Bush Approved Torture?

Posted on April 14, 2008 by davenate

I don’t see any other way to explain this.

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175&page=1

Filed under: Politics

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4 Responses to “Bush Approved Torture?”

  1. Lance, on April 14th, 2008 at 9:13 pm Said:

    More or less. There is little denying that there is minor torture going on, it is simply a debate among Republicans on whether or not the ‘torture’ should be condoned.

    I got a kick out of this:

    Powell said that he didn’t have “sufficient memory recall” about the meetings and that he had participated in “many meetings on how to deal with detainees.”

    Haha!

  2. Mike O, on April 14th, 2008 at 11:12 pm Said:

    Reading the article demonstrates that the Bush gang learned another lesson from Bill Clinton; how to parse words flexibly. ‘Is’, ’sex’, ‘torture’; all mean different things to different people.

    Heck, I would consider body waxing torture, but a lot of people do it voluntarily. And believe me, if they’d bodywaxed KSM rather than waterboarded him, we would’ve heard him screaming in this country. That guy was furry.

    We are talking about 3 extreme cases here, from what has been reported. Putting the worst of terrrorists, ones with intimate knowledge of immediate threats to this country, through the same thing our own Special Forces go through. It is indeed a moral stretch, though.

    Myself, I’d have no problem criminalizing the misuse of waterboarding, and that every future case be brought before a judge and jury (who can hear sensitive intel) for possible prosecution. There are crimes I’d willingly commit and serve the punishment for, because the cost would be worth it. I’d serve a couple years in the federal pen if that was necessary to waterboard the information out of KSM; he gave up a lot and it saved lives.

  3. Ryan, on April 15th, 2008 at 3:11 am Said:

    The problem with torture isn’t just that it’s immoral, but also that it can produce unreliable information. If a subject doesn’t know the answers your demanding, he or she is bound to blurt out anything to get the torture to stop. Waterboarding, etc. are not some magical system where you put a terrorist in one end and brilliant intelligence pops out the other end. Yeah, the suspects probably know some information that our intelligence services could use, but how do we know which questions will provide the good information and which will provide the bad?

    You guys can complain all you want about giving ’socialist’ governments the power to ruin our lives, but I’d be a lot more worried about the power to torture than the power to regulate a central banking system.

  4. Mike O, on April 15th, 2008 at 10:33 pm Said:

    Any intelligence garnered in any manner needs to be confirmed. However, effectiveness is hard to argue with, as this report details:

    “The former agent, who said he participated in the Abu Zubayda interrogation but not his waterboarding, said the CIA decided to waterboard the al Qaeda operative only after he was “wholly uncooperative” for weeks and refused to answer questions.

    All that changed — and Zubayda reportedly had a divine revelation — after 30 to 35 seconds of waterboarding, Kiriakou said he learned from the CIA agents who performed the technique.

    The terror suspect, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reportedly gave up information that indirectly led to the the 2003 raid in Pakistan yielding the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Kiriakou said. “.

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