey than you do vinegar. Obama need to wake up and stop this leftover Bush sh*t.

Charlie, this tired, unlikely example is so last year. Watch some more 24 videos in order to come up with a new one.

Hey Charlie,

Did you hear this one? - A really good man, with a beautiful wife and clean, honest kids, has something bad done to him, or his family, by a truly evil person. Then he gets to do amazingly bad things to this person who has wronged him. But see he’s doing good by doing all these bad things! It’s so cool!

Charlie

A terrorist is captured by the authorities, and claims to have planted a bomb, but won’t say where. The man in charge is asked for persmission to ‘put him to the question’, but he refuses to do so, having once been tortured himself.

Hours of tension pass,…and there’s no explosion, NO bomb.

Wanna know the difference between your scenario and mine?

Yours is hypothetical

Mine actually happened, Algeria, 1958. It’s detailed in the book, ‘A Savage War of Peace’ by Alistair Horne

Charlie watches old WWII movies and roots for the torture rooms of the Nazis and the Japanese prison guards. After all, if it’s possible that an American POW will give up the location and info on his squadron, it’s really important to save the lives of thousands of innocent German or Japanese civilians, right? All of those old movies show Americans standing up in the face of torture; the torturers are the bad guys. I guess Charlie watches too many Dirty Harry movies, or Quinten Tarantino, and it’s twisted his torture opinion.

Bush and Cheney did not pay attention to the Geneva Convention policies. Those policies were established for a reason. But Bush and Cheney, in their arrogance, established policies that blackened the reputation of this nation.

“As a policy, I will never use it.” Good for you! As a policy, will you get behind investigations into the USA torture policy as it was applied during the GWOT? You don’t believe in the theory of torture, but the knowledge that we did torture, often, repeatedly and sometimes to death, gives you that breathing room in “particular circumstances”. After all, people who know what they are doing are doing it, not you. You are “honest enough” to be confused about what the right thing to do is. And righties make fun of Dems for “moral relativism”. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. That’s what John Wayne or Ronal Reagan would say, right?

Bush’s mistake was being too transparent? Yeah, that’s why he/they kept telling us we just need to trust them, nothing bad is going on, and if it is, we don’t have all the facts, don’t need to have the facts, and are traitors if we question. This is war, after all. Transparent! Phhhhhthp.

But enough about whoever the spit Charlie is - what I guess I’ll NEVER understand about Barack O. is that he has absolutely no interest in punishing those who ordered that the morally superior US of A resort to underhanded & reprehensibly indefensible torturous tactics, on a so-called enemy - Iraq CERTAINLY was NOT nearly our biggest problem after 9/11.

As an expatriated (near Pacific coast Mexico) far-left democrat, I’m afraid to say that the Prez does not appear to have the strength of his convictions.

He’s starting to smell like his initials - B.O.!!!

I’m sorry to have had to say the above, but I’m getting very impatient with Our Country’s Leader.

DO THE RIGHT THING, MR. OBAMA!!!

Charlie,

If your little brother disappeared and you heard a rumor that the school bully had kidnaped him and hidden him in an abandoned building, and they picked the bully up and he denied being the kidnapper, and your parents and the police beat him to a pulp, and he still denied it, so they hooked his nipples to a car battery, and he still denied it, and they held his head underwater until his involuntary muscular response told him he was dying, so he said that your brother was in the basement so they’d stop torturing him, and when they went to the basement your brother wasn’t there because the school bully wasn’t the kidnapper after all, would you tell the parents and police “On to the next suspect?” How many innocents would you consider it justifiable to torture, so long as you finally DID finally find the guilty person? Assuming, of course, that your little brother doesn’t walk in during the middle of the proceedings and say “I was over at Tommy’s house. What did I miss?”

It’s largely the same argument I have for abolishing capital punishment. If it could be proven to me that everyone executed was actually guilty I still wouldn’t support it, but we know too many cases where it has been shown that the innocent HAVE gone to the chair, and that’s a mistake that can never be rectified.

Torture, as the Inquisition proved, works on the innocent, and those fearful of death, to admit to anything. It does NOT work on those who do not fear death, and are totally fanatic in their beliefs.

THAT is what all those who’ve never been near it don’t comprehend.

Interrogation techniques can and do work, that are still legal, and they are NOT necessarily “kindly”.

Those techniques were made legal with the last boss and his crime family. Obama as a contitutional scholar should have taken the inititive and made those things illegal again, yet he did not. I voted for the guy to right the wrongs of the last administration but so far he’s only followed in his foot steps. I guess he’s afraid that it would be open season on former politicains should some future president have a problem with him. Everyone of our leaders is the same. Cover for the previous administration no matter what they did.

Mr. Scarborough is a national security writer who has written books on Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA, including the New York Times bestseller Rumsfeld’s War. has said this:

The information is found in a CIA report is entitled, “Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against al Qaeda.”

It concludes: “Detainee reporting has helped thwart a number of al Qaeda plots to attack targets in the West and elsewhere. Not only have detainees reported on potential targets and techniques that al Qaeda operational planners have considered but arrests also have disrupted attack plans in progress.”

And it said, “Since 11 September, the capture and debriefing of [high value targets] has significantly advanced our understanding of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Before the capture of Abu Zubaydah in March 2002, we had significant gaps in knowledge about al Qaeda’s organizational structure, key members and associates, capabilities, and its presence around the globe. Within months of his arrest, Abu Zubaydah provided details about al Qaeda’s organizational structure, key operatives and modus operandi.”

The second Cheney-requested report deals more closely with information provided by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who proudly took credit for 9-11 and for beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

“Since his March 2003 capture, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the driving force behind the 11 September attacks as well as several subsequent plots against U.S. and Western targets worldwide, has become one of the U.S. government’s key sources on al Qaeda,” the report said. “He has provided intelligence that has led directly to the capture of operatives or fleshed our understanding of the activities of important detainees, which in turn assisted in the debriefings of these individuals.”

As for Cheney, he feels vindicated. He released a statement that said, “The documents released Monday clearly demonstrated that the individuals subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks.”

I thought the intelligence he provided was received BEFORE “enhanced interrogation” because he liked bragging about it. No torture was needed.