Obama Tortures Me Every Day

Although I realize full well how naive it sounds, I always wish there was some way that those imbeciles who rant and rave against torturing known terrorists would find THEIR loved ones kidnapped by hypothetical "Mislim" terrorists and facing imminent execution (say by slow beheading a la Daniel Pearl), and THEN being asked to give their opinion about having one of THOSE captured terrorists being tortured to within an inch of their miserable lives in order to rescue THEIR loved ones…
As for waterboarding- that might take too long; If any of MY friends or family members, or for that matter ANY American, were in mortal danger from "Mislim" terrorists, then I'd suggest an expedited session using a pair of pliers and a blowtorch…; – )

IMO the left now has enough rope to hang themselves, if and heaven forbid, anything like a 9-11 happens again? There will not be enough pitchforks, tar and feathers in this country, not to mention THE rope.

Waterboarding…what? So they create the impression of drowning? I wouldn't like it if it happened to me, but compared to the rack and thumbscrews, that doesn't exactly count as torture. Of course, if the leftists really want everyone to go through waterboarding so they know how it feels, we could return the favor by letting them know how it feels to be beheaded.

They'll still figure out a way to blame Bush for it.

When I was a kid the boys next door invented waterboarding. They used to surreptitiously crimp the garden hose when we went to drink from it. They would wait until we were deep into our first gulp and let go a stream of water that would cover our faces and fill our sinuses. They taunted my sisters with bugs, too. Who knew pre-adolescent girls could withstand enhanced interrogation better than adult terrorists?

You just know the terrorists are laughing at us over this. Waterboarding is torture? Bwahahahha! Yeah right! Try losing some body parts.. then we'll talk torture. I'm surprised McCain is against waterboarding given what he went through, but since he obviously went through a lot, I won't judge him on that. But I hate that he gives ammo to the Left to undermine our country's security. I can't begin to guess how demoralized the C.I.A. is right now. I frankly don't understand why Obama is doing this as I think it will absolutely bite him in the a** at some point– hopefully not through another terrorist attack. It's just plain stupid to play politics with national security.

Enhanced interrogation works. Obama knows it. Everybody knows it. In the ticking time bomb scenario, torture may be necessary, but we already hashed that subject to death, so let's stick to enhanced interrogation. It is a political molotov cocktail Obama and his banana republic prosecutors want to toss at the Bush administration. But they know they will have to use enhanced interrogaton themselves or risk losing an election, or even earn impeachment in the event of a terrorist attack which could have been avoided. I'm guessing we will see a bunch of political grandstanding, and damned few if any prosecutions. That molotov cocktail could much too easily explode in the faces of Obama allies in Congress who will not succeed in hiding their agreement to and complicity in enhanced interrogation prior to the current great handwringing.

"Terror" today is defined simply as "any technique, including but not limited to saying 'boo,' which was used by anybody, anywhere, for any purpose by the military on a terrorist during the Bush administration."

It is OK to cut off Daniel Peal's head; stone muslim, women to death; Kill African Muslims, abort unborn children.

It is NOT OK to waterboard or otherwise make uncomfortable known mass killers who want to kill again.

Who finds this amusing or insane?

Torture. The liberals don;t even know what it means.

Reminds me. My brother used to waterboard me at the beach every summer. Held me down until I threw up. Somehow I survived.

Torture? Hardly.

This issue shows how far gone conservatives are. I don't even consider you Americans any more. You are more like Islamic extremists than Americans.

It is naive, because, as someone rightly pointed out in a response to another column (and was vindicated by a lib confirming the truth of his post), the lunatic lib crowd actually would countenance another attack on America and not fight back in the name of retaining the moral high ground. They would let their family be killed and they would feel good that they didn't lower themselves to the terrorists level, because they don't understand the concept of self-defense.

No, the way to make them realize it it to hammer into their head (no pun intended) that the terrorists want to kill them personally.

