Nancy Pelosi claims she was misled by the CIA when they briefed her on interrogation methods.
At a somewhat chaotic news conference, the speaker — who used to be the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee — turned her fire on the CIA itself. Previously she said she had been briefed in 2002 that waterboarding and other controversial methods had been approved but not that they had been used. Now she says the agency misled her by explicitly informing her that those methods had not been employed.
The news came as the CIA rejected a request by former Vice President Cheney “to declassify records of abusive interrogations of suspected terrorists, a spokesman for the spy agency said Thursday. In a written statement, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the two documents Cheney requested are the subject of two pending lawsuits seeking the release of documents related to the interrogation program and cannot be declassified.” The Weekly Standard has more detail.
“In researching the information in question, we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency). Therefore, the document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review,” Nelson wrote in the letter to the National Archives, the agency responsible for handling Cheney’s request. …
Initially, Obama administration officials seemed open to releasing the Cheney memos. … Holder said he had not seen the documents. But added: “It is certainly the intention of this administration not to play hide and seek or not to release certain things in a way that is not consistent with other things. It is not our intention to try to advance a political agenda or to hide things from the American people.”
But with the rise in political interest over the subject, the stakes have gone up considerably. It’s not just national security anymore. Careers are at stake. The Weekly Standard notices that phrases are already being trimmed at the edges.
In a letter to his intelligence community colleagues sent to explain the release of the OLC memos, Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, wrote: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” But when Blair’s office released parts of his letter as a public statement on the subject, that sentence was cut. Blair also noted that members of Congress had been briefed on the methods, but that section was also cut from the public statement.
(Blair’s office claimed that the assessments were cut for space — an odd explanation since such statements are released on the internet or over email. And, in a subsequent clean-up statement, said he supports Obama’s position because it might have been possible to extract that valuable information using other techniques.)
Although Obama decided yesterday to block the public release of photos depicting prisoner abuse, he has promised to run the most transparent administration in history. The day after he took office, Obama issued a memorandum for executive branch departments and agencies.
John Kerry recently wrote in a CNN op-ed that “torture elicits lies — not just from those experiencing it, but from those who seek to conceal it. After years of Orwellian denials and legalistic parsing, what a relief it was to hear our new attorney general-designee finally acknowledge what we know to be true: that yes, ‘waterboarding is torture.’ As we move forward, President Obama is wise to ‘reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals’ — but the American people should know that closing a prison conceived outside the rule of law will not be easy.”
Kerry’s statement may be part of the biggest lie of all. The reason why Nancy Pelosi and now Barack Obama are caught up in having to both simultaneously denounce coercive interrogation and yet continue it in whatever way they can hide it — by rendition, denial, classification, legal parsing; by hearing things they didn’t hear and winking when there was a mote their eye — is that there is often a choice “between our safety and ideals.” Cheney knows it and wants the documents declassified to show it. The right approach would have been to make the choice. In many cases the public should have chosen, through their officials, to have given up some degree of public safety to preserve the national ideals and paid the price that upholding morals has always exacted. At other times, the public may have elected to do what it felt was necessary and taken the responsibility for it; to be praised or condemned as posterity judged, just as Sherman, Truman, Curtis Le May, and Franklin Roosevelt are now weighed in the balance.
But they wanted to have it both ways. Now both Pelosi and Obama are caught between the political necessity of preventing another 9/11 and losing their jobs or explaining what might have to be done and risk losing their jobs. Kerry was right: “torture elicits lies.” But not in the way he meant.
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Well there is only one way we are every going to find out the truth from this professional politicker… waterboard Nancy now!
Heck, Christopher Hitchens did it voluntarily.
But they wanted to have it both ways. Now both Pelosi and Obama are caught between the political necessity of preventing another 9/11 and losing their jobs or explaining what might have to be done and risk losing their jobs. Kerry was right: “torture elicits lies”. But not in the way he meant.
Ah–the political class. They’re just as cute as a rattlesnake eating a puppy. And they tend to have the same moral values.
haha totally.
No Wretchard, Pelosi and Oabam are caught because they as Goldsworthy noted in his NRO podcast interview, as Rome fell when the Emperors and other power brokers cared more about their position than Rome, so Pelosi and Obama cared more about their positions than America.
Geraghty at NRO has a “Alinsky Presidency” column, but the danger from operating on Alinksy rules is that no one trusts your word.
The CIA and Military do not trust Barack Hussein Obama. He and Pelosi (his creature) have made war upon both, promising investigations, hearings, prosecutions, for things they agreed upon earlier.
Pelosi broke her word, and Obama broke his (implicit) word to the CIA and the Pentagon. Both know certainly from Pelosi’s press conference that she plans political show trials for them both, to eradicate them from political influence and indeed their jobs and lives. Obama has done nothing to stop this and no one trusts him.
He and Pelosi BOTH are the enemies of the CIA and Pentagon. BOTH will actively work to undermine them at every turn. Expect the Cheney memos to get leaked, anyway, embarrassing Obama and Pelosi. With an accounting of thousands of Los Angeles lives saved.
Expect the Rashid Khalidi tape to surface, with at a minimum Obama and Michelle laughing away at anti-semitic and anti-American jokes, and perhaps making them themselves. Expect more of Rev. Wright’s sermons with Obama and Michelle screaming with laughter at “America deserved 9/11 and God-Damn Whitey!” remarks surfacing. Expect tapes and documents showing Obama at mosques in NYC frequented by pals of Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik), and perhaps even explosive video of him praying there. Expect tapes and documents of Obama hanging around Jihadis in Pakistan (as was his habit in Occidental per his own book) with perhaps an explosive video tape of Obama hanging around Osama.
The problem with Alinksy rules is that it does not deal with institutions (police, CIA, Military) that retain the ability to reach out and hurt you, when you become their explicit enemy.
Pelosi just dragged Obama into the fight, the way Austria and Serbia dragged the Axis and Allies into WWI. She did it because Obama did not make her shut up, did not keep his word, because he’s never been punished (until now) for failing to keep his word.
And all the worship, all the fawning adoration, all the treatment of Obama as the living God, will not change that.
Of course when these things drip out, his worshippers, the Press, which is deeply feminized, and his base, SWPL yuppies and women (but I repeat myself) will only love him more, but Obama will lose men, married women, and create open rebellion.
Imagine a President known to have cavorted around with Osama bin Laden (both were hanging around Pakistan at the time of Obama’s visit, knowing what we know of Obama’s state of mind and attitudes from his autobiography, it would be surprising if he did NOT meet Osama). Can you just imagine what that would do?
Why … it might even make a Secretary of State … President. [Joe Biden would be found medically unfit quite rapidly, I think.]
Be fair, now. Would those collagenized lips lie?
Sometimes I think that lying has become the vice of Washington. Why tell the truth when fantasy will serve? Fannie Mae was too big to fail. Your future is assured with social security. We will create a world without nuclear weapons. “I will reduce the deficit by the end of my first term”. The stimulus package will put money in your pocket. We can keep printing money without consequences. That all my moral administration will ever ask of fanatics bent on killing civilians is their name, rank and serial number. That I will keep you safe. On both sides of the aisle, politicians have piled lie on lie until they can’t keep track of them any more.
At some point a liar begins to believe the falsehoods himself. Self-deception is the most dangerous phase of deceit. At this point you truly believe that you are above the requirements of reality. That at your word the oceans will fall and the world will begin to heal. But it won’t last. Reality eventually taps you on the shoulder and whether you wake to a pleasance or a challenge, you will awake.
Truth is both beautiful and perilous. We all remember Tolkien’s famous line about Sam watching the stars twinkle above Mordor. “The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” But that star was also a reminder of the hard journey ahead of him. That it would light him up the slopes of Mount Doom. That was truth too. To bear the Ring, it is sometimes necessary to admit that you do not know the way.
I doubt Pelosi can balance a check book. What random aspect of civilization chose these idiots to lead us now? There must be a solid link between boomers and all of the current mess? Are boomers affluence peddlers? They have been given everything thus what they know to be ‘normal’ is in fact a curious blip?
‘Go Galt’, be barter hoarded?
See? She should’ve impeached W while she had the chance! LOL! Sure, let’s have a “truth” commission-what a novel idea!
Annoy Mouse writes:
Well there is only one way we are every going to find out the truth from this professional politicker… waterboard Nancy now!
Good idea, but really I think it might be better to condition her by threatening to cut off her Botox consumption. See this mirror crone? You’re wrinkling fast. Want the Botox baby? Just tell us the truth. If we catch you in just one little lie, there’s no more Botox for you.
“Obama decided yesterday to block the public release of photos depicting prisoner abuse, he has promised to run the most transparent administration in history.”
Ya know, at some level airing your political laundry for the world to see is damaging to the nations image and prestige abroad. It is also in effect taunting people in the same manner that Al Queda taunts its victims by airing their severed heads on the internet. You’d think that the government would have better control of its collective bowels than that. It it not just honesty. I amy honestly state that you are an @$$hole but honesty does not trump decretion in such matters.
Witch hunts may be advisable if you are a Joesph Stalin, leader for life, but in a democracy, it leads to other things because instant Karma is in effect. Those in glass houses…
Perhaps those torture photos President Obama put back in the safe are not graphic enough to release. If the “torture” does not look like torture, is it not better to let the American people use their imaginations? A lot of the Abu Ghraib photos were actually mock torture — but at least they looked gruesome.
Fred Smoler has written what seems to me to be the best thing I’ve seen so far on the torture memos…Read the whole thing here:
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2009/05/towards_a_defin.html-
Smoler recognizes why it won’t do when folks claim that torture doesn’t work (sorry Wade!) but also blows up the ticking time bomb arguments (such as Charles Kraut’s…). Points out the Israelis who, in fact, face the bombers rather more consistently than we do, have rejected torture – not just waterboarding, but stress postions as well…Here’s Smoler’s conclusion…
“a crucial distinction eroded between 2002 and 2005. Fairly estimating how much it eroded matters, and saying that there is now no moral difference between ourselves and our enemies remains contemptible, either very stupid or very dishonest, which is to say, on a par with the reasoning of those Justice Department lawyers who claimed that water-boarding wasn’t torture.”
A version of Smoler’s point re Israel is also invoked by Kanan Makiya – Cheney’s favorite Iraqi before the invasion! Makiya explains why he’s against “enhanced interrogation” (and why he thinks Obama has handled the issue well) at the end of the following piece on Wittaker Chambers by yours truly. http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2009/05/history_in_the.html
Makiya’s p.o.v. is the “news” in my piece – He’s the one who made the stongest “human rights” case for the war in Iraq, so I figured I’d ask where he stood vs. his former allies Cheney/Rummy on the torture issue…He answered – a bit of real news! – so predictably I buried it at the end of piece!! But Belmont Club readers might be more interested in my comparison of Wretchard’s work/style with Whittaker Chambers’… By the way, I should’ve footnoted Peterike who did quite a bit to inspire the piece by linking the Club to Chambers’ magnificent take-down of Ayn Rand and “going Galt.”
If the links don’t work – just go to firstofthemonth.org and scoll down to “Towards a Definition of Torture (and America” and “History in the Making.”
The Obama decision on the photos amounts to Lord Zero, once again, “voting present.” What better way to avoid issuing an inconvenient, and politically-damaging, executive order than to simply kick the problem back to Justice? There, Holder & Co. can put together a miserably-crafted brief that ultimately won’t pass judicial review. Once that happens, Lord Zero can use it as cover and claim, “Hey, hey, hey, I really didn’t want those photos released, but, gosh dang it, the court has spoken. Who am I to argue? Don’t blame me!”
Barack Obama: The Man from C.R.E.E.P
-Leftists can always count on the courts to do their dirty work for them. The courts will release the photos and the courts will establish gay marriage, and Obama will still get credit because he blocked for them.
