Al Qaeda Was Right, You Say
Kevin says that the Bush administration is now using the same tactics as the Japanese. Of course he is talking about waterboarding, that awful interrogation procedure performed on three high level terrorists in order to obtain information to save American lives. As you know, the CIA performing this procedure on three terrorists, is criminal in the eyes of liberals.
As usual with liberals, Kevin scolds the United States and even says that Al Qaeda was right.
Bush’s childish embrace of torture and idiotic insistence that the procedures at Gitmo be reduced to kangaroo courts tells the Muslim world that Al-Qaeda is right: the US has no interest in seeing them as human beings.
So Al Qaeda was right? Interesting. Of course these three pieces of excrement are still alive and in good health, likely receiving the best free healthcare available. They have probably even been given a Koran. You’d think that if we didn’t see them as human beings, we would have sawed their heads off with a dull knife and broadcast it on the Internet.
Again, how can you be so sure that the victims here are actually guilty of terrorism? That you of all people are willing to just take the government’s word for it is hilarious to me.
Tgirsch, It was used against three people. Let me repeat THREE PEOPLE. All three are known high level terrorist leaders. Khalid Sheik Mohammed was one of them. Do you doubt that he was guilty of terrorism?
None of these people were permanently harmed, by the way.
Glen:
So it was “only” three people. One is one too many. How many innocent people are you willing to torture? And frankly, I don’t much care if they’re innocent or guilty. Whether torture is right or wrong doesn’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) depend on who it is we’re torturing.
In any case, I didn’t realize that whether something constitutes “torture” depends on whether or not they suffer permanent physical damage…
Finally, the government has lied about this before. What’s to say they’re not lying now when they say it was only three people, and that those three were “known high level terrorist leaders?”
I still think it’s hilarious that Mr. Anti-Government is so willing to blindly trust the government on this one…
Listen, if I believed it to be torture, I would oppose it too. But I don’t. I realize though that there are a lot of things the government lies about in regards to CIA stuff.
By the same token, what’s to say they are not setting people on fire?
They could very well be. But it would help if they knew there was a consequence if they were actually doing that sort of thing, rather than neocons constantly making excuses for them in the name of “National Security.”
The bottom line, for me, is this: If we don’t want them doing it to our men and women, then we have no business doing it to theirs. I defy you to tell me with a straight face that you would be anything less than outraged if you learned they were waterboarding our guys.
(They do worse than that; I get that. But somehow I don’t think “We’re not as bad as the terrorists” is the sort of standard we should be striving toward…)
One more nit: Kevin isn’t saying that “al-Qaeda is right” about America. He’s saying that by our actions, we’re making it a lot easier for al-Qaeda to claim that they’re right about America. Why should we give them that satisfaction?
I just don’t think it matters with those folks. They are not really soldiers anyway, but combatants/terrorists.
Sending retarded women into crowds with bombs attached to them? That’s awful.
But see, that’s what you don’t seem to get. This isn’t about them. It’s about us. As I wrote above, whether torture or abuse are right or wrong doesn’t have anything to do with who we’re doing it to. Zero, zip, zilch, nada.
I’m not defending them — not even close. I’m an atheist — I hate religious fundamentalism of all stripes. You won’t catch me defending anything they do. But I will work tirelessly to hold us to a higher standard.
Taking the moral high ground is hard, but that’s true of anything worth doing. Human rights aren’t something we should be throwing away when we find them inconvenient.