Tweet
You’d score more insight debating manatees than anybody at Power Line. I had to read this twice to get my head around the sheer dumb.
The Baying Hounds of CNN
April 24, 2009 Posted by John at 8:58 PM
…What was remarkable was the almost complete absence of any news value. No new facts were conveyed; no old ones, for that matter, if you’ve seen a headline in the last month. No analysis, not even any reasoned conversation: it was pure, mindless cheerleading for the Left. No wonder CNN’s ratings are in the toilet.
[..cue the 'analysis'...] As I listened to an hour of almost non-stop wailing about waterboarding, I couldn’t help wondering how many people have been waterboarded by U.S. authorities during the first three months of the Obama administration. Some hundreds, I would think–surely far more than the three terrorists over whom such tears are now being shed. Those "victims" don’t count, apparently, inasmuch as they are only U.S. military personnel. And, hey, they volunteered.
But if waterboarding is "torture," then it’s illegal. So why is the U.S. military still using it as a training device, last we knew? If we’re going to start prosecuting people, don’t we have to prosecute the many civilian and military leaders who have for decades inflicted waterboarding, or condoned the use of waterboarding, on our servicemen? Just a thought. Actually, of course, no one has any interest in such prosecutions (which would be absurd in any event) since there is no political advantage to be gained.
WOW. Far beyond the prosecutions being absurd, or being of little political value, they’d be impossible because no one believes the law is actually being broken, you freaking idiots.
Waterboarding is a torture technique–torture being an extreme method of interrogation in which wrenching pain and imminent death are used to extract information. If you are not being interrogated, or if you’re really in control of the parameters, you’re not actually being waterboarded. Is that really so hard to understand?
If you’re an officer in the military, you can’t fire your weapon (except in some terrible and rare occasion, presumably) at the men in your charge–yet, it happens all the time in live-fire training.
As a civilian, if you’re standing in the park, you can’t haul off and tackle someone. That’s assault–unless both of you are playing tackle football. You can’t kick or punch someone, yet here. You can’t shoot someone, yet here.
The law is not written and interpreted by children, thankfully. It’s just unfortunately subject to their ‘analyses’ on right-wing blogs, sheesh.
[cross-post: thump and whip]
6 Comments
wow is right, how do these people have the nerve repeating this rubbish
Good post, but I really have to point out one thing (with which toma may or may not agree):
No, it’s used to generate interrogation reports which are usually full of non-information because the victim will agree to anything or say yes to anything or make anything up to stop the pain. KSM interro-torture sessions generated thousands of reports almost none of which checked out. This makes the process perfect for generating false confessions and false confirmations of stories that are useful for whomsoever is controlling the interro-torture. Never assume any assertion made during torture, or under the threat of torture, is reliable information.
Absolutely right you are, Hmmm. Thanks for filling in the blank there–I was just trying to keep the post brief because the geniuses at Power Line aren’t worth spending much of our time on. Cheers.
Very good, toma. I apologize if I was shrill there.
Bin Laden vowed to drive the US out of sacred Saudi soil, which Bush did in 2003. Any attack that had been planned for that year or the next had to be postponed so as not to risk an adrenaline boosted US bringing troops back in. After which, with Bush’s help, bin Laden was slowly inching the world toward militancy. The US was looking for an attack that wasn’t there. Torture helped us believe this delusion. As well as helped bin Laden recruit.
See,
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/4983
RichardKanePA
Not at all, Hmmm, that was a salient point.
Sorry, Richard, I’m not buying that convenient story. If the U.S. had bailed out of Saudi, which they did, but put up no extra defenses, Bin Laden would have been all too happy to do it again, accompanied with ecstatic Middle East cheering. Al Qaeda hasn’t shown any discipline in its targets or goals–they prefer to launch hits that can cause jaw-dropping shock, and then ice the shockwaves with propaganda.
And ‘bin Laden was slowly inching the world toward militancy’? It’s been militant for a few thousand years, hasn’t it? Most of the ‘first world’ easily avoided Iraq, no problem.