-The CIA (I would say “CIA” but it sounds twee and Beltway-insiderish) may be lousy at getting information about our enemies but they do a great job of assasination with *their* enemies. After gutting W. like a fish I guess Pelosi figured they were on her side. There’s no sides here lady. I read years ago a quote from an Air Force colonel, until recently a Washington big shot- “In a game with no rules, everyone is the enemy, and only one man is the winner.”
Benj, “Points out the Israelis who, in fact, face the bombers rather more consistently than we do, have rejected torture – not just waterboarding, but stress postions as well…”
If you believe the Israelis have rejected torture including stress positions. I have some lake front property in AZ you might be interested in. I got it from Harry in a sweetheart deal so there is no paperwork on it. But it is a goldmine. I promise…
No when to quit believing your own BS. This goes for politicians and Benj as well.
Jim
14. Thras,
In a game of last man standing I am betting on the professionals and I don’t mean politicians.
Jim
Too big to fail?
America, too big to fail?
Think again, citizens. Where does the road end that we are on now? There are no good answers left. When political defeat means criminal retribution to the defeated, the incentive for leaving office is greatly diminished. Ignore the patented sophistry, “Was it torture?”
This is about political power, raw, naked political power.
As Gig Young intoned at the end of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”…”How much longer can they go on!”
“America, too big to fail?”
This from the knuckleheads that brought us anthropogenic global warming. A two hundred year old republic made of people verses a 6 billion year old chemistry experiment with changing agents measured in the parts per million. I have advised people who have merrily advocated anarchy that when the $h!t hits the fan I am going to put them right on the top of my list of problems that are going to need to be sorted out and to expect a visit. The list has been growing of late but when mother country calls we will have to all do our duty. A promise is a promise.
Wretchard @ 6 beat me to it.
I have long ceased to be surprised at how persons can deceive themselves; and at times, as Joseph Goebbels understood, the bigger the lie the more convincing it can be, even to the person deceiving himself or herself. At this point the person can seem sincere and be quite convincing.
Many studies about cognitive dissonance show that when behavior and beliefs are in conflict and the behavior continues, the beliefs will gradually become congruous with the behavior in order to remove that internal conflict. I have no idea what Nancy Pelosi believes at present, but I think that as time goes on she will more and more believe what she claims to be true. And in the process she will convince some others.
Jim
“Sometimes I think that lying has become the vice of Washington.”
Not just the vice but the device.
As I have said before one of the many unpleasant aspects of working Inside The Beltway is that you have to lie. You have to lie because you are being attacked with lies and all too often do not have the time to tell the real truth. You have to lie because you are being attacked with lies and you can’t even figure out whathell they are saying. You have to lie because you are being attacked with lies and there is no way they could be made to understand the real truth. You have to lie because of real, actual, security classification issues.
And you sometimes lie because the people attacking you with lies do not deserve the effort required to explain the truth to them.
The Clintons brought lying to a new level. They seemed to believe that there was no reason to tell the truth if a lie would do as well.
The Obamas seem to have taken things to yet a new level. They don’t seem to see any reason believing the truth if believing a lie is more comfortable, and more useful.
Somebody in an earlier post commented that Pelosi would sell her soul for power. Too late. I saw the thing at a buy here/pay here used car lot last month, marked down for quick sale, but they were loading it on a truck. Small, dried up, black, nasty thing it was.
She is a most utterly contemptible being.
JF Sanders – Smoler invokes a recent Israeli court decision at the end of the following passages – I’ve included a couple graphs fbefore he gets to that – might convince you SMoler knows what’s he’s talking about.
“the loathing of torture is, for most of us, extremely vivid. Many people who had supported the Iraq War wavered when the photos of Abu Ghraib came out; had we gone on to lose that war, rather than see its outcome again in doubt, my guess is that Abu Ghraib would have explained much of that result. It is important to distinguish what a decision to refrain from “enhanced interrogation” will probably achieve from what it will almost certainly not achieve: when we are told that the use of torture exposes American troops to torture in turn, someone is being economical with the truth. It is fatuous to think that Americans were tortured by Japanese or North Koreans (or North Vietnamese) or Lebanese only because Americans had acted similarly, and first. Our restraint will nonetheless achieve something precious: it will let more of us feel that we stand for an order more obviously and indisputably worth defending, which is no trivial gain.
It is also worth deciding what, exactly, we should vow never to do, or at least never to boast of being willing to do. For example, it was never reasonable to debate whether waterboarding was torture, and a very little familiarity with our more recent history would have shown as much. Although we had ourselves used a version of the technique in the Philippines early in the 20th C., by 1947 the United States had convicted and imprisoned a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, for abuses of an American civilian that included a version of waterboarding, and we included charges of what would now be called waterboarding in other cases against Japanese accused of torture. The United Kingdom executed Japanese who carried out versions of waterboarding during World War II, and Norway tried Germans for similar activities. The State Department has condemned variants of the practice when it has been carried out by foreign governments, and we condemned its use against American POWs by the North Koreans and North Vietnamese. The people in the Bush Administration who claimed that waterboarding was not torture seem to have been either grossly dishonest or peculiarly incompetent.
On the other hand, abiding by the letter of many current interpretations of our legal obligations about torture may be harder to reconcile with historical practice which we did not then and may not now condemn. The United Nations Convention Against Torture’s definition of torture includes inflicting any severe mental suffering for the purpose of obtaining information, which gives the lie to those repeated assurances that with their backs to the wall in 1940, Great Britain nonetheless shunned torture. In 1940 Great Britain staged mock executions of Abwehr and SD agents to encourage other captured agents to give up information, which they did, and to significant effect. Many UN Treaty interpreters, especially those from recently non-belligerent states, consider such a practice torture. Nominal specialists may well interpret the United Nations Convention Against Torture in ways we find at best peculiarly and destructively limiting, and we will probably have to choose between allowing people who have little imagination of and perhaps less sympathy for our predicament to dictate our tactics, or pursuing a now-very-easily-mocked unilateralism. We might do best to attend most closely to the experience of people who have long been in a situation more closely resembling the one in which we may long be mired. So the Israelis bear watching, and in the last few year the Israeli high court, which exists in a society that does face ticking bombs, has moved against interrogation by means of what the Israelis called “moderate physical pressure,” including stress positions, one of the techniques American interrogators used through 2005. The Israeli legal decision still allows interrogators the theoretical defense of necessity, but the burden of proof is on the interrogator.”
Now on to Makiya – in his note to me he referenced Rabin’s countenancing of beatings during the first intifada. But, apparently, Yitzak pulled back largely because of what it did to the IDF – bad for its “character” …One scholar even told Makiya a possibly apocryphal tale that Rabin’s turn on beatings/torture was not entirely unrelated to…Oslo…
Makiya also noted “There is a fascinating issue of the Israel Law Review from about 10 years ago dedicated to the discussion on torture by Israeli scholars and legal minds. Israel is, I think, the only country to frankly and openly discuss the issue in depth.”
Maybe you know a LOT more than these guys about all this. On the other hand, maybe there’s SOMETHING they could teach even you….
Somebody in an earlier post commented that Pelosi would sell her soul for power.
Get real. In any kind of free market economy her soul wouldn’t buy you more than a pack of cigarettes at best.
As George Costanza famously said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it”.
Benj, I am not sure that I know more than “those guys”. But I DO know some people who have had positions within the Israeli military. And according to them your guy’s statement doesn’t hold water. You believe who and what you want.
Jim
Is EIT, or what the liberals and holier than thou folks call torture, where there are legal restraints, physical limits imposed and doctors present in any way comparable to the murder of innocents who simply went to work on a beautiful day in Manhattan and were incinerated by an av gas fire at their desks, or were forced to jump to their deaths from the top of one of the Twin Towers because the heat was unbearable. The moral arguments over not employing EIT on jihadist warriors really crumble when the lives of several million civilians are at stake. Are we as evil as the 9/ll hijackers if we use EIT? Its a Jack Bauer world today that was created by a lack of will on the part of previous administrations to face up to the threat of Jihad and the fact that our Saudi allies were (are) financing a war on the same western civilization that they have gained all of their wealth from…tick, tick, tick,… time is of the essence in this war of the worlds and we must use all of the weapons at our disposal if we are to win this.
And now for something completely different…
Yes, Minister is a great British satire on politics. Thought it apropos of the discussion.
Here is a tidbit…
“everything you tell me is in complete confidence”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xYI3M2098w
Thank you Benj, for supplying the link (in your #12) to an article you posted on the blog “First of the Month.”
It gives some valuable insight for anyone who might at this late date be confused about your positions on matters.
Be sure to scan the endorsements from a most impressive list of supporters.
Thanks for your honesty in this instance, however inadvertant.
25 JF – “I am not sure that I know more than “those guys”. But I DO know some people who have had positions within the Israeli military. And according to them your guy’s statement doesn’t hold water…”
JF – for real? – you asked your buddies about Smoler’s and Makiya’s statements in the lsst few hours? Look – no logical prob w/ you insisting individual IDF guys tortured people. I’m sure that’s happened in every army – the question is whether there are bureaucrats devising ways to say it’s all good (or more to the point ENCOURAGING (often resistant) folks in the military service s to adopt such tactics) In Israel, according to Smoler (and Makiya) the legal system has said a No in thunder to that sort of pettifoggery when it comes to the issue of torture. If you know different, give me a link, otherwise maybe it’s time for you to rethink?
26 Enigma: “The moral arguments over not employing EIT on jihadist warriors really crumble when the lives of several million civilians are at stake. Are we as evil as the 9/ll hijackers if we use EIT? Its a Jack Bauer world today…”
One of Smoler’s points is that you probably have to think through what kinds of interrogation are acceptable – he’s pretty clear that there are definitions of “torture” that are too broad – including the U.N’s..BTW – he also allows that it DOES make a difference if the EIT (to use your shorthand) was used on mass murderer (like Abu Z.) OR some Afghan swept up by mistake (as many folks were by the Bush Admin’s own acknowledgment). Instead of focusing on the guilty one, consider if you’re easy with idea of America torturing a (relative) innocent…Finally, here’s Smoler on the recent versions of the ticking timebomb argument – If I was Charles Krauthammer or Dick Cheney, I wouldn’t want to go toe to toe with Smoler…
“An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.” Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, May 1, 2009.
When my friends were going to law school in the early 1970s, I heard and on one occasion read about a striking piece of professorial bullying: the professor would ask a 1L whether he or she thought torture unacceptable under all circumstances, and the student would predictably assure the professor that he or she certainly did. Then, in what was often reported as an exuberant, even gleeful tone, the professor would unfold the hypothetical: the nuclear weapon concealed somewhere downtown, the timer ticking away, the terrorist who alone knows the location of the concealed device in police custody, and notoriously sensitive to very low voltages—what were we then obliged to do? What advice would the student offer?
It was the hypothetical nowadays known as the ticking bomb, the one that appears in pretty much every episode of 24 (where torture is as infallible as it is ubiquitous), and it exercises a remarkable recurring fascination on apologists for torture. Forty years ago, the students never seemed to have had a good answer, and the professor effortlessly scored whatever point had been at issue—perhaps that the law often involves balancing tests, and that absolutist ethics are not for grownups. The anecdotes, which had a pretty clear Cold War as well as post-colonial context—torture had been used in Algeria, and had recently returned to the Greece of the Colonels, after having made a striking appearance in post-Goulart Brazil, also other places in Latin America, and in South Vietnam. The ticking bomb hypothetical anticipated two trends visible in much recent polemical writing about torture: some of the interlocutors were having much too good a time, and the ticking bomb was a substitute for thought as often as it was a spur to thought.
