Thursday, January 21, 2016

On torture, Cruz stands alone

Going against the GOP's rhetorical grain is Trump's main rival for the party's nomination, Ted Cruz. "Torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end," the Texas senator said in December 2014. Cruz, whose own father was tortured in Cuba, reaffirmed that position last month, saying that "America does not need torture to protect ourselves."

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

God bless him for taking the right side once again, and taking a stance that is pretty unpopular among the Constitutionally-hating neo-cons and their even more ignorant psuedo-conservative base of rubes who never seem to have the willingness to respect the sovereignty of another nation when it doesn't conform to the whims of the Wall Street Banksters and their Babylonian slave currency system.

Torture is morally reprehensible, provides the enemy with a propaganda coup they don't need to be given, and cannot be a clearer indication of just how far down the criminal path the government of oath-breaking usurpers has become given the rampant practice of extrajudicial punishment (including assassination, transforming due process into a punitive series of actions all by themselves, etc.).

Anonymous said...

Hey! If it doesn't make them bleed, dislocate or break bones or even cause bruises, it ain't torture. Kalid Sheik Mahammed was water boarded over 200 hundred times before he was asked the first question. When finally asked if he was willing to explain Al Qaeda's chain of command and working structure, or receive another 200 hundred water boardings, he asked for a blackboard and chalk, and explained everything like he was giving a seminar.

Chiu ChunLing said...

Torture:
1. the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.
2. a method of inflicting such pain.

I will content myself with pointing out that shooting someone non-fatally to stop a crime is clearly torture, and every firearm capable of inflicting non-fatal injury is thus an implement of torture.

I do not support shooting people in the knees for light or trivial reasons. But I'm instantly suspicious of anyone who claims that it is in every case absolutely wrong and we should never have the instruments to carry out such an act.

Anonymous said...

Ok. Enough of the politicians. Find the remote and turn their shit off. I happen to be an interrogator with decades of experience. Here is the skinny:

First, the definition of torture during the Bush administration was different than it is today. Previously, it was tied to U.S. Code and was objectively measureable. Today, it is subjective. Some believe waterboarding to be torture, others do not.

Second, on the question of the effectiveness of waterboarding, it depends. Most crusty DoD interrogators that were in prior to 9/11 would say something to the effect that it is unwise to do away with a technique that would otherwise be lawful. Every tool should be used as war is usually a struggle for national survival, thus losing is untenable. Everything should be on the table to include flame-throwers and nuclear weapons.

My observation with pundits and politicians are that they are confused about the objectives of the techniques; we call them "approach strategies." The objectives techniques are not used merely to get a person to talk. It is to gain the person's willing cooperation. If it takes a water board to break resistance, so be it. There are other methods to measure accuracy.

Lastly, for your consideration: Where do we get the authority to water board? Three words: "We The People." That trumps all other conventions and treaties. We decide the tools to ensure our national survivability.

Anonymous said...

Just guessing that they didn't ask Rand Paul? He is the only candidate that any true liberty loving, thinking American can support.

Anonymous said...

I think we all know that the government will always take techniques or tools used to "combat terrorism" and eventually use them against citizens for more routine crimes or infractions. Just ask the Hammonds.

I'm not bothered at all that that slimy S.O.B. by the name of K.S.M was waterboarded. But I don't want it to become Just Another Tool the state can use against its citizens. It's done now, and nobody who values liberty should want to see that kind of power put back into the hands of the Feds.

And, yes, I understand that fighting terrorism will always mean using techniques above and beyond mere law enforcement. But I prefer that those actions be as open and obvious as possible. No torture or waterboarding, no CIA "kill lists" of U.S. citizens.

Anonymous said...

So if we catch an islamo fascist killer, and we know that he or she knows where the nuclear weapon is planted somewhere in the US, and when we ask nicely where it is, he says "fuck you and die hard infidel", we have no way to make the bastard talk? Bullshit! I'd do a lot worse than water boarding the piece of crap...like the rimfire persuader...where you shoot him repeatedly with a .22 short starting in the foot and progressing higher up his leg until he talks, taking special aim at nerve centers. This method makes water boarding look like a walk in the park. Ted Cruz and John McCain would leave us with no way to save Americans if it ever came to that...and the terror crowd knows it! You can't advertise the things you will not do to protect America...I mean...we have nuclear weapons...that kill indiscriminately everything, but we can't waterboard a captive killer so that we don't have to use them?

Anonymous said...

Waterboarding exploits our fear of drowning, but otherwise leaves no permanent damage. It ain't torture.

Anonymous said...

Teddy Cruzvelt is still too shady and too connected to the donor class. Rand Paul: same basic beliefs, but not glued to the establishment.

Anonymous said...

"We the people" cannot delegate a power to a government that we do not possess as individuals.