Now it makes perfect sense.

Libs hate Islamofascist terrorists… but only when they are American conservatives.

Thank you for clarifying. Now please google the phrase 'self-defense,' get in the tub, and drop your computer in.

I'm sure Andrew P.will be joining me on this side-issue. Obama and his team of ivy-league lawyers have done publicly what they could not have done in a courtroom. They are showing pictures of enhanced interrogation techniques, and they are scary stuff. But what purpose do they serve except to enrage people who have never been in a theater of war and have never had to interrogate a terrorist in the field? I wouldn't do that to a vicious animal here, but that proves absolutely nothing, and is a complete red herring. Proof ("evidence") must show something useful in demonstrating that a crime was allegedly committed, not to demonstrate how awful it may have been. The Obamists are trying to do so by showing pictures of something we would all rather not see. This kind of evidence cannot be used in court, and the objection is "the probative value of the evidence is outweighed by its prejudicial harm."

Another legal test is the utility of the act versus the risk of harm. It's damned useful to slap around or waterboard terrorists to gain information about a pending attack, and the harm is only to the terrorist's dignity (hmmph) and temporary physical comfort. Since Obama seems to want to use civilian standards for the military in wartime, he would fail anyway in the civilian arena, assuming the judges were not hand-picked Obama/Clinton/Carter political appointees

Sorry to break up my comments this way, but I kept getting the "too long" message from the administrators.

simple person = simple question

You represent a greater danger to our country. More Americans have died in Iraq than on 9/11.

which means……you now love us? Good, using my new illegal immigrant status, I will hop on down to the State Offices and start my unemployment and new Social Security benefits, thanks! Gee, I didn't even have to pay anything for 'em! Pay no attention to that vest I'm wearin' with all the road flares. I might run into some infidel children along the way and, well, you know, have some good ol' Islamic fun. How about that?

janet?! is that you?!

I agree with your assessment of jury trials, but this isn't a trial — it's a public policy argument and dirty pictures are fair game in that. The same holds true for the abortion people or the vegitarians, or the whatever. Pictures may have too much power over our imagination, but it's perfectly valid to show people what you are agruing over.

By the way, not to be called soft on torture again, but I read an interesting article yesterday written by the guy who did a lot of the interrogating of Al Queda people for the FBI. He claims that they got the information they were after before the waterboarding, that the waterboarding proved counter productive, that information obtained under torture is unreliable because people in pain will tell you what you want to hear to make the pain stop — not necessarily what is true, and that he and the other FBI agents objected to the waterboarding and were pulled out by the FBI in protest.

As I said before, I don't want to take a stand on this issue until I know more.

hilary has been trying like crazy to get info/intimidate with a stern look and a wagging finger. you can tell she means business cause she wears the universal sign of meaning business: eyebrows in v-formation and a drab pants suit. feel safer now?

You are one sick moron. Idiots like you will be shopping for suitable headrags and robes and learning to scribble in Arabic before you figure it out. That or you spout your garbage with a little warm spot glowing inside you that knows the rest of us WON'T let that happen to our country. You're a coward and a disgrace to our flag, which you would probably pee on if someone like me wasn't around. So, where's the pie fool?

Caution: simple guy = simple question

Hey people…don't give these guys any more negative reputation scores. They want it.

Kind of like some of the seventh graders my wife teaches. Negative attention is better than no attention at all.

I can understand why logic , common sense, and facts could be a greater danger to you. We must cause your limbic brain to expand and press agains your frontal lobe, so your synapses misfire…

I'm fully aware that it isn't a trial. That's my point. This is a national security issue, and they can show all the pictures they want to Congressional committees, justice departments officials, the President, and anyone else who has a need to know. The public does not have a need to know yet. Or if it does, and I concede they might, then the administration has at least a moral obligation to give it full context. But morals in this administration is more than one has any right to expect. Abortion, animal rights, and a host of important issues have no effect on national security. Enhanced interrogation goes directly to the heart of national security, and should not be a public football for politicians to play gotcha with. On either side of the aisle.