I remember finding the stories of the swiftly crumbling absolutism of the 1Ls irritating, and wondered why the students didn’t offer equally aggressive counter-hypotheticals: what if the terrorist is peculiarly sensitive to the protracted rape, torture and murder of baby girls, but only when done not by anonymous CIA contractors, but by tenured professors of law? What if the serial slow and agonizing murder of a mere fifty female toddlers would do it, to save the teeming population of Spokane? What would the professor then advise? What if the terrorist is sentimental about Paris and Lyon, and upon the nuclear destruction of one of them will give up the location of the bombs concealed in more populous Shanghai and Canton? This was, of course, a species of l’esprit de l’escalier; I hadn’t had to face the apparently irresistible bullying sophistries of law professors, and could never be sure how I’d have behaved on the spot. Also, in framing the counter-hypothetical I was having a bit too much fun myself, not least because the problem the hypothetical tried to address was not quite so easily banished. As it happens, the counter-hypothetical, which I had thought a reductio ad adsurdum to be deployed against vulgar utilitarianism, was unwittingly apposite: it combined techniques then employed, or soon to be employed, by actual regimes. Pinochet’s interrogators flogged toddlers in front of the young mothers they were interrogating, and Saddam’s interrogators showed films of women raped by regime interrogators to husbands, siblings and parents.
The continuing fascination with the ticking bomb scenario remains remarkable, because it is not clear that a ticking bomb scenario on such a scale—and to achieve the rhetorical effect, scale matters–has ever occurred on American soil, nor a ticking nuclear nor massively lethal WMD of a more exotic kind, radiological, chemical or biological, on anyone’s soil. Yet the apologists still wheel out that ticking bomb, every time; they seem less interested in finding an improbable nuclear bomb than in first setting a precedent, then extending it very far indeed. The elements of the original hypothetical were carefully chosen: low voltage, and a weapon capable of killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. It is probably a moral and rhetorical mistake to say that you will never countenance anything that can be called torture under any circumstances, because that move keeps the ticking bomb crowd very confidently in the game, and risks eroding the will of some reasonable people to outlaw the torture that has actually happened, where exponentially fewer lives have been at stake. Note that the ticking bomb scenario is no longer the same one deployed in the palmy days of law professors who had seen The Paper Chase one time to many: last week Charles Krauthammer thought torture the only moral choice when a) any bomb is ticking, not just a WMD and b) “the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives.” That last one is a large and ominously imprecise category: can we therefore torture a commander of Iraqi irregulars to locate the likely but not inevitable snipers’ posts in Falluja? That implied calculus is a version of where the German Army wound up in its last couple of world wars, and where the Israelis and the Americans are at least accused of being now. Minimizing your own military casualties is always a laudable goal, but the slope is very notoriously slippery.
28 – Scyth – Nothing “inadvertent” about my honesty. I got nothing to hide! FYI – FIRST OF THE MONTH has been hated on by conventional leftists because of our readiness to publish guys like…Smoler and Makiya (among others). Especially since 9/11 and the Iraq war. Many FIRST’ers – though not all (no correct lines at our rag) were willing to break ranks with standard left positions. – Hope you’re willing to think outside YOUR cocoon.
IF you want evidence of disdain for FIRST’s openness to views outside the consenual left wisdom – try this review of FOTY:2008 at the influential online journal Democratiya – sneaks some praise in too, but you’ll get a sense of how FIRST’s openness throws folks on the left side of the dial… http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=257
Benj–What are you apologizing for this time? My stance on torture, is that it works, it will get a confession to anything you want and that somewhere in the massive pile of yes I did its will emerge the truth, and if you have the people and the resources to run it down, and if you have the intelligence to eliminate most of the irrational and impossible, you can get truth.
I have always been more concerned with what torture does to our guys than I am concerned with the pirate like figures in Gitmo. For the record, I believe summary execution of the Al Queda in Gitmo would be a fair and just end. A fitting solution to their sorry illegal status.
I have no end of concern when members of the press as well as intelligent people, go after our guys in knee jerk fashion. Claiming lines of command exist for orders not given where no such ownership can be demonstrated. In the military there is no such a thing as a nod to impropriety. Just ask those who claim to have received one. There is nothing about an illegal order that is not understood, including the consequences. That is what makes the conduct at Abu Ghraib so frustrating. The willingness to assume a nod so questionable, without lawful challenge or legal support is moral cowardice that is simply not in line with the standards of the US Military and assumes acquiescence from far too many who would not allow such actions to continue unchallenged. I believe the investigation of impropriety made in the conduct of lawful discovery is proper. Made in a newspaper it is criminal.
As torture is a short cut to achieve questionable results so too is publishing accusations without due process and real investigation. A lot of Iraqis paid with their lives for those photos. Our soldiers did as well. It smells too much of the smears from Haditha, and gives too much credence to the idea that our troops have no moral compass. It is viewed as elite smugness, by many. I do not think it is journalism.
I have never agreed that torture makes us better or worse than our enemy. I find that is a false argument. What AQI torture chambers were engaged in was sick, slow and sure murder. They sought no information, they sought to save no lives. Al Queda in Iraq sought only to pleasure themselves in a manner befitting the devil himself. There is no comparison.
Can’t get memos out of the National Archives, you say? Bureaucracy slowing down their release? Where’s Sandy Berger when we need him?
F
One problem I have with “enhanced interrogation” is that it is effectively a confession that the prisoner has information that the interrogator wants. In other words, “enhanced interrogation” ensures that the prisoner wields power over the interrogator through the knowledge he appears to have.
I’m not convinced that we necessarily want folks from al-Qaeda getting constantly reminded of how important they are to us. Perhaps it would be better if they regard giving us information as a means of getting someone to pay attention to them.
Secondly, I think the most important information we can get from unlawful combatants isn’t their operational intelligence. It’s their dreams. I want to know what they dream about. What do they desire? And what are their nightmares? If there were some way to tap into the enemy’s dreams, we would have a better idea of how to create theatrical scenarios conducive to eliciting information on other subjects of operational interest.
I do wonder why interrogators haven’t done more research into analyzing dreams.
31 WAde – I’d linked you w/ the “torture doesn’t work” argument, though I KNEW you had heavier concerns as well. Sorry (again) if I got that wrong. I hope you will give Smoler’s piece a work-out. As soon as I got it, I was thinking that folks like you and Buddy and alexis et al. might be …engaged by it. While Smoler comes hard at torture-mongers and their legal enablers, he ain’t going to make Sullivan et al too comfortable either. MY guess is that Smoler’s piece – like more than a few others from FIRST – won’t get anything like the response it deserves. Just doesn’t fit the left/right templates. In this case because Smoler takes a clear stance re waterboarding and those memos (in a way, for example, that someone like Wretch refuses too). But he also doesn’t diminish the, ah, ugliness of our enemies or the silliness of some of the claims maide by righteous leftists…
… IF you appreciate Smoler’s thing, hope you’ll let whoever know…
He said, she said? Or they said, she said? Good points here.
Waterboarding and enhanced iterrogation — we currently use thes on our own special forces as training tools to toughen then up and see if they can handle the stress.
I know of an interregator whose department never did anything to the detainees tha they were not personnaly subjected to: cold water showers, bad food, sleep deprivation from long work hours, etc… Most of these “tortuous” conditions were just the normal living conditions of troops in the field.
Yep. Just uncrated my new Funk & Wagnall’s and there it is. Nancy’s cold, smiling face is now scotch taped over Bill Clinton’s, right next to the entry for “LIAR.”
Sweet!
This guinea is the worst Speaker ever to grace the House.
Tcobb @23 you priced cigs lately?
SIGINTEL
#26
First, love yr name-it takes me back to my military days (’nuff said !). Your observations are spot on…well thought out, and well put. Thanks for an axcellent post.
S.M.
Wretchard @6: thank you.
We may have to climb Mount Doom, but that light out there in the cold darkness is still a source of strength for today.
This POTUS is a dangerous, arrogant, ignorant fool. It will be a long time before the full price we will pay for the foolishness of the worshippers who elected him is understood, even as the evidence piles up day by day.
We are a long way from being able to say with certainty, “Well, at least it can’t get any worse.”
One viewing of the “news” conference she held yesterday should dispel any myths that Pelosi is telling the truth. Not sure if anyone else noticed the amount of sweat on her upper lip as she rifled through her notes trying to keep her story straight (I guess the Official Presidential Teleprompter cannot be borrowed?). Very telling. I have to admit that I DID enjoy seeing that crazy woman sweating for once. Karma is a sweet thing.
There’s are so many scams going on here that this is looking like a grifters’ convention.
Obama’s release of the Justice Department memos kicked this off.
Cheney delivered his masterstroke by calling for Obama to release the results of the EIT, stating that the Bush admin saved Los Angeles in doing so.
To date, Obama has balked at releasing those documents.
Then came the calls for prosecuting the lawyers who were tasked with giving legal opinions.
This distracted attention from Cheney’s unanswered challenge.
And Obama needs to sacrifice somebody…who better than the Stimulus of the House, whose popularity is lower even than George W. Bush’s?
Which results in Pelosi having her mammaries put into the wringer, since she knew that we were done with the kid stuff.
Pelosi is trying to throw one of her aides under the bus, but I don’t think her aide is going to go quietly.
And CIA is more than happy to crank that wringer exceedingly fine.
But wait! Here comes somebody making noises about Abu Ghraib pictures!
WTF? Is this Pelosi trying to extricate her dugs from the laundry equipment?
Now, the obvious thrust here is to conflate the EIT at Guantanamo with Abu Ghraib, which are two completely different things, to get the rubes all a-lather again…back to the heady Democratic salad days of 2005-2006.
And then Obama balks at releasing THOSE documents too,(although it’s odd that everyone on the Left seems to KNOW what’s in them, but no-one has seen them!).
And is Obama EVER going to release ANY documents? Starting with that vault copy Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth?
Y’know, folks, there are producers of reality TeeVee shows who would reject this script as simply too sordid and outlandish to be believed.
President Obama is hanging Nancy Pelosi out to dry to replace her with someone who will do his ideas in Steny Hoyer. Nancy has overplayed her hand. She deserves everything that’s coming to her…
“It’s not just national security anymore. Careers are at stake. ”
Wretcherd, that is a statement of sublime genius! I an eaten up with envy over not writing it.
Oh well. I see this whole kurffal (sp?) as a tempest in a tea pot. It will blow over and any Republicans counting on it to bring down fancy Nancy are going to be dissatisfied.
Remember how the Anti-War types were picketing her office in December of ’06 after she refused to cut war funding for the campaign in Iraq? She ignored them and they went away, since they had no where else to go.
No, the only real effect of this brew-ha-ha will be to delay the Revolutionary Justice Committee witch hunt of President Bush’s minions. That is a pity since most of them belong in jail and it would set a precedent for putting the Usurper and his minions on trial after their day in the sun is over.
What worries me about that is the Democrats are acting like there won’t be another election and their day is a sunny, endless one. Maybe they know something the rest of us don’t?
46 SS Totally agree. You could see that coming when she was taking the lead during the budget debacle.
The Capo wants everyone to remember their place; he has already put the hit out on her. You’re in Chicago, not California, Nancy.
That was a great press conference given by Pelosi. Nothing better than watching a politician drown themselves then grasp at anything being thrown to them to survive.
Not that I had any lingering doubts about Kerry being a fool, but if I had, that inane comment would have dispelled them.
If you are stoooooopid enough to let the one being tortured lie to you, you are to stupid to make use of anything you learn so you might as well not bother.
If I start cutting off your toes to find out who will win the world series in 2022, then yes, you will lie to me. On the other hand, if I want to know the combination to your locker, toe cutting works out well. The combo you give me will work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, then snip, snip and we try again.
The value of ANY intelligence received thru ANY type of interrogation depends on the questions, NOT the answers.
Remember the dog that didn’t bark? The absence of information can be valuable information under the proper circumstances.
Aren’t you happy Kerry wasn’t elected?
I’m considering changing my “nom de guerre” to “EnemaoftheState”. Our federal government desperately needs to be cleaned out.
meryl/42; re ‘fool’ –what if that’s what we are meant to believe?
typos/49; Kerry too, maybe what he displays is what a US senator & communist fink must display.
