Barbarians
Posted November 21st, 2007 at 3:37 PM by Jon HamPure and simple. And the American lefty loonies are worried about water boarding being torture. Let’s see, 200 lashes or a brief encounter with a wet washcloth resulting in no lasting effects. Which would you choose?
November 21st, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Simple truth #1: If it weren’t for all the oil in the Middle East, we would have glassed that place and built a wall around it a long time ago.
When the next iteration of 9/11 occurs, I hope that we have a President in office who has the guts to nuke Mecca and then tell the rest of the Muslim world to shape up or their cities will be next.
And before anyone refers to me as barbaric, let me say this: That whole turning the other check thing may work in a perfect world, but the world we live in is full of insane death-worshippers who have the ability to come HERE and attack us. If it comes down to them or us, I vote us.
November 23rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Yes, the culture is barbaric and there are barbarians who help maintain the status quo, and we owe it to ourselves (and to all civilization) to stop it.
What I’m wondering is whether the use of torture isn’t doing more harm than good towards that end.
My admittedly limited reading on the subject has found little or no evidence that torture has a high rate of success at extracting accurate information, and runs considerable risk of obtaining information that is just plausible enough to convince the HWT (hydrated washcloth technician) and yet remains, somehow, inaccurate and hence useless — a senseless waste of a perfectly good washcloth.
Intuitively, as well, it would seem obvious that if a certain percentage of wet washcloth encounters involve a person who is not in fact in possession of the needed information, the sheer agony of non-consensual facial cleanliness might be sufficient to inspire — shocking though it may seem — a momentary, unthinking lapse into falsehood. I know, it seems difficult to imagine that even hardened jihadis fully deserving of a complete rubdown and massage-with-facial — never mind a little washcloth action — could stoop to such depths, but these are of course terrorists we are dealing with… and we know how they are.
But seriously… where might I find more data on torture effectiveness? If nothing else, we should be sure that America uses only the very best, proven and state-of-the-art interrogation techniques. It wouldn’t do for our position as leaders of the free world, the beacon of liberty and justice, to be seen using outdated or ineffective methods for anything, much less the time-honored discipline of hurting people to get information. If we can’t even get *that* right, surely we deserve to lose. (And don’t let any of those wacko liberals try to tell you that there are better ways of getting information. I don’t care how “accurate” the data you might get by any namby-pamby alternatives; there is simply nothing as satisfying as information you get after hearing someone scream for mercy. …oh wait, did I say that out loud? Sorry, I sometimes say things I hear everyone thinking.)
Buzz Clearcut