I haven't seen the article you mentioned, and it may be perfectly valid. But it is only one opinion, and more than one agent of the FBI, CIA others have made public statements that they probably should not have made, and are frequently more about self-aggrandizement than about the actual issue. As I said, I have seen many recent articles that say exactly the opposite, and I have friends in the intelligence community who have said E.I. does work. There is also at least one who agrees with the FBI agent you cited.

I have had many cases in my time (family law in particular), and I'm guessing so have you, in which the public's need to know the details of what was going on was far outweighed by other considerations. In those cases, it was usually to protect a child, or privacy, or the safety of a key witness. The public needs to know only that we are conducting a fair trial, protected by a fair referee, with both sides represented and that evidence the public didn't see or testimony they didn't hear was fair and impartial, protected by the rule of law. And that isn't even a national security matter. The current issue is all about national security. Public policy and national security may overlap, but they are two entirely different things.

Jeffrey –

The last line should read, "…nothing is above your paygrade". Plenty of things should be below the President's pay grade.

Let's face it. If you've already concluded that the U.S. is fighting an "immoral war" and that enemy combatants are just kids caught in the wrong time and place, then any discomfort inflicted by interrogators is going to be considered torture.

They fixated on waterboarding. But if that didn't exist, I'm sure they'd find another unacceptable practice to condemn. Remember how they paraded Abu Ghraib as if it was official policy and not a very unfortunate breach of conduct?

Any President Obama press conferences are absolute torture; his words are slow & measured to the point of absurdity.

If the Democrats go through with the witch hunt, it will eventually consume the Obama Administration & the Congressional Democrats.

Don't worry, you still have time to catch up.

So you want all of the people that earn all the money and pay all the taxes and who supply all of the jobs that support all of your government programs to leave? Who's wealth would you spread then?

[...] us back to being a nation of laws. Does that include our immigration laws? Doubt it! Heh, heh. Big Hollywood

McCain is having a field day again being loved by the press as a "maverick." He's so good at it that it got him a nomination, and an electoral defeat. I respect him as a great national hero, but he's definitely not part of the great American brain trust. He simply throws out "we should never torture" as if that even comes close to addressing the issue. Let's define torture first–that would be a big help. His personal experience has colored his already deficient thinking process. What the enemy did to him is indeed unacceptable under any circumstances in a civilized society. They did it to gain a confession, and a propaganda victory. He bravely gave them neither. What does that have to do with waterboarding, or a terrorist in the field with information which would fend off a dangerous and deadly attack such as the planned attack on the L. A. Library Tower?

There were more deaths per capita in Iraq. I thought you guys were good at logic?

Most conservative states take more federal money than they provide, while most liberal states give more than they receive. If conservatives leave, it would solve our budget problems.

Conservatives are not social libertarians. You might as well argue that the sky is green and the grass is purple. If you are going to call yourself a conservative in the US, you should at least know what the conservative platform is.

Yes, well, this is probably to be expected, given that there were fewer Americans in Iraq, where we were fighting a hot war, than in Chicago, allegedly a peaceful city under rule of the law.

And I don't understand your second sentence there. Are you questioning yourself? Is that what you thought? Do you know what you thought? The accepted punctuation for a declarative statement (e.g. It's interesting that liberals subsume the mantel of intellectual superiority when so few of them can form a cogent, orthographically correct, properly punctuated sentence.), is a period.

By the way, do you like the song 'My president is Black,' by Young Jeezy? Do you remember when you derided Bush for the 'you're either with us or the terrorists' line? Did you do that because you are with them, or what?

I know that people keep saying, "we would be tipping our hands" — but that (1) assumes that somehow these bad guys believe right now that we might kill them, which we obviously won't, and (2) assumes that torture works — which is the basis of my objection at this point. That is not clear to me.