But then their grandstanding over the past five years would look stupid. It’s too late for that. At this point the choice is between looking stupid, ignorant, or dishonest. They’re going to plead ignorance. The public has a bad habit of forgiving politicians for not knowing fertilizer from shoe shine polish, when in reality they know fertilizer all too well.
Hey Bud – i once promised (?) to tell you the tale of how I came to try WITNESS earlier thsi spring – figure you might (!) not get through to the end of my longish piece on Chambers where it’s imbedded so cut and pasted below…
Which leads me to a short story about how I came to try WITNESS. Earlier this spring. I was out with my five-year old in Riverside Park watching him play solitary war games (frowned on by his progressive public school and by his playmates’ parents). He had his tri-corner hat and his wooden musket (which is way too heavy for him – reenactors have ruined childish things). My boy was fighting the Brits in his head. (What the hey –it was Harlem Heights!) We were on a bushy slope above tennis courts. My boy was battling hard but noticing purple crocuses, daffodils. The birds were wailing… It all reminded me of my times war gaming when I was a kid. Looking back way après la guerre, what kept me in the fight as a child — more than the prosepct of imaginary victories — was the undeclared possibility of being lost in a familiar place. Given my lousy sense of direction, it was easy to get some strange in the no man’s lands beyond the back yards in my hometown. Lacking a compass head, I could get real gone in those woodsy areas before thinking my way back home. As per Heil Heidegger, who defined thought as “coming into the nearness of distance.”…My boy was getting out ahead of me as he stepped off into the tatty half-forest. Not that he could get very far from the path (or from Riverside Drive and the City higher up on the hill). I was just wishing – it was still early in the season – maybe he wouldn’t run into much litter. Or leftovers from a camp of homeless guys. It occurred to me the place where we were getting back to nature must be close to the spot Hemingway has sad old men searching for hustlers to piss in their mouths in To Have and Have Not. It probably wasn’t too far from where that friend of Kerouac’s murdered a man who had a history of making passes at him…Onward, I kept up with my scout (and kept an eagle eye out). There was a little trash. And, beside it, a book. Looking odd, all by itself. Though we were just 10 blocks or so from Columbia. I checked the book out a little gingerly. It turned out it was WITNESS. Soiled. Wet through? Nope. The cover was bad but the text was intact. Could it get a witness?…My boy called out to me from behind a stump and I suddenly recalled my own pop’s offhand line on Chambers. We never talked through the Hiss case. It was long before my time. But I remember my pop allowing to his “shame” that he’d identified for a hot second with the grocer’s boy from Whittier who’d gone toe-to-toe with the Harvard man. He also wasn’t entirely sure about Chambers’ probity.3 Yet he was certain of one thing: Chambers could flat-out write. That tore it. I ripped the hanging hard cover off Witness. I‘d be slipping this dirty (literally) book by my neatnik wife…
After a few more skirmishes in the Park, my boy and I headed for the Columbia campus where there’s a spot we like to play soccer. On the way through the gate, by the Columbia Journalism School, I saw a face I knew coming out. It was…Victor Navasky – longtime publisher of The Nation and the last (let’s hope!) fervent apologist for Alger Hiss. A tell-tale sign that pretty much ensured I’d be reading WITNESS right away.
BTW – did you ask your childhood bud from Louisiana who he voted for?
Nothing I have heard and seen so far indicating that this lady is trustworthy. I remember her reaction and on-off smile and blame game during the first stimulus package during the last days of Bush’s presidency, anytime that package came under scrutiny. I vividly remember her smile and excitement when the stimulus package was finally signed. It seems that she was telling her audience, “We now nailed the first major deal in the road to socialization of America”. She was right; two other major packages went through along with a $3T budget after that first package, locking US for many generations to pay for social plans and salary of new and old government workers to execute those plans without creating a single important program to create jobs in civilian sectors. As I said, for some reason I have a really hard time trusting this gal. To me she looks and acts like a snake so from now on I am going to call him, Nancy “Snake” Pelosi.
if EIT is so ineffective,why have politicians been ‘falling on their swords’ to protect it?
Benj
for the most part I don’t agree with your positions, and I’d prefer you drop your insults against our host in your arguments, but I thank you for coming on here to challenge assumptions and provide real background material and arguments. As we call it on one of my car forums “tech”, rather than blather. The club is the richer for it.
Peloser is a democrat, of course she lies. That is what they do.
51.buddy larsen…yeah. Good question.
It’s sickening to realize that the things that are happening are actually much worse than what we suspected and feared would happen, and we were acccused of paranoia for voicing those concerns over the months.
It’s really very difficult to exaggerate the threat from the domestic enemies of the United States today, especially those holding office.
and yet the Lie will go on, even if one of its highest authors goes down completely.
what we will witness is the power of propaganda, as the Lie lives though its author die. just as we do everytime some nonentity, whose other opinions are confined to dunkin donuts, MS Word fonts, and dancing with the stars contestants, shrieks like a Bolshevik that “Bush lied.”
depressing. but perhaps if pelosi goes down hard enough the edifice will crack? hard to say.
What I do not understand, with all the stupidity of Pelosi, how is she still there? What, in the state of California, elected her? Could it be the people? Oh, diar!!!
Don’t try to connect Pelosi and Obama on this. My impression is that Obama had been genuinely unaware of the extent to which “enhanced interrogation” had been used (well, actually misused — Cheney is and was a stinking pile of crap on this: there’s not a *single* verified instance where torture produced anything useful, and that includes that supposed 2002 LA terrorist plot BS.) So he ended up with a very unpleasant dilemma between his idealistic inclinations and promises and exposing the US for fierce ridicule and anger over what will be seen as base hypocrisy.
As far as Pelosi goes, rumor has it that Obama has come to see Pelosi as his biggest obstacle in getting things done, especially anything with even a resemblance of bipartisan support. And he really wanted this whole torture stuff to go away — he released some memos and decided that was enough of an owning up, but the issue with the torture photos came up, and Pelosi’s own little tortured backpedaling and confused excuses and explanations have made things far worse. I think you guys would be very surprised at how many Democrats and liberals are on the same page for this matter as Republicans and conservatives.
57 Pres – Thanks!
Over the past 10 years, the rag of “the radical imagination” I’m associated with hasn’t got a helluva lot of traction – hard to make a way as we don’t fit the templates on the left…Still we’ve stayed at it and over time we’ve accumulated a litle pile of blurbs. Mostly from folks who share more of my biases than you do. Have to say, though, I got a feeling I might end up appreciating your shout-out more than any of those other puffs. – “to challenge assumptions and provide real background material” – That’s my idea of democratic discourse and believe me it tends to piss off many lefts too…
Your line re “tech” reminds me of a key moment in the history of modern “reform” movements…The key man in the British anti-slavery society – Thomas Clarkeson – began to make all the diff when he put out a case statement against slavery that eschewed biblical quotations and most kinds of religios/philisophical talk – Just the facts. He thought, rightly — and with a little help from Wilberforce’s tongue and the Haitian revolution – the facts should be enough to turn anyone against slavery…(Stories help the tech go down though too!)
Kanan Makiya updated this whole line of endeavor in his attack on Arab despots and their intellectual enablers – The key he argued was to…”Put evil first.” We’re all ag’in that. And everybody human knows what it is when he/she sees/hears it. So, in the end, if we stick to the facts, we can keep the debate real – rather than simply ideological…Maybe come together in moments of provisional solidarity – even if we disagree about a whole lot…(Hmm… sounds like a certain politician’s rhetoric…)
As for Wretch and my “insults” – Tell me where I’m wrong on the facts, and I’ll back up. We’re all humam so the polemical isn’t entirely impersonal. But, for what it’s worth, my argufying here isnt’ much ado about me vs. him..
PS See B.C. immediately above for evidence of prospects for provisonal solidarity over the FACTS….
B.O. is just as guilty as peloser of being a liar and a fraud. His thug tactics and destruction of the rule of law show what a petty dictator he is. His incompetence is also shown by releasing a few memo’s for political gain, then thinking it would go away.
And yes, it is proven that waterboarding worked wonders on top al queda leadership.. but do not expect the Thug in Chief Dhimmi O to release any of that info.
The rabid frothing from the reactionary right-wingers on here is just evidence of their hysteria as it begins to dawn on them that the right wing is about to be at the center of a major war crimes trial. The evidence is quickly piling up that clearly shows that the Bush administration:
- Broke the law by torturing,
- Used some fancy lawyering to try to make torture legal,
- Lied to the public about torturing,
- Allowed ordinary soldiers to be jailed as fallguys,
- Lied again about whether the torture was effective,
- Lied again about whether information we got from torturing actually prevented an attack (it didn’t),
-Authorized the use of torture to fabricate a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda
- Authorized the use of torture long before any members of congress were briefed.
If Pelosi and other members of congress did know that this was happening, and did nothing to stop it, then it is all the more reason to investigate all who had knowledge. It’s time to find out who knew what and when they knew about it.
I am certain that there will be Democratic reps and agency officials who will be swept up in these charges for their knowledge and support of these crimes, but at the end of the day, this was conservative Republican policy, and if anyone is going to ultimately end up behind bars, it’s going to be mainly Republicans.
It’s pathetic to watch the right wing flail around defending their own party’s role in illegal torture, but then turning on a dime to attack Pelosi for some hypothetical role in listening to a torture brief, as if listening to a torture brief is somehow akin to the Bush administration actually authorizing torture, and then lying about its use and capabilities to the American public.
I’ll say it again, if Pelosi was involved, put her on trial. But none of you nimrods actually want that to happen. Because if Pelosi goes on trial, she’ll only be a small fish in in a pond full of big GOP targets, and at worst will most likely be censured and/or forced to resign. But as for the Bush crowd? These guys are done for. Even if there is not a single indictment, the legacy of the Bush presidency has already been sealed: America will forever remember the administration of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Rice as a reign of pathological cowards who authorized illegal torture, lied to the public about it, and then let soldiers take the fall for following the orders they were given by high command.
And not a single one of you can prove that torture worked or that it made us any safer, and, even if you could, it still does not make a difference; an illegal act is an illegal act, and unless you are happy to live in a dictatorship, no one is above the law.
And so the only move you have left is to attack Pelosi.
Pathetic.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/11/agent.tapes/index.html#cnnSTCText
For the leftist idiots here.
There also is nothing illegal about using real torture on a moslem terrorist. Geneva certainly does not forbid it.
And peloser was ok with even harsher methods then waterboarding. Until now as her lies consume her.
All’s I can say on it is do more, and thank God that some of these loony lefwingnuts here are not in charge. fdr used real torture and it looks as though the ONE Dhimmi O is keeping it too, at least such methods as waterboarding. Guess that make Obama a war criminal now too!
Lol @ the left wing loons.
To Fantom: Please…:
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/blog/2006/02/intel_pros_say_bush_is_lying_a.html#more
Never mind Geneva — we have our own laws:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sup_01_18_10_I_20_113C.html
37. Camo:
I know many a grunt who would love to have a cold shower while at a FOB. They usually get “clean” with baby wipes or bottled water poured on a rag!
65. Pastor of Muppets:
No worries for anyone involved…Obama is doing his best to sweep it under the rug. He’s changed his mind, again! So, sorry, Muppet Boy, but your witch hunt has come to an end. Pelosi will be the only one to go down because she’s getting in Obama’s way.
The UN’s take on torture: http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html
Seems that Grandstand Nan’s goose’s cooked. Stick a fork into her, she’s done, it is a matter of time and probably not much beyond 30 days.
I dunno, I am uncertain if a trap has been actually setup by 0 for her. I was convinced that at some point 0 would go after her (power consolidation), I just did not expect it so soon and in this particular fashion (though it is a typical sociopath’s fashion). Who’s next? Harry?