Lawfulness of force comes down to an imminent threat of serious bodily harm to an innocent, not some perceived threat so nebulous and open-ended that too often becomes just a convoluted way of avoiding any honest assessment of what it is: aggression.

Aggression is the initiation of force, fraud, or coercion. The "Non-Aggression Principle" is at the heart of the 3% Catechism. Don't start fights, don't go out of one's way looking for a fight, as the sociopathic nature of the enemy MUST, sadly, be allowed to continue to ratchet up to the point where the ~3% who will use necessary force in the defense of life or liberty are not doing it for a largely ungrateful population of people who will squander such efforts in short order. There are more than just Ammon Bundys out there impatient as all hell and seeking to make the decision to shed the blood of others when he is not morally capable of making the decision and it is not in his rightful authority.

In any fight predicated on a moral principle, defeat is assured when one abdicates the moral high ground. WE possess it, not Dan Malloy or Mario Cuomo's most moronic son.

Now that those elemental facts are out of the way, the question now becomes, what foreign military intervention does the U.S. typically engage in that is NOT aggression? What sadistic military tactics, developed beforehand and refined on the "battlefield", in this nearly 15 year "war-gaming" in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not ultimately destined for the streets of America? Biometric identification technology now being deployed to police forces across America. Fusion centers in every state and most large metro areas created specifically to identify and target political opposition to the Constitution-hating regime.

Islam is clearly a political ideology (like many religious systems) of aggression -- of violence. But what allowed socially- and technologically-backwards peoples to ever become the threat the government-approved press (which includes Fox News and MSNBC in their stable of propaganda horses) has clearly brainwashed a few of the above commenters into believing they are?

Iran is only a problem because it was destabilized by the American CIA in 1953. Saddam Hussein was a CIA asset for decades...until 1990 when he wasn't. Gaddafi, and his $8B in gold, created a serious risk for the fiat currency regime that enslaves Americans and imposes neo-con corporate hegemony across the world (and he had tons of non-U.S. weapons the CIA smuggled to the "freedom fighters" in Syria who seemingly overnight transformed into ISIS -- who are so tactically superior to U.S. military might that they evaded all attempts to 'stop' their rise, and yet Putin's Russia was able to expose that lie with a couple dozen Sukoi sorties...so yeah, consider me skeptical of the psychological warfare goals of the U.S. brainwashing its own people) . The House of Saud was created out of thin air (just like the U.S. Federal Reserve Notes that prop up the petrodollar that sustains them), and funnels DOLLARS to extremists throughout the Muslim world in masterful misdirection. The treachery they engage in and spread across their world of a billion people only occurs because neo-con U.S. policy depends on fomenting blowback. The CIA and Mossad aren't against the House of Saud, they prop them up abroad to keep the masses in line at home.

CONTINUED

Anonymous said...

CONTINUE FROM ABOVE



So I'm to believe these nebulous "islamo-fascist killers" are people who are to be reasoned with, but only after we are to lose the moral high ground of defending against their aggression and clear hatred? So by doing something other than detaining them, trying them, and executing them, by condoning truly sadistic (and frequently fruitless) practices such as torture, we're really better off?

The Constitution-defying government that presently exists is not legitimate. The bogeymen said illegitimate government either creates or misdirects the attention of boobus americanus towards should be looked at no differently than the edicts emanating from the financially-selected legislatures, finding anxious pens in the hands of the Malloys, Cuomos, and O'Malleys of the world?

When a group of people exist who clearly have the means and intent to engage in murderous aggression and without equivocation state such, it is the basic obligation of all right thinking people to fix the problem. That most logically means to engage in righteous self-defense, and KILL them. But I feel the need to repeat this, the threat must actually be real, not imagined or exaggerated, otherwise it is not defensive, and thus, not lawful.

The pro-torture attitude has already allowed the regime to kill innocent Americans BEFORE 9/11, most notably Kenneth Michael Trentadue.

I despise the despots of the Islamic world, but that doesn't justify being ignorant about who they really work for on this side of the ocean. That day is not far off when all that government PATCON propaganda that led to Trentadue's death comes full circle and more government-employed murderers have carte blanche to do even more of what they love to do. And any Constitution-lover, particularly those possessing the means to resist, will be the first to have regime waterboards and reticles with their names on them. And when there's no one left to speak for them, we can "thank" our own allies who were not challenged on their myopic apologetics for the regime merely using "a legitimate tool of dealing with enemy combatants".

Anyone who still hasn't quite grasped that the permanent governing class in this nation long ago declared the independent-minded middle class American (oftentimes, but by no means exclusively, the working white male) as the enemy, needs to get their head on straight.

Mike, keep on keeping on, and God Bless you and for family in these most trying of times.

Chiu ChunLing said...

If Cruz wants to come out and be the only candidate who says that the Federal government has no Constitutional legitimacy and should be disbanded entirely, that would make me consider supporting him.