Doubleplusgood

Roland and I can't even agree on the premise of a book, I could have spent 30 minutes crafting a response that would not be unlike arguing with someone speaking another language, or posted a funny picture...

he thinks there are millions of terrorists that are going to invade us and kill us so we can be one nation under Allah, I think Al Quada was a carefully crafted enemy that can never be defeated meant to traumatize us into a persistant state of fear so we would gladly trade liberty for "security"

if two cannot agree on simple definitions, there can be no reasonable debate. Each one chooses thier own pill.



Or I could have explained what I expected the future to be like in the shade of the sapling that has spouted, once it matures:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."

Cart before the horse, Roland - which was my original point. One needs to have purpose and policy before one can judge whether such techniques have merit or practicality. You were getting lost in the "technical minutiae" of torture, whereas Taco's point was policy-related.

I guess I just don't get your explanation. We don't do this for escape attempts in US prisons...


America = Humane Torture?



You started off kind of iffy, but you finished strong. Very nice analysis on why we, in fact, are creatin gmore "terrorists" than Bin Laden ever could.

Thanks Seth! As an American, I have a lot of trouble expressing what I mean in a clear manner. I appreciate you explaining what I was trying to get across.

Here's a picture of a baby giraffe.

Well my first sentence is that things happened that shouldn't have. I agree with you that the pictures are shocking, but some of them demonstrate the difference between American torture and the torture methods used worldwide a century ago. America is supposed to use psychological torture. This psychological torture is not supposed to be nice. Torture by its very nature is going to be nasty. You aren't going to be able to see pictures of torture of anykind without being shocked. If you had pictures of what American soldiers go though as training, you would be outraged, but the truth is that US soldiers who come out of SEARS training for surviving POW camps come through the proper use of psychological torture still sane and in one peice.

I only call the torture more humane comparitively, because it causes no permanent damage, but it should still be a last resort. Psychological torture will still have the same psychological end result on both the one being tortured and the society he is taken from. I do realize that there is still ill effects to torture being used in any form, but I do not think it is as bad as some pictures would imply. I've seen the same type of things with my own eyes being done to Americans in training. You honestly would be suprised how far torture is allowed to go even on Americans in training. The whole point is to break the person down psychologically long enough to get them to tell you what you want. That is why people are scared, humiliated, sensory deprived, sleep deprived, and made as uncomfortable as possible. At the time it is very scary, but in the end it doesn't permanently hurt you. If America has no problem with an American coming out of training with a broken bone, half starved, sleep deprived, and temporary a basket case; why do you think they are going to have any other standards for enemy prisoners. Granted things in Iraq went much further than this to the point of causing permanent damage and death, but many of the pictures are of methods that are still considered appropriate by the U.S. government because of the lack of permanent damage on the inidividual.

I agree with you that the torture is a problem, but I stand by my statement that it is a more humane form of torture than what was used in the past. We have a long ways to go, but you have to admit we have come a long way as well. We are no longer cutting off peices of a person till they talk or die. It is too bad that we can't be perfect, but at least things are better.

Great slogan -- Republicans should use that in 2006.



GOP. We Stand For A More Humane Form of Torture.

lol. The cold hard fact is that alot of what went on was perfectly in line with military policy. I don't think the president sits down and reviews every military policy in the defense department, but these soldiers really were doing what they were trained to do. If they took it to the point of someone being maimed or killed they were out of bounds, but there was a policy of giving interrogators alot of free lattitude as long as it didn't go that far. If you train someone to carry out torture in a certain way, and you are in charge of them, they will torture in that manner. If we decide torture shouldn't be done at all, then get the officers in charge to change the policy. I can't believe they just threw lower enlisted in jail, kept the policies unchanged, and then acted like they never advocated torture in the first place. We have advocated torture for a long time.

Hence, why I have a problem with it all

Ty again Kendra, I needed that laugh.

Or could it be that he is as smart as he ever was and it's just that he says things you don't agree with any more?

For me... being a left wing type, he seems as brilliant as he ever was and his analysis of terror politics is particularly enlightening. I think that since you are a right-wing type of person, the minute he left the (oh so dry and removed), arena of Linguistics, you started to see him as intellectually bankrupt.

Seems to me that it's those glasses you are wearing, (not Chomsky) at fault here.

What would be convincing to me is if you could cite a single left-leaning kind of person (of his intelligence level), that thinks similarly about Chomsky. That at least would prove that it wasn't political bias behind the accusations you make about him.

This is nuts.

You watch too many movies I think.
Also ends dont justify means, ever, period.

and his citations are to the point of overkill

I can't understand how anyone could view the facts that Chomsky has compliled and come to any other conclusion than his

The United States is the #1 terrorist state in the World

and if you disagree, let me ask you this

is an ultimatum to neutral parties with a threat of violence a tactic of terrorism?

if so, please explain "with us or against us"

if not... sigh

remember, pigs are kept fat and happy up until slaughter

great post Dianne

Not to butt in... but,

in addition, the only terrorist groups that have ever "given up," and the only terrorist situations that have ever been sucessfully resolved into peacefull ones, were done by way of negotiation, not war. This usually after literally decades of war and thousands of dead failed to resolve anything.

So even though no one wants to hear it, the most likely way to sucessfully resolve the whole Islamic terrorist thing, is to actually sit down with them at a table and work out a deal.