Bug-eyed, Botoxed, Pukey Pelosi makes me ill at just the sight of her.
-And, to all the Liberals who have such touchy-feely, deep, gut-wrenching empathy and sympathy filled with humanitarian emotions towards the vile scum who were being squirted with evil, cruel, inhumane H20:
Please, let me remind you that your very own Barry Dohbama (along with plenty of YOU) are not only for partial birth abortion but not saving a child that survives partial birth abortion but instead putting a surviving mangled infant in a ‘death room’ to slowly die. http://priestsforlife.org/brochures/deathindeliveryroom.htm That is torture!
So, cut the phony “those poor, tortured terrorists” crap. It’s not like they are innocent souls having their limbs ripped off and their brains sucked out until they ‘hopefully’ die. Gimme a frickin’ break with your asinine, feigned ‘sympathies’. PUKE!
For now, what the un thinks is not relevant. Maybe after The god President is done it will matter. Or enough nuts like ginsberg get on our courts it will matter. Hopefully though if that is the case we will have a revolution here.
Yes at # 70, Dear leader is eating his rival.
Personally, I just love how the loony left is making the looniest one from the san fransicko nuthouse look so stupid.
Fantom: “http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/11/agent.tapes/index.html#cnnSTCText
For the leftist idiots here.
There also is nothing illegal about using real torture on a moslem terrorist. Geneva certainly does not forbid it.
And peloser was ok with even harsher methods then waterboarding. Until now as her lies consume her.
All’s I can say on it is do more, and thank God that some of these loony lefwingnuts here are not in charge. fdr used real torture and it looks as though the ONE Dhimmi O is keeping it too, at least such methods as waterboarding. Guess that make Obama a war criminal now too!
Lol @ the left wing loons.”
LOL @ yourself. Try reading the article you linked to, dumbass:
“A former CIA agent who participated in interrogations of terror suspects said Tuesday that the controversial interrogation technique of “waterboarding” has saved lives, but he considers the method torture and now opposes its use.”
And really, you’re going to automatically accept the word of some CIA agent who admits that he participated in torture? Honestly, what do you think hes going to say, “Yes, I broke the law, lock me up?” I would expect these guys to release every tape and transcript they can to try and save their hides; you or I would do exactly the same in that position if you had been assured by Bush and Cheney that what you were doing was legal and now you wake up to find out that you had been lied to.
None of this changes the legality of torture.
If `torture’ doesn’t work why is it a practice reaching back to antiquity? We no longer use many many techniques and strategies in warfare, but this one technique remains. Why is that?
Delia: “Please, let me remind you that your very own Barry Dohbama (along with plenty of YOU) are not only for partial birth abortion but not saving a child that survives partial birth abortion but instead putting a surviving mangled infant in a ‘death room’ to slowly die.
So, cut the phony “those poor, tortured terrorists” crap. It’s not like they are innocent souls having their limbs ripped off and their brains sucked out until they ‘hopefully’ die. Gimme a frickin’ break with your asinine, feigned ‘sympathies’. PUKE!”
Abortion is legal. Torture is not legal. I don’t know how to make it any clearer. If you don’t like it, work to change the law. If you can’t change the law, suck it up and come to terms with the fact that not getting everything you want is part of living in a Democracy. Maybe you’d be happier in the UAE or Somolia?
It certainly won’t serve O badly to have the Democrats fearing him. If he gets the wiry old scalp of Nancy “Mrs. Bates” Pelosi hooked onto his belt, the rest of the Dems will be putty in his hands. The Republicans, too, will be shocked enough to lose the one remaining vertebra in their spine. He’s already got the business world in a panic.
Not a bad few months work for O’s little Mussolini routine.
SeanLA: “If `torture’ doesn’t work why is it a practice reaching back to antiquity? We no longer use many many techniques and strategies in warfare, but this one technique remains. Why is that?”
You don’t define what “works” means.
If you’re aksing if torture is consistently effective in providing the kind of critical, life-saving information that will help us in preventing an attack on us, then no, torture does not “work.”
However, if you’re asking whether torture can be used effectively to obtain false confessions and pre-determined conclusions that can be used as propaganda, than yes, it “worked” for the Stalints, the Maoists, and it “works” for Dick Cheney.
B.C. and Pastor – I hear you and share much of your way of seeing this issue – but you might check Fred Smoler’s piece here – there’s a link above in #12 if this isn’t too hype..
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2009/05/towards_a_defin.html
Smoler notes difficulties with the U.N. definition – now I know that doesn’t speak to the narrower point of U.S. being a signatory etc. But consider Smoler’s point there. There are things the UN objects to that we may need to do – not including waterboarding…He also has some other unobvious points that complicate (slightly) the subject though he never fades on the need to judge what was done…
WHOOOMP! There it is!
WHOOMP! There it is!
Obama’s creature Panetta just tossed Pelosi unda da bus!
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/cia-director-fires-back-at-pelosi-2009-05-15.html
Fuggedaboutit, Nancy! It’s the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Sub-committee for YOU, me lass!
75. Pastor of Muppets:
“Abortion is legal. Torture is not legal.”
~
I just spelled out T-O-R-T-U-R-E for you (and a much worse torture than anything dished up by some military men waterboarding people who should have been shot on sight in the first place rather than taken prisoner).
A child who survives partial birth abortion is not an ‘abortion’ any longer! Good grief, you’re THICK! Why don’t YOU move to an Islamic country and hug a beheader?
79. Bilge,
Ya gotta love that last line:
“At the same time, liberal groups could question why she didn’t push back harder against the Bush administration. Pelosi defended herself for not speaking out at the time about information disclosed in a classified briefing. Asked why she didn’t co-sign a formal objection by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who attended the briefing with Pelosi aide Mike Sheehy, Pelosi said any objection would have done little good.”
Whatta crock! Now she admits she knew but says ‘objecting’ wouldn’t have done any ‘good’? Bwa-hahahahahaha! Caught in a lie and she keeps on digging that hole deeper.
She didn’t ‘object’ because she was all for it, just like many people were after the horror and shock of 9/11. If she felt so intensely horrified by waterboarding she could have co-signed that formal objection by Rep. Jane Harman who DID object. Wow…it must be REALLY hard to co-sign something. Pfft!
Another phony lib caught in a lie. Big shock!
#75 PoM:
“Abortion is legal. Torture is not legal”
Hey, buckwheat, did you read Delia’s link?
If you lot can get away with inducing labor to deliver a live baby, and then deliberately letting it die as “abortion”, then I don’t see where our lads pouring some water up some wretched terrorist’s nose can’t be euphemized as “enhanced interrogation technique”.
And when I have to meet my Maker and atone for the wrongs that I’ve done, I’ll HAPPILY sign up to be the waterboarder, as opposed to being the “abortionist”.
82. Bilge:
“And when I have to meet my Maker and atone for the wrongs that I’ve done, I’ll HAPPILY sign up to be the waterboarder, as opposed to the abortionist.”
~
Amen, Bilge. Amen!
#83 Delia:
I’m surprised you didn’t get the next shot, where Baby Samuel gives PoM and his ilk the finger…
84. Bilgeman:
“#83 Delia:
I’m surprised you didn’t get the next shot, where Baby Samuel gives PoM and his ilk the finger…”
~
This is all I could find!
As to topic: I hope Grossy Pelosi is forced to step down from her House ‘Squeaker position’. Bump-bump-bump! A-nudda one unda da bus!
And wouldn’t you know it?
It looks like there won’t be any Navy destroyer with a SEAL team aboard to rescue Nancy Pelosi.
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/white-house-ducks-pelosi-cia-battle-2009-05-15.html
She’s all alone in a wee little boat in a very big ocean…
I hope her Botox content is high enough that the sharks will recognize her as the ghastly poison that she is.
Hey, Nancy maybe your goodfellafriends in the Seafarers Union will save you.
(google her career donors on OpenSecrets.org)
I hear there’s an opening for an apprentice toilet scrubber on a cruise ship somewhere.
86. Bilge:
“I hear there’s an opening for an apprentice toilet scrubber on a cruise ship somewhere.”
~
Great link! Ha! Toilets are too good for her (even though, I’d love to give her a swirlie)!
Job? I imagine palooka Pelosi would be great at this job! Or, better yet!
Muppets, you don’t get it. The issue is not about what the law IS, but what it OUGHT TO BE. You have no problem with allowing innocent people to be tortured to death, but won’t support the guilty fearing that they may be. The hypocrite is you, and is/ought fallacies won’t change that.
77. Pastor of Muppets: Wow! I don’t get it, I’ll admit it. An innocent, helpless baby vs. a grownup that is evil and intent on destroying our nation…hmmmm, and you don’t pick the baby.
Do we know for a fact that the grownup in Gitmo or the other dentention camps are evil? NO, but the infantry men I know don’t like taking prisoners, so they only do it when the evidence is there.
Abortion is murder!!!
88. Delia:
She’ll get on welfare!
89. myth buster & 90. Ms. Attitude,
That’s just it! You don’t need to put an infant on ‘trial’ to know they are innocent without any doubt. -And, killing them via an agonizing death is the worst, most evil kind of torture there is because we are talking about the most PURE, UNTAINTED of HUMAN BEINGS who have done NOTHING to deserve such cruelty.
It’s telling, that one of the few times 0bama didn’t vote ‘present’, it was to be the ONLY senator to vote against saving an infant if they survived a partial birth abortion. -But, he’s concerned about Gitmo scum?
Ya gotta love the Libs who would rather feel sorry for the scourge of the WORLD than an innocent baby. Sickening and UNREAL.
A nice, hot, steaming plate of EVIL and Hypocrisy, anyone?
~
“She’ll get on welfare!”—Ms. Attitude
Gah! I’d rather feed her to some hungry, illegal immigrant swine-flu infected piglets who swam the borders.
You also have to love that 0bortionist had this to say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypDwNpgIUQc
-And, yet for the Gitmo detainees, they had doctors and psychiatrists on call to be sure they were ‘ok’ through their interrogation aka supposed ‘torture’. -But, GAWD forbid an innocent baby be a ‘trouble’ for a mother/father who hoped to kill their offspring and the poor child survived! Oh helllllll to the no! Die, baby! Die!
INSANITY.
Okay, enough. Sorry. That sh*t just makes me so peeved off.
Meanwhile, back to the liar-lair, bloomers on fire Pelosi.
I’m waiting for Zero to throw her under the bus any time now [doubtful but I'm a wishful thinker]. Maybe he’ll just demote her to grooming his new hypoallergenic pooch. Aww. So kewt!
-Wait! That might be cruel torture to the dog!
We now have no moral standards for torture? Nobody has moral standards for torture.
Torture is just that-torture.
My husband won’t tell me about his South American Friendship Cruise in the Navy-it is top secret. I would like to torture him to find out what happened with all those nice girls wanting American guys…like what did they do?
94. acj:
“We now have no moral standards for torture? Nobody has moral standards for torture.
Torture is just that-torture.”
~
Thanks for clearing that up.
It’s so nice to know that an innocent life who could possibly change the course of history for the better of mankind is murdered and; A person who is already known as evil and hell-bent on destruction who could change the course of history for catastrophe is handled with kid-gloves.
Delia: “That’s just it! You don’t need to put an infant on ‘trial’ to know they are innocent without any doubt. -And, killing them via an agonizing death is the worst, most evil kind of torture there is because we are talking about the most PURE, UNTAINTED of HUMAN BEINGS who have done NOTHING to deserve such cruelty.
It’s telling, that one of the few times 0bama didn’t vote ‘present’, it was to be the ONLY senator to vote against saving an infant if they survived a partial birth abortion. -But, he’s concerned about Gitmo scum?
Ya gotta love the Libs who would rather feel sorry for the scourge of the WORLD than an innocent baby. Sickening and UNREAL.
A nice, hot, steaming plate of EVIL and Hypocrisy, anyone?”