3. The "one opinion" you are talking about was directly involved in gathering the information in the memos that supposedly show that torture worked — thus his opinion on this carries considerable weight to me. That said, I never rely on one opinion. And as I keep saying, I am undecided on this issue.

I could not find the exact article I read, but here is a link to a similar — although more biased — article. http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089?from=rss

Look, if this stuff works like you say and is needed, then there should be no problem making a case to the American people to allow this. We're not squeamish. We still favor the death penalty by 80%, we reject the disarmament folly, and we even still allow food production methods that look pretty cruel on film.

testing…

I think that McCain likes to parrot back left-wing garbage because it makes him feel morally superior to the rest of us. The fact that he doesn't understand that the media treats him like a useful idiot is extremely disturbing.

I may get smacked for saying this, but I think I'm actually relieved he's not President. I think he would have done the same BS that Obama is doing — because he would have wanted to please Nancy Pelosi, and he would have ruined this country in our name.

Don't get me started on how he ended up as our candidate. . .

I think "speedy and public trial" is more than a vague public interest, and I'm sure the public has a very definite interest in the public policy of determining custody, visitation and other familial rights. Yet for sound reasons, they sometimes see only the result because of the other considerations.

How keeping a sensitive national security issue out of the public forum is "carte blanche" escapes me. That is why we don't have a direct democracy. In a representative democracy, aka "republic," we elect people to represent us and protect our rights. But we have always accepted that part of the function of a republic is to protect us from harm by doing what is necessary without informing us of every detail. That's why we have three distinct countervaling branches of government, two parties, and freedom of speech and press. We can give all the input and information we choose, and express our opinions to our representatives about torture and enhanced interrogation. So who is suggesting we withhold the information from Congress (or the administration, or the courts)? I'm simply saying some things don't belong in the stream of public discourse. Let our public representatives handle it. By the time we have exposed every interrogation technique publicly, and made a public announcement of what is allowed and what isn't, we have provided the terrorist enemy with a road map around every security point we previously had available to us.

You'll get no argument there from me. Now ain't that a relief? Although there is the small possibility that it might not have been so bad because when McCain proposed the gigantic increase in our national debt and programs to solve every problem that ever existed, the Democrats might have turned into faux fiscal conservatives just to thwart the mean old Republicans. Remember, they don't love him, they merely pretend to love him. And the same holds true for his "good friends" in the press.

And, by the way there were more deaths in the Pacific and European theaters of war than were killed at Pearl Harbor. What exactly is your point? I know… Bush lied people died.
We've all heard it before.
American military men, and now women, are dying so people can have freedom.
Those same military personnel are fighting evil over there so those same people don't come
over here and saw your head off.
Look this statistic up… how many Iraqis were killed by Saddam Hussein.

Yeek! I'll tell you, I'll tell you. But please don't "boo!!!" me anymore. I'm tough, but I can't take that! The dirty bombs are located in two places–one on the Golden Gate Bridge and the other at the top of the TransAmerica Tower. They are set to go off at 2:45PM PDT today. Oops, too late. Sorry. Was there anything else you would like me to tell you? I will, you know, if you just promise not to "boo!!!" me again.

Saved by irony? Sadly, I suspect they would have loaded up every program they ever dreamed possible, spent every penny they could conceive of spending, and then would have gone on tv to talk about how out of control the McCain spending was. . . and he would have agreed. And we would have needed to form a new party.

"No argument", yeah, that's a relief. At least you and I can argue without getting upset and name calling. See if you can find that at Hufpo. LOL!

LOL! That's funny. . . tragic, but funny.

I realize that this the new Huffpo talking point, but do you have facts to back that up? The states most in trouble are those pesky Blue states – California tops the list followed closely behind by Nevada, Florida and Michigan. It is interesting that our leadership in Congress comes from two of those failing states.

Oops! I meant "The Raven."