These groups have a lot of valid grievances, and the population can be far more easily bribed with prosperity than they can be beaten with the "stick" of war..

How revolutionary!

zackly

like i said, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

You seem to have this mistaken belief that the population of these regions is in league with the terrorists.

Are all of those Iraqis that have been murdered by terrorists just "taking one for the team?"

How about the wedding that they bombed this week? Oh, wait.. those guys probably didn't count. They probably weren't "the population".

Who exactly are you going to sit down with at a table? Al-Zarquai? The guy who says that the only solution is to kill all the infidels (you are an infidel), and impose Islamic law on everyone? How exactly do you come to a compromise with that? We'll kill SOME of our people, and institute SOME of the Koran as our civil law?

The problem here, which I stated before, is that the biggest threat to religious fundamentalists is not the US military.. it's the simple existence of the US. The population of these regions WANT of have commercial goods.. they WANT to have political freedom... and the reason they want it, is because they see what life is like in the US. As long as the US is there as an example, the religious fundamentalists will be threatened, and they will want to attack the US.

So, how exactly do you remove that perceived threat?

I absolutely agree that prosperity is the way to end terrorism... but that requires the opposite of what Mulch is offering. To bring prosperity to those regions, involves trading with them. Trade brings prosperity. But the terrorists don't want that.

hey now, i never said cease trade and relations

but bombing the shit out their land to get their oil and economically hijacking infrastructure and calling it "capitalism and free trade" is ridiculous

*patiently waits for the specifics of of who these terrorists are and how Roland knows so damn much about how a fringe element thinks, as he seems to know the exact motivations and thought patterns of an unknown group*

Do you think that Al Qaeda would be totally cool with you having free trade with people in the region? That they'd be cool with you selling them TV's, and cars, and designer clothes?

Sorry, but I think you're completely wrong... I think they'd consider that "getting up in their business".



They go on TV, and they say what their goals and motivations are.

oh yeah, if it is on TV it must be true

methinks you give more power to "their" words than reality has given them

Uhh... So, you're suggesting that when they present their "message" on TV, that they're actually lying?

While I respect your opinion as an avid TV watcher, I would be remiss in my duty if I failed to point out that "The more TV people watched, the less they knew"

special thanks to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber for pointing this out.

That's quite funny. Really.

Let's take this from another angle then... Supposing that all televised messages from the terrorists are fake, and listening to them actually makes you know less, how exactly do you know what their "legitimate grievances" are?

It should truly be interesting to see what kind of source for this information you have, that is somehow more valid that the stated goals of the terrorists themselves.

Not to mention that America is stuck on the idea that unity is what makes a group strong. They don't realize that most of the groups that threaten American security today are strong because they aren't united. They are so splintered and spread out that they will never be destroyed. Osama Bin Laden is not a general planning, organizing and orchestrating a world domination plan. He is an educator. He educates people about his extremist views on the world, shares his dreams of what bad things should happen to the evil, and he trains people before they leave and spread out over the globe.

You cut off the head, and this animal doesn't die. It isn't a country. What are we killing Pushtus in Afghanistan and Shi'ites and Sunni's in Iraq for? Why do we think we have accomplished some mission by getting rid of Saddam? It doesn't make the enemy weaker. If anything it makes them stronger, because they have another excuse to get people angry at us.

People that think this whole thing is about who has the biggest balls need to grow up. We aren't playing cops and robbers like you did when you were a kid. You don't just kill the bad guy and then go to sleep at night because justice won. The "bad guys" didn't just wake up one day and decide they hate America. There were specific events that led to the hatred of America, and we have been ignoring that anger for a very long time. Dianne is right, unless we sit down and come to an agreement with these people, the problem is not going to just go away through the use of American weapons of mass destruction.

On that side note, it is funny about how many weapons America has that I would consider weapons of mass destruction. I think of the Lockheed AC-130 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC-130_gunship), the Lockheed MLRS (http://www.army-technology.com/projects/mlrs/). the B-52 Stratofortress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-52_Stratofortress), and last but not least the nuclear bombs ( http://es.rice.edu/projects/Poli378/Nuclear/f04.stratg_invent.html ). Who has the weapons of mass destruction, and who has the trigger happy Texan as its leader that wants to wage a war against the "Axis of Evil". Scary, isn't it.

So, let's follow this train of thought down the road a bit.

Let's suppose that we choose to negotiate with the terrorist groups, and simply give them what they want.

At this point, you have legitimized terrorism. You're saying that no matter who you are, and how small your group is, the way to go up against those stronger than yourself, is to blow up those weaker than yourself.

Why would anyone ever bother organizing peaceful resistance again? Why wouldn't they just get some cheap bombs together, and murder more civilians? At that point, that would be the proven method of getting the US to do what you want.

We aren't killing terrorist. If you look at who we are fighting in both countries, it is not the Al-Qeada in either country! We are doing nothing but creating enemies out of people that before we got involved were not linked to the Al-Qeada. I'm not saying negotiate with the terrorists. I do think we should negotiate with the people we attacked without povocation though. I do think that we should stop the types of foreign policy that led to anti-American terrorists to form in the first place as well.

I pointed out that this is in fact a proven method yesterday. For ignoring my post, as well as Seth's trying to redirect the topic to the actual topic, you get a picture of this man i just found randomly:

Sorry if you answered that.. I just came on this afternoon and didn't see a few posts. I'll go read it now.