Well, a majority of women in this country still want the right to not be forced by the government to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
If the abortion issue is that important to you, which it obviously is, then you have two choices: move to a country in which abortion is illegal, or work to change the law. But sitting in front of your computer all day writing in all caps about how awful late term abortion is an excercise in futility. Yes, late term abortion is awful, but so is forcing a woman who has been raped to carry her the child. And by forcing a raped women to carry her child, you have just fallen down that slippery slope to fascism, because you are giving the government power over an individual’s right to make decisions about her own body.
But on to Pelosi.
I just hope you all realize that if she goes down for this, the entire Bush Administration is going to go down as well? Is that what you all want? Ok, let’s do it. Full investigation. We’ll see who knew what, when they knew it. I couldn’t really give a **** about her, and am more than willing to watch her go down if it means getting to the truth.
You folks are all at a severe disadvantage, because you don’t really want any of this to happen. You’re calling the Democrats’ bluff here, and hoping that by threatening Pelosi, the Dems will chicken out, call off the dogs and let the Republican criminals who are ultimately repsonsible for illegal torture go unpunished. But what you don’t realize is that President Obama has gamed this through already, and if you don’t think he’s shrewd enough to let Pelosi go under the bus for this, you don’t know jack abut him. He’s doesn’t have any particularly warm relationship with Pelosi, and if the golden opportunity presented itself for him to get rid of her, and give him the added bonus of being nonpartisan and judicious in torture prosecution, he wins out. And, he gets the iceing on the cake – the chance to throw Bush, Cheney, Rove, and all the other criminals up on the hot seat and watch them all squirm and rip each other apart.
However you slice this torture pizza, Obama wins.
96. Pastor of Muppets,
Nope. I WAS raped at age 17 and if a pregnancy had resulted I’d have had it because that baby was innocent and still a part of ME.
There is no excuse for abortion any longer: MORNING AFTER PILL.
Any skank who carries her child almost to term and decides she doesn’t ‘want’ it is a MURDERER and so is the scum-bag father of that child who goes along with it.
~
“I just hope you all realize that if she goes down for this, the entire Bush Administration is going to go down as well?”
HELLO, numb nuts? The Bush admin is OVER! It’s YOUR sock of sorrow now. That’s what the Dems have been trying to do…pass the buck! What part of, “Trying the Bush admin for crimes” do you NOT UNDERSTAND? HELLO? ANYONE IN THERE? Your high-up Dems are just as guilty. You can’t play innocent when your biggest nay-sayers are the biggest liars.
Keep mentioning 0bama’s saggy, black balls that you’re so obsessed with. You are one creepy gay dude and 0bama’s junk is hardly note-worthy if you’ve seen him in shorts on the beach, it’s barely gherkin worthy. Puhlease. Get over his half white weenis.
#96 PoM:
“If the abortion issue is that important to you, which it obviously is, then you have two choices: move to a country in which abortion is illegal, or work to change the law.”
Listen up, you mealy-mouthed @sshole, what was described in Delia’s link was NOT “abortion”.
Those babies were born ALIVE via artificially-induced premature labor.
And then they are left to die.
That is MURDER…
If I took a tire-iron and beat both of your kneecaps and your wrists into pulp, could we
then we all just say it was “corrective surgery”?
It’s the deliberate murder of an infant…it’s infanticide when the fetus is born alive, and you’d better get that through your head.
Boy, you’re displaying a case of cranial-rectal inversion so severe that you need a periscope to see where you’re going.
98. Bilgeman:
Apparently, killing an innocent [in the truest sense of INNOCENCE] human being is nothing compared to a few minutes of physician observing waterboarding of a criminal who will survive the ‘torture’ and be treated humanely thus forth.
Amazing, huh? Un Fuc*ing believable!
Anyone want to waterboard me and post it on youtube? It sure beats being aborted!
My mother fu*ked with my head and was far more cruel than what the Gitmo Girls suffered. Puhlease!
#99 Delia:
“Amazing, huh? Un Fuc*ing believable!”
In a sense, yes, but in another, no.
He’s displaying the same mindset that I suspect was held by sertain German death camp guards.
There were fellows who would wake up, shower and shave, eat breakfast and perhaps read the newspaper…
And then go out, pull on a gas mask, and shake Zyklon-B crystals into a chamber full of human beings.
Then they’d clean up and go eat lunch, maybe take a nap until the afternoon train came in…
All in a day’s work.
The human capacity for self-deception knows no bounds.
100. Bilgeman,
The scary part is…
More people are worried about cruelty to animals than about aborted babies who suffer, shiver, are wracked with unimaginable pain and die without anyone to love them through their death. Nobody to whisper in their ears that it’s ‘okay’…they are treated like garbage. Can you imagine? Women who do this sicken me and my mother was one of them and she has immense regret over it, but, it doesn’t take away the fact that she murdered a child ‘legally’. How nice.
Wrap your head around THAT?
God and his Angels are angry. Our country deserves what is coming. We are Godless and any empathy is just a phony facade for more liberal b.s. sans true comapssion.
I love Delia –no really, i do –trying to frame the one issue without the other is just crazy and she knows how to express that truth. Those who dance back on forth on legal vs moral are just trying to avoid the real issue.
Benj –will get back to you when time permits –
Hey Bud, Alexis, Wade, Pres…et al – I think this thread has turned in a little lesson in what makes genuine political discourse difficult in America – it’s also an object lesson in why Obama’s anti-ideologue’s message resonated with youngsters. Delia’s Gone as the song says…- nobody can talk to her unless you agree with her on HER social issue…The pubs will be screwed forever if her sort rules…Not that I should really care. But – what the hey, it’s not just young’uns you’ll lose with this sort of fantaticism – There’s old Mrs. McCain too. I was just thinking again of the currents of feeling that must have been in the room when the Old Lady wss hanging tight with Sarah P. It’s America – but damn – the class/culture divide there dwarfed anything on offer when it came to the break between “Reagan Dem” and O’s nation….
103. Benj,
“nobody can talk to here unless you agree with her on HER social issue”
~
Not true, Cubby.
What say you? You got a beef with Delia, specifically or am I just your pin-point rant rag subject de jour?
When Libs decide to seek attention RE: my rants, and want me to interact, I expect a certain amount of intelligence and back-ups to said mind-melding.
You have given me none. You’ve been here long enough for me to annoy you though, non? Therefore, I’ve gotten under your skin, Oui?
Take heart, small-minded one… Every moniker you post under is just a laugh for me. I appreciate the memo of stupid though. Thanx.
Meanwhile, back at the dumpster dem diver ship of fools:
Borat YoMama Waffles /waffles/Biffs and smiles all the way…
Benj, there’s two ways to ‘handle’ a Delia –the Blind Eye or the Cannibal Feast. I can sympathize with you on the need for the Blind Eye when other matters are urgent and proximate, but to maintain Blind Eye past the urgent & proximate other, is to have joined in the Cannibal Feast. Sorry to sound like a zealot from flyover country, but that is what “is” is.
When the adult humans don’t speak for the baby humans, something has gone way wrong –an orgasm has become an idol, worth murdering your kin for.
105. buddy larsen,
What fate will come of our elders under such evil? Will our elderly be ‘aborted’ too when they are no longer ‘viable’? Old tribal beliefs put the elderly on high and not the other way around, just as babies are treated as gifts from GOD and not ‘curses’ or ‘mistakes’.
What on earth has become of us? Our humanity? I cry too much, but, I’m terrified of the evil that is uplifted and the innocence that is tortured, killed and cruelly thrown in a garbage bin without so much as a proper burial.
What has happened to our souls when we would rather ‘care’ about evil people rather than innocent ones? WTF?
My heart breaks and yet I’m labeled an ‘extremist’ for things that people should be outraged over!
*swipes tear*
#106 Delia:
“Will our elderly be ‘aborted’ too when they are no longer ‘viable’? ”
Of course…THAT groundwork has already been set, again in Europe,(which the Alleged Hawaiian obviously so admires), with the “Physician” assisted suicide laws.
And that’s another of the Leftists’ lethal thought mechanism mind-traps…to misuse the word “physician” for a person who willingly and knowingly kills his “patient”.
It ensnares the dullards and the feeble-minded like the term “abortion” does to PoM.
Boil those frogs slowly, and they’ll quietly walk right in to the abbatoir, lay down on the stainless-steel table, and expose their own necks for the knife.
Buddy & What the hell Delia – this is for you too – You gotta great name – “All the friendS I ever had our gone” Hang on to your passion but maybe listen a little more to the other side and ride your horse of instruction a little less…Here’s an excerpt from a review of a novel by John Irving that touches on the kinds of compassion that once informed BOTH sides of the abortion debate (at least at one time)…Give it a shot….Forgive me for not linking – but you can’t get to it online unless you’re into the TIMES archives – the piece is old goes back to the 80′s (?)…
[Cider House Rules] is also a book about abortion, and the knowledge and sympathy directing Mr. Irving’s exploration of the issue are exceptional. Pertinent history, the specifics of surgical procedure, the irrecusable sorrow of guilt and humiliation, the needs and rights of children – their weight is palpable in these pages. Responsive to the ideals and passions that drive both parties – pro-life, pro-choice – the author does not tease himself with delusions that a sunny negotiated accord waits just down the road. There is no maddeningly abstract prattle about the possibility of determining, ”scientifically,” the precise moment at which ”the fetus becomes human.” But Mr. Irving draws readers close, in the space of his imagination, to an understanding of essential links, commonalities – even unities – between factions now seething with hatred for each other. I have to record, at the risk of a pompous sound, that the novel’s potential political consequence -as an approach to reconciliation based on clarification of shared moral objectives – moved me to gratitude as I read.
The time frame extends from the first through the sixth decades of the 20th century (we stop well short of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion). There are two heroes: the book’s first half is dominated by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a celibate physician who directs an orphanage, delivers babies and performs abortions illegally (”when he was asked and when it was safe”). The second half belongs to the orphaned, ”unadoptable” Homer Wells, whom Larch loves as a spiritual son and schools informally as a gynecological surgeon. The setting is Maine, or rather the two Maines, dark and light. Larch’s orphanage, St. Cloud’s, is located in a dank, stripped, far northern river town founded as a logging camp and plunged into decline when a paper company moves downstream. Wells spends his 20′s and 30′s on a seaside farm where Atlantic breezes clean the air and apple and lobster harvests alike confirm the rightness of hope. W ARS, elections, public personages obtrude intermittently. It is in letters to F.D.R., for instance, that Larch presses his full argument for the legalization of abortion. (”Mr. Roosevelt – you, of all people! – you should know that the unborn are not as wretched or as in need of our assistance as the born! Please take pity on the born!”) There is wry scrutiny of several cultural innovations relevant to the book’s subject, including drive-in theaters. There are striking successes in evoking, unsentimentally, the imaginative lives of the poor. (Especially admirable is an easygoing description of migrant workers entertaining themselves on the roof of the cider press that gives the book its title, observing the magical lights of a distant county fair and explaining their meaning to one another.) And there are a half-dozen or more love stories. (The two most affecting portray the unrequited passion of a pugnacious, winningly lewd orphan named Melony for Homer Wells, and the unrequited but doomed passion – years later – of Homer Wells’s son for a black woman sexually abused by her father.) But the novel’s core is the developing conflict between Larch and Wells, spiritual father and son, concerning the unlawful termination of pregnancies. Through a series of complicated schemes – Mr. Irving, the inventive, clever-zany wit is in clear sight here -Larch not only trains the orphaned lad as surgeon, but arranges an alternative identity for him as a licensed physician. Pushed further by the need to allay suspicion among the clinic-orphanage’s trustees, he fabricates a record of antiabortion statements for the younger man. The goal is to insure that, after Larch is gone, help will still be available to poor women facing unwanted pregnancies. But it emerges that the cliche-ridden pro-life statements sardonically fabricated for Wells are not at total variance with his views. Repelled by the surgical procedures of abortion, persuaded that ”the fetus has a soul,” Wells pulls back from the place prepared for him, and a contest of wills ensues.
