Well it's a war asshole. Do you understand what happens in war??? Did you make it out of first grade?
I understand that a war is not a justification to torture and, even more importantly, torture has been shown to be an ineffective means of extracting information. If the story is true then what occurred is wrong.
Do you understand that we are NOT the Taliban and if we reduce ourselves to their level then there is not even a point in fighting – we already lost. What this story entails is sickening and should never be allowed to occur under American control. The fact that you can defend that is nuts.
What we need to do is kill the enemy, not torture random people in hopes that we can find out something that may or may not be useful (and is it is WAY more likely to be completely useless when obtained through torture). Did the Bush debacle not teach you ANYTHING?
What makes you think that a government empowered with the ability to torture innocent people at will based on mere suspicion is going to give 2 shits about your rights here at home? Where do you think the mentality comes from when the government decides that it has the right to assassinate you at will or deny you your rights of trial even if detained here in the states? Here is a hint – all of this comes from the same mentality and disregard for rights.
Good points FA, on the specific question of the "Taliban" and our reducing ourselves to their level, I think a good argument could be made that we have become WORSE than the Taliban in some aspects. How many innocent civilians have we killed in our "war of terror", how many people tortured and imprisoned? How many bloodthirsty murders have we armed and supported over the years? How many people do we impoverish under the framework of economic sanctions?
Average Americans don't really seem to care that their government carries out the mass slaughter of innocents on a global scale, in fact many of them seem to cheer it on. The Taliban for all it's heinous human rights abuses are just pikers when compared to the violence abroad that the U.S. Government has perpetrated. While the United States has certainly done a lot of good for the world, we have also done a lot of evil, on balance which is the greater of the two?
"
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood." --
Mohandas K. Gandhi
An argument could be made that way but I rather think it is more a scale of capability than it is of shades of gray. No matter what the opinion of many is, America STILL takes great pains in attempts to limit civilian casualties and collateral damage. Terrorists take great pains in MAXIMIZING the same. So, no, I do not think that we are necessarily ‘worse’ than the terrorists but rather we are FAR too powerful to be waltzing around the world like we own the damn place. I think that Americans in general have no concept of how truly horrifying war really is. If you are not willing to sit there and douse a child in napalm and then light the fire yourself for the cause you are trumpeting then you should not be willing to go to war over it because I can guarantee you that is EXACTLY the type of shit that is going to happen in a war. It was the one thing that worried me (and it turned out I was justified in that worry) when Afghanistan kicked off. There was no death on our side. Americans sat at home eating Cheetos and seeing that we had no casualties, not noticing at all that there were many people that were not Americans dying, thinking that this was war. That made them far too complacent when it came time for Iraq.
I would like war to be bloodless but I think that when it is it makes us so much more likely to get into even worse wars.
I would like to address some other points that you made and am going to reformat them for simplicity:
- how many people tortured and imprisoned?
- How many bloodthirsty murders have we armed and supported over the years?
- How many people do we impoverish under the framework of economic sanctions?
- While the United States has certainly done a lot of good for the world, we have also done a lot of evil, on balance which is the greater of the two?
1 – That is the sick part. I can accept collateral damage; there is no way to prevent 100 percent of that. As long as we take every REASONABLE precaution then we still have a soap box to stand on. Torture and imprisonment though – those are premeditated conscious decisions that WE are making by proxy of our government. We cannot claim to be the beacon of freedom and rights when torturing even the guilty. If we know you are a terrorist then imprisonment is an option but torture should have NEVER been on the table. I, for one, could care less about the terrorists and would be just fine if they were flayed alive and drowned in saltwater but what taking that action does to OUR soul is unacceptable in the highest regard. We should never allow ourselves to be so tainted that we can turn our backs on morality and justice in pure revenge.
2 – the backlash of supporting forging bloodthirsty regimes. Another kick in the pants with Afghanistan as we created that situation and the animus toward us. And the truly scary part – Libya is proving that we learned NOTHING. How dense are we as a nation to forget that all important lesson in just 10 short years?
3 - As far as economic sanctions goes, there is nothing wrong with that concept. The fact here is that we are, as a nation, perfectly within our rights to simply not trade, and work deals with our partners, with a nation that is not representing our interests. That is one of the sole things that I think we have right. Those nations that suffer have nothing but themselves to blame in that regard as their leaders live in opulence while the peasants starve. Trading and sanctions is one thing, bombs and bullets are quite another.
4 – I don’t think that ‘balance’ matters at all. I could care less how much good we have done. Stopping a murder does not justify raping the ‘saved’ afterward. We need to stick with our principals because that is what makes us grate rather than try and weigh what we have harmed and helped.
By the way, I like the Gandhi kick. You are a goldmine of awesome quotes today