A key scene dramatizing that contest – Wells’s first expression of disapproval, Larch’s first self-defense – takes place in Larch’s clinic. He is performing an abortion with Wells as anesthetist; in the next room a nurse checks the contractions of an unwed mother; we have just heard, outside, the voices of orphanage children pleading for a chance to prove their qualities -”I’m the best! I’m the best!” – to a couple newly arrived, theoretically in search of an ”adoptable.” Wells, whose attachment to Larch is deep, takes a stand -says aloud that he wishes to leave the operating room.
Continuing to scrape with the curette, Larch insists Wells must watch, must understand the process, must learn to perform it. Wells protests, Larch is obdurate. Anguish and suppressed rage intensify, and Larch finally cries out: ”Do I interfere? . . . When absolutely helpless women tell me that they simply can’t have an abortion, that they simply must go on through with having another – and yet another – orphan: do I interfere? Do I? I do not,” [Larch] said scraping. ”I deliver it. . . . And do you think there are largely happy histories for the babies born here? . . . But do I resist? I do not. I do not even recommend. I give them what they want: an orphan or an abortion.”
I am neutral: this is the claim. I am a teaching professional, I serve my patients’ will. Larch’s self-justifications have force and reason, but, as we listen, we understand that the man’s whole response to his work is not in his speech. And before the story is done we understand that its mission is to show us what is absent by revealing the full moral and psychological reality experienced by an altruist as abortionist.
What is absent, speaking bluntly, is suffering and guilt – Larch’s suffering and guilt. He began his career confidently but soon found himself fighting his abhorrence of his own surgical procedures. The words he addresses, late in the book, to Wells speak to his own history: ”If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice – and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.” How exactly has Larch been victimized? During his medical training he saw the fearful self-mutilation practiced by poor pregnant women. As orphanage director he observed firsthand the pathos of the lives and longings of children born unwanted and quickly abandoned. More than once in his career he dealt with class hypocrisy – the comfortable assumption that, for the Truly Nice, double standards are invariably appropriate. All that would bring a sensitive physician to a guiltlessness while breaking laws against abortion was, seemingly, part of Larch’s experience.
And yet he cannot feel guiltless, cannot endure his work, sees himself as trapped: here lies his victimization. The procedures of dilation and curettage, the sight of ”the products of conception” – limbs, organs, nascent features of expression – are, without anodyne, as unbearable to him as to Wells. The assurance his crustiness projects edges ever toward hysteria; he is addicted to ether; his altruism has, as its reverse side, a near incapacity to express feeling for others.
Implicit in Larch’s suffering is, I believe, Mr. Irving’s strong, simple theme: our learned forbearance and cultivated sensitivity lie at the root both of acceptance of abortion and repugnance for it. The orphanage at St. Cloud’s was founded long before the creation of aid-to-dependent-children programs, in a century during which moving crusades were launched to awaken public consciousness: obliviousness is cruelty, and forbearance creates obligations to the neighbors’ children, not merely to one’s own. Subtly, shrewdly, Mr. Irving evokes those crusades. The bedtime stories Larch reads aloud to the children in their dormitory are drawn from the novelists – Dickens and Charlotte Bronte – who taught their contemporaries to notice the waifs in their midst, to hesitate to scorn or cuff or starve or sell them into slavery as child miners or sweeps. Considered in this context, Larch’s kindly orphanage can be understood as a stage in the history of compassion. The same is true for the emergence, later on, of the initially confident altruist-abortionist.
And it is also true for the development of that figure, still later, into a person conscious of his guilt, suffering and victimization. What is felt in the grain of ”The Cider House Rules” – in its study of rule-givers and rule-breakers – is that the history of compassion cannot have a stop and must perpetually demand larger generosities than those hitherto conceived. By responding to that demand we may, tomorrow, invent ways to abolish nightmare choices between born and unborn. Something akin to this faith seems alive, finally, in Larch’s successor, Homer Wells, at the close of the novel; in the process of deciding that he must perform abortions, he reaches a position on the ”issue” more humane than any summoned by standard pro-life, pro-choice campaign cries. Viewed in literary terms, ”The Cider House Rules” is hardly without defect. Its young hero and several lesser characters lack presence and independent vitality. The accounts of diseases, treatments and operations are impressively detailed – Mr. Irving acknowledges debts to his grandfather, an obstetrician and author of technical manuals, and to Dr. Richard Selzer, a surgeon and essayist – but improbabilities abound in the narrative. And there are other difficulties, none negligible. Often the tone wavers; the graphic mode gives way to ghoulishness or bawdy. And surely no other writer of literary reputation is as absurdly certain as Mr. Irving that the repetition of the words ”tears” and ”kisses” unfailingly summons emotion.
No one aware of the present literary climate, however, blames failures to sustain poised thematic seriousness solely on individual novelists. It is one thing to counsel an author choosing Mr. Irving’s themes to aim for the nobility, solemnity and heartbreakingly perfect restraint of, say, a masterwork like Rodin’s ”Mother With a Dying Child.” It is another to explain how these qualities are to be achieved in an age ill at ease with the notion that art can have a subject, an age half-persuaded, in fact, that no subjects exist except language, the death of feeling or the artist’s proud (or nervous) separation from society. For whole chapters at a time ”The Cider House Rules” manages, despite the odds, to speak as though the tragedy of a country blinding itself to the history of its own moral progress mattered, and as though a writer’s work has to do not with exterminating pity and anger but with animating them. At its best, this novel is an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor.
78. Pastor of Muppets:
Heres where you might be wrong. Over thousands of years of documented and discussed techniques, there are many many thousands cases of valuable information being gotten from uncooperative people.
I keep thinking of the book The Day of the Jackal:
`unsparing in its detailing of government-directed torture’
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Jackal-Frederick-Forsyth/dp/0553266306
I know its fictionalized, but I bring its up because its so detailed and shocking that it stays with you, only certain people are capable of even doing it, In the book, they don’t care if the person being tortured lives or not, and they especially don’t care what the person says in a conscious state. What they want to do is bring them to the very edge of death and the torturer keeps talking and the person rambles, like they say you see your life in front of you before you die, and out of these random words associative information is extracted. The hero of the book vomits and is repulsed by this, but, he gets valuable information that helps him prevent the pending assassination.
So, on this plane, if your asking me if I think Kalid mohammad’s life is more valuable than say, some unnamed person falling from the twin towers on 9/11, my answer is most definitely no. But on the other hand I wouldn’t want to be in the room while info is being extracted.
A certain quote from Orwell comes to mind about how good people can sleep in peace because brutal people stand by to make it so.
Also a certain Marine quote: “In this country you have the right to say whatever you want, and I have the right to bust your face open if you disagree.”
Benj, Smolers’ piece has a faint ring, I tied to that UN doc a while back here, (in the archives now) we are NOT signatories to the UN thing. We are on board with the Swiss conventions however, and there are places where in those docs where the ambiguity was stretched real thin.
For me it still comes down to the way the enemy chooses to fight, the defining bit of immorality that allows them to use human shields, that encourages them to hold children up to catch bullets and women to catch hell. They are not signatories to the conventions either, they are not state actors, they are not a real army. Then what are they? And why should anyone care? That illegal combatant issue is a major point of contention for me, that and ALQ conduct toward civilians.
PoM has said, ‘But what you don’t realize is that President Obama has gamed this through already’.
PoM, the guy didn’t ‘game’ the Farrakahn, I mean Wright association (this isn’t the same pastor I knew). There’s a myriad of others but the point is:
What Obama had, his infinite campaigning-type mode, his ‘Gaming on’ is banking on, and being paid, so to speak, the ‘amnesia-like’ recollection and stupidity of his supporters.
Your aforementioned comments definitely qualify you as one of his zombies. The mind, truly is a terrible thing to waste..
life begining at conception is not religious dogma or opinion,it is a biological fact.
i however see the battle to reduce abortions not in the courts but in reaching out and showing the alteratives to it.
why people feel the need to defend partial birth abortion though,fills me with the deepest disgust.
it is also deeply troubling that the same group advicate for euthinasia.(which i don’t mind in limited cases for the terminaly ill)judging from their stand on abortion,i highly doubt that would be the standard for them if it were made legal.
the whole theme in general,is that there are just too many of us.
have they not been clued in that their social programs depend on a steady population growth?
delia, benj –we’re either a source of protein or we’re in the image of God.
Look into Easter Island (jeez, wot a name for what happened there). It was a world unto itself, like our own. The Pacific Ocean might as well have been the Milky Way for the people who made the statues (last seen when the Martians in “Mars Attacks!” knocked one over with a bowling ball and the rest fell like dominoes). The plain fact of those enormously labor-intensive heads showed a society given over so completely to idols that when famine slipped upon them, they began eating each other. The last of them died as prey, in deep caves, in hiding from their own people. In vacuo mutatis mutandis.
PS, there need not be a supernatural note to that either/or proposition.
It’s actually all practicality. Having developed over the life of the species certain spiritual taboos , what fealty must they now be paid (after all, this is new era, there’s never before been this “now” until now)?
So, the answer obviously will need to come too late–how else will we prove we had known or not known the answer?
The riddle of the Sphinx –what walks on all fours in the morning, on twos in the noon, and on threes in the evening –has of course, an easy answer: the Human (first a crawling baby, then a striding adult, then a doddering elder with a cane). So the riddle is the human, “once removed”.
‘He said’ and ‘She said’ is having a profound impact on this thread/topic but, in ways not intentioned (I imagine). My sincere apologies to the author for veering completely out of the realm of scope.
My beliefs are mine alone and they are not mutable. To those folks that believe other than myself, thank you for sharing your opinions and keepin’ it real. God is watching all of us and taking notes. I ain’t perfeKt so I’m sure I have a lot of red letters under my name in God’s big, book O’ sinners.
Pelosi please fry
Evil do die
Let sleeping dogs
Lie
Nancy has Shite all over her nest-
Now her buddies at CNN says she lied.
Dear Leader wants rid of Nancy.
Throw her under the Bus!
Oh No!
…the kremlin and the Five Families are doin’ a little hoss tradin’.
115. Delia: . . . “God is watching all of us and taking notes . . . Pelosi please fry”
I think you’re missing something.
118. sheesh:
“I think you’re missing something.”
~
You’re right! I should have wished for her kidneys to be tragically expunged from her flaccid body. -Or, maybe just a wee wish for her bug-eyes to bulge, pop and finally fall out of her vacuous bobble-head.
119 Thaaat’s more like it. I knew I could count on you to represent good Christian thinkin. Wanda Sykes is a Christian, did you know that?
120. sheesh,
LOL! You crack me up!
Who’s that makin’ nasty thoughts? Nasty boys! Who’s that dancin’ to my nasty groove? Nasty boys!
Nasty boys don’t mean a thing. Oh, you nasty boys! [Take it, Janet and flash that tittay]!
Thankfully, I don’t have a cross to bear. I’m a sinner and I know I’ll never be perfect. Therefore, if you’re looking for a ‘perfect’ Christian, you’re missing the whole point of why Jesus died on the cross for our sins.
Oh, I try to be good but I know deep down, way deep down in my deepest soul of souls, I have a lot of work to do on ME. Judge me all you want but my ultimate hope is my own personal journey in life to be positive and hopefully to give something of myself during this short time I have here.
I’m going to send you a ((HUG)) and a *SPANK* anyway, just to make your Saturday.
121 DELIA . .. It’s not about perfection. It’s about thinking it’s ok to hope people “fry” while you wrap yourself in some feigned deference to Jesus.
“Oh, I try to be good ”
No, you don’t. I’ve always considered Jesus to be Judeo-Christian doorway to a bigger god. You use him like a “get-out-of-jail-free” card . . . “I can sling all the crap I want cuz I got the love of Jesus right here in my heart.” The fact that you so readily double-dipped is all the proof we need. You could have said, “You’re right. I’m not perfect after begin called on the Christian contradiction of your “Pelosi should fry comment. That was your chance. Instead, you decided to take it up a notch with bulging, popping eyes and kidneys ripped from her body. That’s wilfull disregard of principle.
That’s why non-Christians aren’t concerned with your morality . . . because YOU aren’t concerned with your morality. These relentless contradictions honeycomb your philosophies . . . and while they help other forked-tongue vipers of similar self-interests congratulate each other with “silly me, there I go again judging others and falling short of the glory of god” . . . your contradictions have a far more costly and immediate impact – your political downfall. How they effect what happens after I’ll leave to . . . Hiyyuuuuuum . . . or Joseph Smith. I can never remember who’s who in that sitcom you call Christinanity.
Man, I would LOVE to waterboard puppetmaster. That would be in my top 10 “most enjoyable moments” list. I’d try to set the record for “longest waterboarding session” with that mofo.
#123 v-cubed:
“Man, I would LOVE to waterboard puppetmaster.”
You obviously haven’t read the new memo from headquarters.
The term “waterboarding” has expired. The preferred terminology is now “inverted respiratory enema”.
Please update your manuals,
…and have an Obama day!
124 BM3K . . . ixnay on the enema-ay
#76 Pastor of Muppets: “Abortion is legal. Torture is not legal. I don’t know how to make it any clearer. If you don’t like it, work to change the law. If you can’t change the law, suck it up and come to terms with the fact that not getting everything you want is part of living in a Democracy.”
Democracy assumes we elected our representatives and in open session we saw them debate the issue of abortion and the statute permitting it was duly passed. If voters did not like it then they could duly vote those who enacted it out of office. Legislation under the US Constitution works that way.
Times might then change and we the voters could then elect a Congress to repeal the statute set out in the US Code which legalized abortion.
There is a problem here. Congress never voted to legalize abortion. There is no abortion statute on the books, making abortion legal, to repeal. There was no debate and no open vote. We never got a chance to vote out those idiots who voted for abortion or against abortion depending on our views as voters.
Hey, Pastor, do you know why we can’t change the “Abortion Law” by democracy or repeal the statute that gave it to us? Because it was never legislated. Five white guys, some of them Southerners, behind closed doors were fearful the minority races would propagate too far for their comfort and they figured abortion would keep the ranks of the poor and dependent on the welfare state down to manageable levels. In the early 1970′s they legislated from the Supreme Court Bench behind closed doors, and we do not know what arguments they used among themselves to justify that judicial legislation. They sat for life so they had no fear of being voted out.
To understand how they did it you’d have to know something about Constitutional Interpretation theories. But mark this. Madison wrote precise notes about the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1789 and abortion, as a proper subject for involvement by the Federal Government to be granted precisely enumerated and limited powers, was never discussed, nor would it have occurred to anyone then that local sexual practices would be of any concern to the centralized Federal government which the States were very nervous about. Roe v. Wade, anyway, was a fake lawsuit dug up and contrived by leftist lawyers, the same as the Scopes Monkey Trial was a scam pre-arranged by the Leftists as well. Ms. “Roe,” so named by pseudonym, now regrets having been talked into it.
Anyway, it’s probably useless to explain this to you, but the real facts of why no abortionist can now be criticized is alot different from what your ignorant comment suggested. Some people think the abortion legislation from the Bench is no more legal than any other judicial legislation, at least in the face of the constitutional separation of powers as originally formulated which gave the legislative power exclusively to Congress. To me it appears no more legal than the President using his office to steal a bond holder’s property and give it to union leaders hell bent on killing the golden goose that gave them their position. (And I say that even though I believe abortion should be legal in several important areas, though perhaps not universally so). The leftists certainly know these arguments concerning the unconstitutionality of Roe v. Wade. They just don’t care.
122. sheesh,
My [personal] relationship GOD is has NOTHING to do with YOU, honey chile. I’m not trying to sell GOD or CHRISTIANITY to you are anyone else. If I mention my belief in God that is hardly a crime. In your tiny, little speck of a mind, you’d think I was the greatest thing since sliced Pelosi if I said I was a Satan worshipper. Then, allllllllll would be cool with little mister/miss Sheesh. You really are whack.
In your opinion, I could be the most vile, evil, disgusting cretin if only I was a bull dyke who loved the gays and killing fetuses and cheatin’ men.
You’re obviously soul-searching but for what I have no idea and I’m not the person you need to be typing to about whatever burning questions are bothering your heart/mind/soul.
I hafta love how you think what *I* say [jokingly] about Pelosi is sooooo terrible as if it might even come true *gasp*
by my even speaking it and yet when a Stand-Up comedienne says they wish for R.L. to die of kidney failure and the TOTUS guffaws at that joke, that’s a-ok. Just like you thought the Palin jokes were funny “nailin’ Palin” et al.
Give it up, Sheesh and don’t get your tranny panties in a twist.
Get-out-of-hell free card? Nawwwww. If I go to hell, I’m goin’ to hell playin’ the piana!
127. Delia . . . “My [personal] relationship GOD is has NOTHING to do with YOU, honey chile.”
I know, baby cakes, that’s why I said, ” . . .non-Christians aren’t concerned with your morality . . . because YOU aren’t concerned with your morality.”
“In your opinion, I could be the most vile, evil, disgusting cretin if only I was a bull dyke who loved the gays and killing fetuses and cheatin’ men.”
Not sure, but I think you meant the opposite – are you for or against bull dykes killing babies? (And why the unrelated addition of cheatin’ men? Is that what you’re TRULY dealing with, snookums? Or did Mr. Big sit on you again?)
Your religiosity is irrelevant. I never said you were right or wrong. You’re just indifferent to the restraints and behaviors that your god suggests you should embrace. As for jokes made by others about others, they weren’t the issue now were they? Your reference to them merely heightens your moral relativism. And if those jokes were immediately preceded by “God is watching us all and taking notes . . . ” then they would have screamed hypocrisy just like you did.
Soul searching? Nope, not me. I found mine a long time ago. You’re right, we’re not perfect. You’re just a little more imperfect than me. Consider this rehearsal for when you you stand at those pearly gates and he/she/it asks you, “So, why the relentless death wishes?” You better come up with a better answer than “Rush Limbaugh.”
Someone should ask soon-to-be-seated senator (groan) Al Franken what he thinks of torture. I remember when he was on one of the late night talk shows shortly after 9-11. He actually made a couple of funny jokes regarding the terrorists’s resolve – and advocated the use of torture to extract information. He said, almost verbatim, “You know, I understand they’re willing to die for allah (lower-case intentional), but are they really willing to take a red-hot poker up their a$$ for allah? Are they willing to have their nuts squeezed in a vice for allah?” I just wish I could find that clip.
128. sheesh,
I’m more imperfect than you? Ha! Are we having a contest on who is more ‘imperfekt’ now? Yay! I won!
Sooooo, if I stood by all of my beliefs except for God and I said I was an atheist where would your grand argument stand? -And, FYI…I was an atheist for quite a long part of my adulthood up until a couple years ago. My LIBERAL mother shoved religion down my throat so I know all-too-well about religious hypocrisy.
-And, ‘jokes’ were the issue since you were acting as if I was some horrible person for joking about Grossi Pelosi frying.
Do you even read yourself type? -And, I still wonder what your obsession with me is, ‘baby-cakes’. Survived the abortion? Herpes flare-up? Boyfriend not giving you any attention? Soros took you off the dingbat docket?
Did you ever get that new car that doesn’t guzzle the evil gasoline? No? Why? Because 0bama didn’t say so?
Today, being Sunday and all and me bein’ a goood KershTin, I’ll only wish that Pelosi’s bowels twist in knot and she has to crap out of her mouth [won't make much of a dif anyhow].
G’day, punkin’
sheesh why the obsession with delia? i have been lurking here for a few months now and i cannot help but notice you seem to seek out delia for arguments that hardly have anything to do with the topic at hand. let it go man. i voted for obama and i am proud of my president but people like you are making those of us who support obama look like fools. please stop acting like you represent those of us who actually care about our country and our president. pelosi lied and that is obvious but the bigger question is why did she lie? p.s. i am black but i did not vote for obama because he was black but because he was the only decent choice over mccain. i would have rather had voted for hillary in all honesty but c\’est la vie. let us give our president a chance to make some mistakes. how was he to know that most of the people he appointed to his cabinet would turn out to be tax cheats and liars? obama did not have much to work with so why blame him for things he could not foresee?
131 . . . I think 130 explains things. If not, just go to the start of it at #118. Hardly an obsession.
Just setting things right. Nor do I believe you are who you present yourself to be. Your facade is painfully obvious – much like the “I used to be a liberal” posters who lob out “the error of my ways” in a hackneyed attempt to establish some semblance of moderation and reason amidst the rampant hypocrisy and angry insults that define this forum. Here’s your particular “oops I dropped out of character” moment:
“how was (Obama) to know that most of the people he appointed to his cabinet would turn out to be tax cheats and liars?”
You’re not very good at this, are you?
Besides, If you want calm and reasoned debate based on facts and brought forth with decorum and civility, you’re in the wrong place. If you’ve been lurking here for several months, you know that. Me, I just like terrorizing the minds of radical right wing extremists. Call it a hobby.
131. Banifa Jackson,
No offense but, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of your rant and you never really gave a reason why you support Dohbama other than him being a Democrat so I’m having a really hard time taking you any more seriously than Sheesh-sham-wow.
Sheesh is an angry Gay man btw, he’s not obsessed with me [at least not in a 'sticky' way]. Right, Sheesh? -And you don’t terrorize me in the least. You *do* make me LMAO a lot though.
Colon blow and youuuuuuuuuuu in the moooooooornin’!
#13 Banifa Jackson:
“sheesh why the obsession with delia? ”
My grody blog-slave suffers from intense “vagina envy”…he wants one of his own, but can’t have one.
“i voted for obama and i am proud of my president but people like you are making those of us who support obama look like fools.”
Hear! hear! I second that!
Knock it off, mutant. Out and Proud Obamavoterz don’t need any help from the likes of you to look like fools.
“pelosi lied and that is obvious but the bigger question is why did she lie?”
Pelosi Lied, Al Qaeda Cried?
“how was he to know that most of the people he appointed to his cabinet would turn out to be tax cheats and liars? ”
Two words: competent staff-work.
“i would have rather had voted for hillary in all honesty but c\’est la vie.”
Just out of curiosity, did you vote for the UberFrauFuehrer in the primaries?
134. Bilgeman,
LMAO! Your grody blog slave is my grody blog slave. Shall we toast to our GBS? Our human pez dispenser spits ‘em out and we yell, “PULL!”.
“Just out of curiosity, did you vote for the UberFrauFuehrer in the primaries?”
I’m curious too. Hmmmmmmm. Another ACORN nutter or one of Sheesh’ alternates? I don’t put anything past OOMO who switches monikers faster than I can log-on to the freakin’ internet.
#135 Delia:
“Shall we toast to our GBS?”
By all means…let’s!
And then we can give the agitated little freak a nice looong drink from a fire hose.
Wouldn’t THAT be nice?
136 BM3K . . . Careful . . . caaarrreefulllll . . . you’re backsliding just a little bit. I know, Delia said the “sticky” word and got you all revved up, but resist the urge. You’ve been so good. Chuck is quite proud of you.
….call it a job…or a social life….reason for being…but not a hobby.
138 . . . 3 minutes to respond to my last post . . . you’re late . . . another demerit . . .
i have 3 hours 50 min from the relevent one….here ya go..take it slow and don’t hurt yourself!http://www.socraticmethod.net/
you should stop watering down your borax….it’s too weak as it is.